Over the past two years, I have incorporated documents in my American History 10 course. It has been a boon for advancing interest, building authenticity, and nurturing literacy skills. One of my perpetual struggles with this is knowing how often to ask students to write a five-paragraph essay that uses the documents to build a response to a question. Expecting this too frequently can lead to a student mutiny due to either fatigue or falsely capping one’s ability as well as running the risk of giving a teacher the equivalent of “highway eyes” while evaluating 150 of these in one weekend. This year I began implementing other ways of working with documents. With this post, I’ll reflect on using an image string, blackouts, and sequencing/speaker identification to allow students other means of interacting with historical documents. It is no accident that this series of alternative ways to work with documents occurred during our final two course units of the school year.

Two different lessons that used an image string maximized curiosity and extended themselves to a wide range of students. When helping students grow in terms of literacy skills, the use of words can occur either in reading or reflecting. By reducing the words on the “front” side of the activity, some students actually find more to say in their written and verbal representations of events. I used this National Archives lesson to show students images related to the call for school desegregation. These images stuck with students so well that I could reference “the dingy auditorium with a conglomerate of chairs that resembled the by-product of asking all of your aunts and uncles to bring a dozen for a graduation party” and see the memories ignited. An ingredient that helped this lesson flourish was the presence of questions, “How do you organize these four images? What do they reveal about school segregation practices?”

In a similar lesson (presented to learning clubs in the style of a silent debate),students examined photographs from this Washington Post gallery to explore the Watergate scandal. As students looked at four of the images, they chipped in on their group’s information-gathering sheets. Individually, the images didn’t reveal much; likewise, individually, a student might struggle to make sense of the event. Collectively, the images and group observations yielded a more complete story. After students worked with these, we pooled the thoughts of all groups in a full-class discussion in which I recorded what they had concluded from their examination of the objects of Watergate. Within about 40 minutes of class, they realized that this series of objects could have been used to gather information from a political opponent that would help Nixon develop counteractions. We proceeded to examine the event in the form of its impact on Nixon’s career and the nation.

As a follow-up lesson to the Watergate work, I started our class period of examining the Ford and Carter presidencies with this DocsTeach image: “Half Right and Half Wrong” letter. Employing the “blackout” technique, students were told that they would learn what this letter was addressing during the course of the lesson. Again, this built curiosity – once the impulsive students realized that the month and day of September 11 were merely coincidental rather than profound in revealing the message of the third-grader’s letter. I still recall the moment when one of my 2nd-hour students, upon hearing that President Ford pardoned Nixon, audibly gasped at recognizing the significance of that opening prompt.

Toward the end of the year, my husband (who teaches AP American History in our school) and I discussed how little we did to build student skills related to contextualization and sourcing despite knowing that our “industry standard” at SHEG encouraged these skills. After taking extractions from the documents posted on the 9/11 Memorial & Museum site, I challenged students to read these excerpts to determine the “speakers and sequence” of them. Student conversations began with statements like, “I feel like this must have been before September 11, 2001, because…” and “I think this speaker is reacting to the attacks.” Only a teacher puffs up and becomes teary-eyed when hearing students communicate like this! I was so proud of the way they justified ideas to each other and wrestled with nuances within the passages. It was interesting that my students didn’t get caught up in being right or wrong on this as much as they were recognizing that the series of documents shed light on the conception of the attacks, the call for American resolve in the wake of these events, and the military response in Afghanistan that followed. After opening with those excerpts, the foundation was set for further exploration of those horrific events.

As I look at ways to improve my American History instruction in future years, I know that I need to use more activities like this early in the year as well. I’ve been a believer in “whole-part-whole” instruction in guiding students to work with primary documents; however, I am convinced that using strategies like these early in the year would help generate greater awareness of the richness of documents while also building student perseverance rather than eroding it, as is sometimes a danger of churning out essays. It’s worth mentioning that building a culture of productive group work contributed to the effectiveness of these lessons. Each of them has a cooperative component that was instrumental in the lesson’s value because of the need for students to articulate ideas to each other. I’m excited to find new means of building engagement and understanding through documents in the future by adapting these strategies to fit other events we study.