The month of March was one of the busiest I have had in a long time; Teaching, running the NHD China contest, heading-up a student trip to Korea, parent conferences, and other work and home responsibilities led to a huge sigh of relief when I made it to spring break.
Despite my frenzied to-do list, one of the highlights of the month was a two-day workshop run by Lynne O’Hara and Kim Fortney from the National History Day organization. The workshop was filled with some great tools and insights about teaching historical thinking and helping students create stronger NHD projects. Below are a few take-aways from the workshop that are easy to integrate and offer some immediate added value.
Contextualization: Big C Little C
I use the terminology “Big C” and “Little C” to refer to contextualizing an event or development versus contextualizing a document/primary source. I do this because it helps my AP World students differentiate between sourcing a DBQ document with historical context and earning the broader contextualization point. However, the last few years have shown me that my students still struggle with the right balance of general and specific information to successfully contextualize a topic or argument.
I like the way the NHD contextualization tool uses the Big C/Little C terminology to differentiate contextualization by scale, that is, national and global trends versus local and regional trends. I plan on pairing this with my contextualization pyramid in a future lesson to help make this skill a little clearer from the get-go.
Primary Source Analysis Tool: O.R.Q.
Getting students to analyze primary sources well is always a difficult, but foundational, task. I have a noticed a tendency in my own teaching to focus too much on text-based sources, neglecting many other interesting source types. The NHD workshop introduced a tool from the Library of Congress that I am looking forward to using; the Observe, Reflect, and Question protocol.
The image above is of the basic tool without any scaffolded guiding questions. In the observe portion of the protocol students are asked to write down what they identify or note about details in the source. They do this quietly and without discussing, an important part of the protocol that the teachers in the workshop, myself included, struggled to follow. In the reflect part of the protocol students generate and test hypotheses about the source. These could be related to what they observed, the purpose of the source, significance, omissions, etc. Finally, the question part of the protocol asks students to develop questions that would allow them to go deeper into the source or its context through the research process thereby leading to further observations and reflections.
Library of Congress Analysis Tools
I highly recommend checking out the source type specific tools, such as charts and graphs, manuscripts, newspapers, etc., that include specific guiding questions for each part of the O.R.Q. process. I’d like to take some of these questions and create a large analysis poster for different source types to put up in the classroom. That will be a summer project.
Using the Library of Congress
Finding good primary sources is one of the most time consuming and challenging parts of teaching history. I have re-used DBQ sets and sources from year-to-year, even if they were not perfect fits for the lesson, because of the time requirement of doing my own research for the perfect source.
The Library of Congress has a massive database that is inherently intimidating. A good portion of the workshop was geared towards providing support for searching the online databases and making efficient use of what the LOC offers. Their digital collections page has some excellent links that offered some immediate possibilities. I most enjoyed using the American Newspapers collection and their curated sets of classroom materials. NHD has also created detailed guides for the LOC sites for both students and teachers.
Image Analysis
Trevor Mackenzie calls the use of a lesson-opening image intended to get students thinking and questioning a “provocation.” That has been my favorite term for these types of little inquiry hooks since I heard it at one of his workshops years ago. I will end this post with two great images from the NHD workshop that do a great job of provoking questions, hypotheses, and connections.
