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