I spent most of last week guiding teachers on classroom walkthroughs. It’s an effective approach to professional development – one that focuses on the students, not the teacher. Think of it as a roving Socratic seminar that provokes reflections on teaching and learning. One of the subjects that often comes up during walk throughs is how to recognize student-centered approach. I think the answer to that question is found in the four elements of any lesson – content, process, product and assessment. Any or all can be decided by the teacher, by the students, or some of both.

I grew up in a heavily curated information landscape. Schools were just another one of the information gatekeepers that ruled my life. Today, students are awash in text without context. They are only a click away from reading that the “Holocaust was a hoax.” Should schools filter?

Angry Birds cost me $.99. I just checked my app stats and I’ve played the game for more than 15 hours. Thus, my cost of Angry Birds is below 6 cents per hour – and dropping. The price of information is rapidly approaching zero. Normally as cost of a commodity drops, we consume more of it. But unlike all the other cheap stuff we buy, and then later discard, cheap information demands our attention. The ability to selectively filter out unwanted information and stay focussed on a task is emerging as the most significant literacy.

This downloadable SlideShare accompanies my workshop in “Teaching with Documents.” It’s a online guide to resources and includes strategy illustrations from my workshop. The job of a teacher is to get the students to do the thinking. Here’s a free guide to teaching strategies and resources that foster the student as historian.

Questions feature a selection of primary and secondary documents, graphics, cartoons, tables, and graphs. Each is keyed to a historic theme and focused on an essential question of enduring relevance. They provide students with the exciting opportunity to move beyond the passive absorption of facts and learn skills in historic perspectives and analysis.