Teaching Historical Inquiry with Objects: Applying C3 Tools to develop “Historical Thinking”

Social Studies education is based on three fundamental domains of subject matter: topical content, conceptual content, and disciplinary skills. These three domains together help students learn how to think like historians.

Developing historical thinking requires students to practice applying disciplinary concepts such as continuity and change, contextualization, perspectives, the use of historical sources and evidence, and causation and argumentation.

Continuity and Change Over Time, Contextualization

Continuity and change over time and contextualization focus on the following:

• Chronology of events: Historians do not view events in isolation. Instead, they take stock of the events that occurred before, during, and after a particular event to better understand the event.
• Similarities and differences: Historians analyze the similarities and differences between historical periods. This constitutes not only change over time, which students often find easy to articulate, but also continuity over time. It is equally as important to discuss what has not changed in addition to what changed.
• Contextualization: Historians also analyze how changes in one aspect of life relate to changes in other aspects. For example, a political change could lead to an economic change, as political parties prioritize different parts of the economy. Other aspects of life could be intellectual, social, cultural, etc.

Perspectives

Historians put themselves in the shoes of the people of the past to study their ideas, attitudes, and beliefs. Developing empathy with those in the past helps modern-day people understand their actions. We can't judge the actions of the people of the past by using the standards of today. This skill can help students not only understand historical people but they can also practice developing empathy for people of today.

Historical Sources and Evidence

Historians use documents, artifacts, oral accounts, and even DNA to learn about the past. Students must practice using evidence to support a claim, as this is important in more disciplines than just Social Studies.

Causation and Argumentation

Historians understand that historical events don't just happen on their own. There are prior conditions that lead to each event and each event has its own consequences. Students often think about historical events as inevitable but they are, in fact, the results of individual decisions and not unavoidable.

In My Own Practice...

My students and I use the HIPP strategy for analyzing sources every time that we look at a new document. The strategy requires students to determine the historical context, intended audience, purpose, and point of view of a source. Additional research is often needed to supply an answer for all four parts of the strategy, especially the historical context. Completing a HIPP analysis every time we look at a new source helps students practice these valuable skills.

Reflections from WCSS 2020

Due to the coronavirus outbreak, WCSS provided their sessions digitally in the form of videos. I would have been unable to attend the conference in person even if it would not have been canceled, as I am on maternity leave at the moment. I was grateful for the opportunity to be able to watch the provided videos in order to learn along with others who wished to attend!

Here are my reflections from the sessions that I was able to watch:

Session: Developing Inquiry in Your Social Studies Class

by Tom Freesmeier

Here is a strategy that gives students an opportunity to think about a term and use clues to construct meaning. This strategy makes the students a more active participant in the process, rather than the teacher simply giving the students a definition.

1. Give students a term
2. Brain dump (students brainstorm meaning, questions, what the term reminds you of, what it sounds like... then discuss with a neighbor)
3. Give students a short reading about the term
4. Brain dump again
5. Give students a visual (chart, photo, etc.)
6. Brain dump a third time
7. Give students a sentence stem: “[Term] is…..” (This is a formative check so the teacher can assess whether or not the student understands the term.)

Session: Hands-on Lesson Ideas for Teaching Ancient Civilizations

by Angela O’Regan

Angela's session included many fun ideas to engage students in active learning. Here are my favorites:

Go Fish

Play go fish with a twist. When learning about different types of governments (monarchy, democracy, etc.), have students take on the role of that government and make up rules for the game. A dictator gets to make the rules alone, whereas a democracy requires that everyone agree up on the rules.

Bracketology

In the format of a tournament bracket, students determine which invention had the largest impact on our current society.

Civil Rights Inquiry Lesson Plan

As part of my Teaching Historical Inquiry With Objects course, I created this historical inquiry.

The compelling question is,

"Did the Civil Rights Movement lead to equality for everyone?"

In this inquiry, students analyze primary and secondary source images and documents to answer the compelling question.

Students focus on the following supporting questions:

1. What were the strategies of activists?
2. What were the government's actions concerning Civil Rights?
3. What forms of discrimination have occurred since the movement, and what rights have been violated?

The inquiry is a lesson plan that can be used with high school students and can easily be modified for use with middle school students.

Originally I had planned to include analysis of the treatment of women, Native Americans, Latinx Americans, etc. in addition to African Americans, but I felt like that would be too much to include in one inquiry. I am considering making more inquiries to center around these groups as well, which could be multiple lessons in a larger unit about what it means to be "equal."

I have learned a great deal about structuring an inquiry during this course, but I could certainly improve. If you have any suggestions as to how to improve this inquiry, please do not hesitate to let me know. The topic of discrimination is highly divisive and I want to make sure that I am not misrepresenting any facts or leaving out important perspectives.

