I have been doing a lot of thinking about reading instruction within Social Studies this year. This is partly due to the course I did over the summer, Harnessing the Common Core to Achieve Higher Levels of Reading and Writing (Heinemann), as I dug into the CCSS informational reading standards. This is partly due to dissatisfaction with my students' abilities to unpack meaning in a primary source document or a news article. And this is partly due to recognizing the need to bring in more supplementary resources instead of relying so much on the textbook.
To this end, I have taught my kids how to annotate texts based on Cris Tovani's work (see my post Annotations as Assessment). They have annotated Q & A articles about Native Americans from Do All Indians Live in Teepees? (Smithsonian, 2012) and an article from the Washington Post about new anthropological evidence from Jamestown. I taught a week of lessons on reading informational texts using the TCRWP text set resource "Christopher Columbus: Who Really Discovered America?" And most recently, we had a guided unit on The Historian's Process in which students read and analyzed primary and secondary sources, both visual and written, to validate or invalidate historical questions about the early English colonies.
They are making progress However, primary source documents are difficult to understand for grade 8 students. The spelling catches them right away, and it is hard for them to get past non-standard English spelling to the meaning behind it. They use really long sentences, and each phrase is a meaning-packed unit all on its own. This can be exhausting for modern readers who are used to short, clear sentences. Finally, they use big words, or unfamiliar words. I am continuously surprised by the words they circle in their annotations with "What does this mean?" written in the margin. We need to do more context clue and word analysis work.
Usually at this point in the curriculum I turn away from the primary source focus and get back to role play and textbook reading. However, this year, I want to keep going with it. Fortunately, I found what I was looking for in my Social Studies closet: Colonial America: Debating the Documents (Social Studies School Services). This handy resources sets up 9 different debatable questions around topics related to Colonial America. A few topics are now too old to return to, such as the Pilgrims and Anne Hutchinson, but there are three that fit right in with what we will be discussing next: The Great Awakening, Loyalists and Patriots, and The Declaration of Independence.
Each 4-5 day mini-unit presents primary source documents, both visual and written excerpts, that consider opposing sides of a question. Students are guided through these by looking at two to three short primary sources, answering guided questions about them, and then choosing between two as the one that historians would find most useful (with justification). This is repeated with two to three more primary sources. Next, students are assigned a "side" in the argument and debate using the documents as evidence. The final step is to answer the Document Based Question (DBQ) in a formal essay.
My teaching partner and I want to use the Great Awakening unit to introduce them to the process and do more work with reading skills. They will debate using a basic format used previously with the Columbus text set, but will not write the DBQ essay. Next, after role playing the First and Second Continental Congress, we'll re-teach and/or extend reading skill lessons and give them more independence in the Loyalist and Patriots unit, ending with a more formal and complex debate. Finally, the Declaration of Independence will be much more independent, ending with the DBQ essay as a summative assessment.
I hope three units is not too much. I don't want them to burn out on primary source documents or debates. Rather, I want them to feel comfortable and stop feeling intimidated by the formal language and difficult words. I want them to view a text and ask questions about its creator and the time period in which it was created. I want them to bring a critical, historian's eye to primary source documents and, in a best case scenario, to all texts they encounter in the world.
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