Copy / Paste by Peter Pappas

Essential Question: Who is the Teacher in Your Classroom?

Over the last few weeks I've been guiding teams of teachers on reflective classroom walkthroughs. During the course of one of our "hallway discussions" I asked a social studies teacher, "who's the historian in your classroom?" After a bit of give and take, we concluded that in the traditional classroom, the students get to watch (and listen) to the teacher be historian. 

That's certainly what you would have seen early in my teaching career. I was the one doing most of the reading, reflecting and synthesizing of historic material. I thought my job was to distill it all and simplify for consumption by my students. It took me a few years to realize my job was to get the students to be the historians (and economists, anthropologists, etc). 

Here's a sample lesson that I developed to demonstrate how historic material could be scaffolded so that all students could participate in doing the work of historians -  What Did Europeans "See" When They Looked at the New World and the Native Americans? Seems appropriate with US Thanksgiving nearly here.

It examines European views of Native American and the New World in the Age of Exploration. While it is a rather one-sided account, the documents reveal a great deal about the cultural "lenses" that the Europeans "looked" though. It is designed around an essential question that will engage students in reflection about how Europeans allowed prejudice to color their perceptions. That, of course, invites thinking about how we may be looking at other peoples and cultures today.

The source material contains twenty-five documents in text and image formats – including journal entries, letters, maps, and illustrations. I modernized historic accounts at two reading levels – 5th and 8th grade. (Each contains the same twenty five documents). I selected images which could be “decoded” by students with a minimum of background knowledge so that all students could practice their content reading comprehension and critical thinking skills. A series of six exercises accompanies the lesson to guide students through the process of extracting information from the documents and constructing their own answers to the essential question.

While this lesson is historical, the same perspective applies to lessons across the curriculum - who's the scientist, engineer, artist, nutritionist, mathematician, literary critic, and musician - in your classroom? Teachers are no longer simply “education dispensers” gathering, distilling and delivering information to students. (There are too many other sources that do a great job of delivering information 24/7.) Instead teachers can thrive as “educational architects” who design classrooms where students do the work of constructing meaning. 

Source documents - 5th grade reading level

Source documents - 8th grade reading level

Six activity worksheets

How to Teach Summarizing: A Critical Learning Skill for Students

Summarizing is an essential skill for learning, but too often in school we simply ask students to "guess" what the teacher (or author) thinks is important.

An essential part of a summary is that it needs to be expressed to an audience. In life, we purposefully craft summaries for a specific audience (directions for the out-of-towner, computer how-to for the technophobe). In school, the tacit audience for most summaries is the teacher. Imagine how a student feels when asked to summarize a textbook passage for the teacher. In effect they have been asked to summarize one expert's writing for delivery to another expert - the teacher.   "...and remember, be sure to use your own words!"

If students are going to learn to summarize they need to be given a chance to genuinely share what they think is important for an audience other than the teacher. Here's a three step process I followed in a second grade classroom using a popular Currier and Ives print, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way." (1868)  
Click to enlarge

Step 1: Start with the concrete "right there" observations. 

I projected a digital image on the screen and asked student to talk about the people, things and activities they could identify. They replied, a train, native Americans, a village, people digging, steam from the train, houses, trees, a lake, maybe a harbor, a road, dry grass, covered wagons, poles, mountains, a school house, people working, people waiting for the train, a train track, etc ....

Step 2: Give students a chance to tell what they think is important.

I managed this aspect by asking each student to draw a picture of what they saw in the projected image. The details they included were what they thought was important. Here's a few samples. Click to enlarge.

      

Step 3: Give students a chance to frame their summary into a narrative explanation for another audience. 

I digitally divided the image into multiple sections and photocopied them (in B &W) into packets of  image details. I gave groups of students the packets and asked them to work in teams to assemble the images into children's "a story book" with a caption under each image.  Click to enlarge.

    

Here are some of their captions: 

(spelling corrected) 

• Water would come from the mountain and fill the lake. You could get fish and drink water. Water is very important
• People were moving west. They moved by wagon at first, then but train, which is faster.
  
• Life was tough. People had to do everything for themselves.
  
• It maybe was lonely because people missed their friends back home.
  
• The people were building a town. They could get wood from the trees. It was a small town at first.
  
• The Indian see the people coming. They knew things were changing. They got sick from the smoke.
  
• The school was different from our school. People had different clothes than us.
  
• The train split the old life from the new life.