You can view the inquiry on the IDM (Inquiry Design Model) webpage, which is a part of the C3 Teachers website, or download the PDF version.

A note on the Inquiry Design Model:

The C3 Teachers website includes a platform in which any teacher can create a lesson plan based on inquiry. The Inquiry Design Model (IDM) allows teachers to publish their inquiries, as well as search for inquiries that have been created by others. I highly suggest taking a look at some of the inquiries that have been created, as there are some really amazing ones!

You can also use this IDM template to map out your inquiry before publishing it on the IDM platform.

Teaching Historical Inquiry With Objects: Compelling and Supporting Questions

In order to structure a successful inquiry, we must first be able to ask good questions. There are two main types of questions: compelling and supporting.

Compelling Questions

In the context of the social studies, compelling questions should strive to address issues that pertain to history, geography, political science, or the behavioral sciences. In order to answer a compelling question, one must analyze evidence to construct meaning and their own interpretation of the evidence at hand.

When using compelling questions in the classroom setting, the question should be clear and something that students care about. For example, a question that centers on equality is something that students care about, as it is important to them that they are treated fairly.

Example compelling question:

When did African Americans gain equality?

The beauty of a compelling question is that there are many answers. One student could reply, "African Americans gained equality with the culmination of the Civil Rights Movement." Another could say, "African Americans still have not gained equality." A third student could answer, "Legislative efforts have been made to protect the rights of African Americans, but these efforts have only experienced minor success."

Supporting Questions

A compelling question on its own is incredibly in-depth; the supporting questions help students step back from the larger picture to look at individual details. Basically, the answers to supporting questions provide the information necessary in order to reach the goal of answering the compelling question.

Supporting questions should be fact-based. Remember that an answer to a compelling question should be in the form of an argument. The answers to supporting questions provide the evidence necessary with which to support the answer to the compelling question.

Example supporting questions:

What forms of discrimination have African Americans faced since the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement?

What successes did African Americans achieve during the Civil Rights Movement?

In My Own Practice...

I would like to structure my units in a way that includes these types of questions. I will center each unit around one compelling question and use daily lessons to answer supporting questions. This will translate to my Essential Learning Objectives (compelling questions) and my Learning Targets (supporting questions), as this is the language that my school district uses. This will also give students an idea of the focus of the particular unit.

My students are more engaged with activities in which they get to solve a puzzle; they see an object or image and then have to come to a conclusion about its purpose and what it can tell us about a culture. Structuring my classes to fit this model will help students engage more as well as see the purpose in the content that we are learning.

How is Classroom Culture Connected to Inquiry-Based Learning?

I believe that in order to have a positive classroom culture that allows an inquiry-based class to work, students need to trust each other and the teacher. They also need to trust in themselves and be willing to take risks and try to provide answers to difficult questions, even if they aren’t sure that they are correct. Students should feel safe in the classroom and feel comfortable with the possibility that they might not know something, but inferring is a valuable skill that they should practice. In addition, there are many questions for which there are no “correct” answers, so as long as students are able to provide evidence to support a well-reasoned answer, they are, in essence, “correct.”

Teaching Historical Inquiry With Objects: Object-Based Learning in the Classroom

I always knew that artifacts were essential for understanding a period of time, a culture, or an event. The course Teaching Historical Inquiry With Objects helped me understand a bit more about why teachers should use object-based inquiry in the classroom.

First of all, objects naturally pique a person's curiosity. When a person sees an object they aren't familiar with, they naturally begin to ask questions about it.

In addition, objects are not age-specific. Students and adults of any age can analyze an object and learn from it, or make inferences as to its purpose and usefulness. For the most part, the reading level is not important when observing an object. Prior knowledge can help, but it not absolutely necessary.

Objects also give us a window into the lives of ordinary people, just like you and me. Often history is the story of people who have done great or terrible deeds; people who have led, people who have resisted, and people whose legacies have put a stamp on the world, for good or for bad. Other times, history is the story of groups of people and broad generalizations are made. By observing and analyzing ordinary objects, we can learn a lot about the people who used them every day. Even though history focuses on a famous (or infamous) few, the ordinary people are the majority and the ones who have contributed a great deal to the world, keeping society going. The ordinary people have stories that matter, and observing their objects can tell us a great deal about them.

Lastly, the practice of observing ordinary objects can help students hone their skills of thinking critically and carefully when trying to glean information from a source in order to construct meaning from it. This is a valuable skill for historians as well as everyday people, as it is important to think deeply about what you are seeing or reading before taking it at face value. You must deeply observe before you can truly understand something.