While summarizing has been shown to be one of the most effective strategies for building content knowledge, that gain only applies when students are allowed to make their own judgements about what’s important and frame their summaries for an audience. When we ask them to "learn" the teacher's summary - they are reduced to memorizing "another fact."

When we ask our students to create authentic summaries (with audience and purpose) we give students a chance to reflect on their learning. Instead of simply testing them for factual knowledge, students can be asked: 

• What did I think was important?
• How did I share that with my audience? 

• Did my summary match audience and purpose?
• Is my summary accurate? 
• Did I use my own words and style?
• What did I learn from the activity?

For more learning strategies see my blog post: 18 Literacy Strategies for Struggling Readers - Defining, Summarizing and Comparing

Essential Questions in American History: "The Great Debates"

I developed this series as part of my work with Prentice-Hall supporting Daniel Boorstin’s A History of the United States.

Originally it was suggested that I develop lessons on questions such as “Should slavery be extended into the territories?” I argued that most of these issues had been answered, and that it would be more engaging to frame the debates around essential questions. Thus the typical question - “Should the Constitution be ratified?” became “How powerful should the national government be?” Anyone following the reauthorization of NCLB or the proposed health care legislation knows the enduing relevance of that question.

The Great Debates feature consists of twelve debates, one for every unit of the text. Each of these debates contains an introduction that states the topic of the debate, examines the background of this issue, provides information about both the readings and the debaters, and discusses the debate topic from a contemporary perspective. Units feature the conflicting viewpoints of two or more historical figures or organizations and a worksheet that helps students analyze the debate through a series of comprehension and critical thinking questions. Download Great Debates here

Essential questions / debates  include:

Debate  1: How Should Society Balance the Need for Tolerance with the Need to Protect Itself? 
Debate  2: How Powerful Should the National Government Be?
Debate  3: Who Should Be Allowed to Vote?
Debate  4: Should Women Have Equal Treatment Under the Law?
Debate  5: How Should Americans Treat the Land?
Debate  6: Has Industrialization Produced More Benefits or More Problems for the Nation?
Debate  7: Should the United States Pursue a Foreign Policy of Isolationism or Interventionism?
Debate  8: What Should the Nation's Immigration Policy Be?
Debate  9: To What Extent Is the Federal Government Responsible for the Welfare and Security of the Individual?
Debate 10: Is Civil Disobedience Ever Justified as a Method of Political Change?
Debate 11: What Are the Limits of a Free Press?
Debate 12: How Much Should the Nation Invest in Defense?

Picturing the Story - An Interdisciplinary Approach to Culture, Environment, Language, and Learning

I'm pleased to served as an advisor to a new interactive resource for teachers and students. "Picturing the Story: Narrative Arts and the Stories They Tell" uses world art from the permanent collection of the Memorial Art Gallery dating from 1500 BCE to the 20th Century.  Each work has a story to tell, either visually through imagery and symbol, or indirectly through custom and ritual. The stories reflect sacred beliefs, folk traditions, common human experiences, or unique cultural practices. 

Each work of art includes downloadable resources - the story that inspired it, the culture where it originated, the techniques used to produce it, as well as extensive lesson plans, activity suggestions, and recommendations for further reading. The lessons and stories are designed to be used at a variety of grade levels. 

Downloads resources include: 

• Classroom Copy - Printable, condensed version of online materials, copy-ready for classroom use. 
• Curriculum Connections - Organized by subject area:  Social Studies, ELA, Science, Art/Art History. Lesson extensions, children’s book recommendations, and activity suggestions, most with accompanying activity sheets.  
• Learning Skill-based Activity Sheets:  Printable, copy-ready sheets that address specific learning skills, for classroom use with online materials or printed classroom copy. Includes skills such as constructing comparison, identifying context, recognizing sequence and many more.

Every work of art has a story to tell. These stories can explain the unexplainable, teach a life lesson, or celebrate our common human experiences. Each work in this collection is approached from three different perspectives: 

1. Picturing the Story: Viewing a work of art while reading/hearing/seeing its associated story. The story is available as on-screen text, as an audio file voiced by a professional storyteller, in ASL video interpretation, or printable pdf version. In addition, an audio “guided-looking tour” of the work of art by a museum educator helps focus attention on important details and promote visual and verbal looking skills. 

2. Reading the Art:  Understanding the symbolism and references used in this work of narrative art. High-quality images of works of art, with zoom-able details, comparison or supporting images, and interpretive information connect elements of the work of art to its associated story.   

3. Connecting the Culture:  Exploring the cultural and functional context of this work of art. Historical and cultural context information, including maps, supporting photos, and other images, connect the work of art and the story to the cultural background, promoting document-based and inquiry-based learning.  Information addressing purpose or function of work, biographical information on artist (as available), geographical and environmental issues, and process and tools of creation allows the objects’ significance to extend into a variety of curriculum areas.

Details from: 
 "The Fox and the Heron"  Flemish, Frans Snyders ca. 1630-1640 
 "Rama, Sita and Lakshmana Return to Ayodhya"  Indian, Rajasthan, Rajput School ca. 1850-1900

First Google Map Discovered - Created in 1652!

I enjoy looking at historic maps and other visual displays of information. I was browsing online images from the National Gallery of Art's current exhibit "Pride of Place: Dutch Cityscapes of the Golden Age" and was startled to see  “A Bird’s-Eye View of Amsterdam” painted (around 1652), by Jan Micker.

Micker's work certainly parallels the Google Map satellite view. Especially noteworthy are his realistic depiction of details, shadows of clouds and the large key with drop shadow in the lower right corner. Not bad considering he lacked an aerial perspective. He was inspired by a similar work (minus shadows) from 1538 by Cornelis Anthonisz. 

Click image to enlarge.

Below is a current Google Map of Amsterdam for comparison. 

Note: the Google maps faces north. Micker's view faces south.

Click map to enlarge or go to Google map of Amsterdam 

Teaching with Historic Photographs: The Google LIFE Photo Archive

Google has posted ten million photographs from the LIFE photo archive on their online gallery of images. It's a great source of material for teachers and students who support a document-based approach to teaching history. 

While I wish that Google had done more to curate the collection with robust search tools and more specific categories, I think that teachers will find it to be an invaluable resource to enable students to "be the historian."

I've put together this quick guide to help you get started.

1.  If you are unfamiliar with the document-based approach to teaching history, you might want to start with a quick visit to my web site Teaching With Documents. There you find many resources including Document-Based Questions (DBQ) for  students grade 2 - high school. Of particular interest are these Student Analysis Guides and for more detailed analysis - my Reading a Visual Document: Guiding Questions. (55KB pdf)

2.  If you are interested in how historic documents can be used to support literacy and critical thinking, visit my sample:  Homefront America in WW II.  It shows how to improve content reading comprehension with source documents framed around essential questions that link the past and present. 

3.  Now that you have some instructional background in using historic photos - it's time to visit the LIFE photo archive hosted by Google. It's organizes images by era and subject. Once you click on an image you get a brief description and some labels (tags) that allow you to find similarly tagged images. 

For example here's one of the archive photos taken by Dorothea Lange in the Migrant Mother Series. It makes a great contrast to the iconic photo she took that day that is more commonly reproduced in textbooks. (You might ask your students which of the five photos they would choose, and why?)

The LIFE archive includes this description with the photograph: Migrant mother Florence Thompson & children photographed by Dorothea Lange.

Location: Nipomo, CA, US

Date taken: 1936

Photographer: Dorothea Lange

And LIFE archive uses these labels for this photo: Lange, Dorothea, Mothers, Fsa Photographers, Us, Tension Or Worrying, American, Poverty, Florence Thompson, Photography By, Migratory, Farmers, California, Expressions, Agriculture, 1930s

4.  If you don't already use Cooliris, I suggest you download this free browser plug in. It presents the photos in a broad panorama that  allows you to scroll through many images.  I've embedded a short clip below of Cooliris in action, so you can see how it can transform your browser when searching for images and videos on Cooliris supported websites.

5.  And remember that all Google image searches allows you to specify image size with this drop down box in the upper left of the screen. 

Teaching American History Grant - The Student as Historian

This week I traveled to Waco TX where I conducted two days of training for an ESC Region 12 "Teaching American History" grant.  I had the chance to work with 5th, 8th and 11th grade teachers on techniques to move the focus of history instruction to document-based instruction. I used resources from my website "Teaching with Documents" and a variety of web 2.0 tools to help teachers see how they can create learning environments that allow students to do the work of the historian. On our second day, teachers used mobile laptops to develop their DBQ's and try out the various web resources.

The response from teachers was very positive. They wrote.

The best part of the workshop is that we had time to practice and digest the information were were using.

A good "kick in the pants" on some big picture ideas.

Made me revisit my own strategies.... Questioning strategies were repeatedly reinforced.

My head is spinning and I am giddy from all the resources and insights.

I need to reevaluate the way I teach. You gave me a lot to think about. 

Got me excited about what I'm going to do next in my classroom.

European DBQ Source Goes Digital

Interested in source material for your European history DBQ's?

The new European Commission's Europeana digital library project has been launched with 2 million digital documents including paintings, audio files, maps, videos and other artifacts at http://www.europeana.eu

Enjoy

Update 8/21/08:

Oops! The crashed just hours after it went online, and it will be out of operation for weeks, the European Commission said Friday. The failure was attributed to overwhelming public interest. Europeana, a Web site of two million documents, images, and video and audio clips, opened Thursday to international publicity and acclaim. But by Friday, attempts to log on were greeted with a message saying that the service might not be running again until mid-December, when computer capacity will be upgraded. The site’s designers had expected a maximum of five million hits an hour. But searches for famous cultural works like the Mona Lisa or manuscripts of literature by Kafka, Cervantes or James Joyce produced traffic as high as three times that volume.

Sequencing - An Essential Summarizing Skill

I've been experimenting with Dipity, a new website that allows you to build interactive timelines. Open a free account, create a new topic, and then upload text and images (from a file.) You can view your topic as an timeline or flipbook. You can even geocode your events and view the project as a map. You are allowed to set permissions for viewers and editing rights.  I created a sample timeline "How did the roles and rights of women change at the turn of the 20th century?"  Note: One drawback for classroom use - banner ads appear on the page and  I can't vouch for what might show up.

Dipity allows you to configure the display of the topic and copy and paste the embed code into your page. You should be able to click the embedded image below.

Visualizing Data and Text - A Comparison Learning Strategy that Works

Comparing is the most powerful instructional strategy you can use in the classroom. But it's the person who does the comparing that's learning. Therefore, we must ask students to develop the comparison, not just learn and repeat the model that we present to them. (Remember, asking a student to fill out a Venn diagram that you created, is just a graphic form of information filing). After they have designed their comparison, students should also be asked to share what they learned.  A major component of 21st century literacy is finding meaningful ways to share information with others.

Many Eyes is a great new website that gives teachers and students a chance to easily use sophisticated graphic tools to analyze data and create interactive displays. Those who register at the site can use 16 visualization types to present data. My favorite visualization is the "Wordle," which enables you to see how frequently words appear in uploaded text, or see the relationship between a column of words and a column of numbers. You can tweak your word "clouds" with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. Why not have your students use Wordle to analyze a selection of non-fiction text to uncover the main ideas and key vocabulary of the piece? Or they could compare text from different sources. Want your students to more fully understand your course content? Let them use Many Eyes to visualize and discover patterns as a catalyst for discussion and collective insights about information, text, and data. As they say at Many Eyes, "Finding the right way view your data is as much an art as a science. The visualizations provided on Many Eyes range from the ordinary to the experimental."

Here's a few examples of the same data in three different Wordle visualizations that analyze the frequency of words in 30 school district mission / vision statements. 

Click on images to enlarge.

The original data and was uploaded to Many Eyes by PPreuss and used to create the visualization above.  I modified the existing online data set mission / vision statement words with the Wordle tools to represent the same data in different layouts and styles. In this second version (below)  I limited the analysis to the top 100 words.

Here's a third representation of the same source data that analyzes 2-word clusters and displays their frequency in alphabetical layout. Below is  a screen shot of the Tag Cloud, but in its original form at Many Eyes, when I click on any of the word clusters,  a pop-up shows the context of how the cluster is used in different sentences from the source mission / vision statements.

Wow! Looks like we educators have a lot on our plates. Personally I think we might want to admit our mission / vision may simply be  "Trying Hard Not To Become Obsolete."

Looking for Copyright-free Historic Images?

The Smithsonian collection of photos has become part of the Flickr Commons group and joins the photo collections of other institutions such as The Library of Congress, the Brooklyn Museum and the Powerhouse Museum. The Commons was launched on January 16 2008, in a pilot project in partnership with The Library of Congress. Both Flickr and the Library were overwhelmed by the positive response to the project!

Plus you can search these images with PicLens, a  free plug-in, which works in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Flock, and Safari. It lets you create a moving wall of images where you'd otherwise just see your Web app's more static display of pictures. Launching the viewer is just a matter of clicking a new "play" icon that appears on images when you're on a PicLens-supported site. 

Students Doing History Beats Test Prep

Over the next two weeks I'll be doing presentations that take me back to my roots as a history teacher. I'll be giving the keynote at the Texas Social Studies Supervisors Association spring conference in Austin and giving a workshop for elementary school teachers in the Rochester (NY) City School District.

In both talks I'll show how history and social studies can be used to teach literacy, numeracy and critical thinking. No need to cut back on social studies instructional time to send struggling students for "mind numbing" test prep in reading and math. It begins when teachers provide students with the historical material that kids use to "do the history."  Let's look at two examples - click photos to enlarge

First, a famous photo of the "golden spike" - the final ceremonial spike driven to mark the completion of a transcontinental railroad line in 1869. What can a student learn by looking at the image? Not much, because the important information is not in the image. It's in the background knowledge a student must already possess to interpret it. Unfortunately, this type of photograph dominates our textbooks. It's iconic - it refers to something else that we want students to know.

In contrast, here's a photograph of a city street in Rochester NY at the turn of the last century. With very little background information, students can use the photo to do history and interpret the impact of transportation technologies and the pace of change. Then the student could write a "first person account" from the point of view of someone in the photo. They could even go on to design their own comparison of the changes in communication technology in their world today. Perhaps include a graph showing the growth of cell phones vs land lines?

We can design the learning to help our students be the historian. It begins when we allow students to make their own judgments about source material and share what's important to them (instead of just repeating the details the teacher highlights). They'll develop their literacy and numeracy skills for a more authentic audience and purpose as they share their thinking with those around them.

"The Arts of the World Within Reach: Creating the Cornerstone for Access"

Washington DC: Peter Pappas will serve as an advisor to the Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester – Rochester, NY. The museum is a recipient of a 2006 Institute of Museum and Library Services grant - Museums for America - Sustaining Cultural Heritage.

The project includes management and educational activities targeting the gallery's collections of ancient, Asian, European, Meso- and Native American, and African Art. Activities include full research and documentation for 250 landmark works of art; the addition of 1,525 images to the collections database and website; and the purchase and use of technology for increased storage capacity, backup capability, and security of digital image files. A new curriculum-based educational module will be developed based on core works in the targeted collections. New technology will provide shared access to educational materials and images. The project will support the development of innovative installations of the permanent collection and public access to the entire collection through technological initiatives.

Teaching American History Grant – “Student as Historian”

This  week I  had the opportunity to work with secondary social studies teachers in Volusia County Florida - a talent group who are participating in a multi-year “Teaching American History Grant.”

The focus of my two-day workshop was the “Student as Historian.”  We practiced strategies that teachers can use to shift their role from teacher as “education dispenser” (gathering, distilling and delivering information); to teacher as “educational architect” who can design classrooms where students do the work of constructing meaning. Lessons were designed to enable students to do the work of historian using a variety of comprehension skills:

- Identify details – can you identify key symbols, words, visual elements?
- Recognizing context – where is this taking place, time period, who’s involved?
- Identify relationships – who are these people, what is their relationship to one another?
- Identify opinions – is there a point of view expressed in the source information?
- Infer meaning – is there meaning that can be extracted from what’s between the lines?
- Make predictions – based on the information, what will happen next?

For demonstration, I assembled a group of documents that students could use to answer essential historic questions. I’ve put the documents and guiding activities online at a temporary web site: Selections from an American History Collection

Exploring Landmark Supreme Court Cases: A Document-Based Questions Approach.

Peter Pappas will serve as an advisor to the Bill of Rights Institute - the recipient of a 2006 National Endowment for the Humanities "We the People" grant. The Arlington Virginia-based institute received $190,000 to develop Exploring Landmark Supreme Court Cases: A Document-Based Questions Approach a teacher resource book and web-based component to bring the intellectual arguments of landmark Supreme Court cases into the classroom.  This resource book will use a document-based questions approach to help the next generation comprehend these ideas and see how abstract constitutional principles are applied in specific situations and how the U.S. Constitution continues to affect their lives.

He will join a team nationally-recognized scholars and educational consultants taking part in the intellectual development of the project; providing guidance and review of the Institute staff’s work in creating the document-based questions; and writing a 500 page introductory essay about the pedagogical effectiveness of document-based questions. His award winning website, Teaching with Documents has long a been a leading resource for document-based instruction.

This important project is designed to help high school American History and Civics teachers develop in their students a deeper understanding of the documentary history and enduring significance of landmark Supreme Court cases. "We are taking a thematic approach to the cases, such as the role of federal courts and students and the Constitution," said Claire McCaffery Griffin, the Institute's vice president of education programs. The lesson plans will cover 19 landmark cases frequently cited in state standards and often referenced in U.S. History and Government textbooks.  The cases will deal with the six constitutional issues: “The Role of the Federal Courts,”  “Equal Protection and Affirmative Action,” “The Rights of the Accused,” “Students and the Constitution,” “Expansion of Expression,” and “Personal Liberty.”

What did Europeans see when they looked at the New World and the Native Americans?

This lesson improves content reading comprehension and critical thinking skills with an engaging array of source documents – including journal entries, letters, maps, and illustrations. It examines European views of Native American and the New World in the Age of Exploration. While it is a rather one-sided account, the documents also reveal a great deal about the cultural "lenses" that the Europeans "looked though."

I developed this lesson to assist high school history teachers working with struggling readers. I wanted to show them how they could scaffold learning so that all students could participate in doing the work of historians. I built the lesson around a theme which was central to their curriculum. It was designed as an essential question that would engage students in reflection about how they allowed prejudice to color their perceptions. I selected images which could be “decoded” by students with a minimum of background knowledge.

The source material contains twenty-five documents in text and image formats. I modernized historic accounts at two reading levels – 5th and 8th grade. Each contains the same twenty five documents.  A series of six exercises accompanies the lesson to guide students through the process of extracting information from the documents and constructing their own answers to the essential question. Link to Lesson

Picturing Ourselves: Teaching with Visual Documents

I recently worked with educators from across the Rochester NY area in a workshop titled “Picturing Ourselves: Teaching with Visual Documents”  at a workshop held at the Memorial Art Gallery.

We looked at strategies for using visual document to create student-centered lessons that invite students to construct their own meaning. Our focus included - the relevance of essential questions, higher order thinking skills, and linking visual literacy with listening and reading skills. Presentation Notes (4 mb) pdf.

Most importantly, we considered choosing images that contain information that is not overly dependant on background knowledge. This enables students of all ability level to successfully “do the work of the historian.”

Use this guide (9 kb) pdf to compare these two images (446 kb) pdf. The first is a famous photo of the linking of the transcontinental railroad. Without background knowledge, students merely see a group of men standing around two trains. Contrast with the second photo from the Stone Collection of a 1910 street scene in Rochester NY. Without much background knowledge students see autos, bicycles, electric trolleys, horse-draw wagons and pedestrians. Independently they can use this image to construct their own understanding of the changes in transportation in the early 20th century.

“Homefront America” is a lesson designed to improve content reading comprehension with an engaging array of source documents – including journals, maps, photos, posters, cartoons, historic data and artifacts. I developed it to serve as a model for blending essential questions, higher order thinking and visual interpretation.

For more ideas go to my websites Teaching with Documents  and Content Reading Strategies that Work For more images from the Stone Collection of the Rochester Museum and Science Center as well as images of Rochester and New York State try The Rochester Image Project. The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Collection can be searched here.

Great Debates in American History

I developed this series as part of my work with Prentice-Hall supporting Daniel Boorstin’s A History of the United States.

Originally they asked me to develop lessons on an assigned group of questions such as “Should slavery be extended into the territories?” I argued that most of these issues had been answered, and that it would be more engaging to frame the debates around essential questions. Thus the typical question - “Should the Constitution be ratified?” became “How powerful should the national government be?” Anyone wrestling with NCLB compliance knows the relevance of that debate.

The Great Debates feature consists of twelve debates, one for every unit of the text. Each of these debates contains an introduction that states the topic of the debate, examines the background of this issue, provides information about both the readings and the debaters, and discusses the debate topic from a contemporary perspective. Units feature the conflicting viewpoints of two or more historical figures or organizations and a worksheet that helps students analyze the debate through a series of comprehension and critical thinking questions. Link to Debates

Homefront America in WW II

This lesson is designed to improve content reading comprehension with an engaging array of source documents – including journals, maps, photos, posters, cartoons, historic data and artifacts. I developed it to serve as a model for blending essential questions, higher order thinking and visual interpretation. I intentionally refrained from explaining the documents, to afford students the chance to do the work of historians. A variety of thinking exercises are imbedded in the lesson to support reading comprehension. Graphic organizers support differentiated activities to assist the students in extracting meaning from the documents.

Most importantly, it is designed around an engaging essential question - “How did Americans change their lives to support the war effort?” Since September 11th, the notion of the “homefront” has been altered. The lesson invites students to construct comparisons between the experience in WWII, the war in the Iraq, and the on-going war on terrorism. Hopefully this lesson serves as a model of how to infuse rigor and relevance while supporting content mastery. Link to Lesson