Need for Additional Evidence
Sometimes the corroboration process raises more questions and the documents provided by the teacher and the textbook do not necessarily hold the answers. To find the answers, students can search for additional evidence in documents, articles, and books and bring the evidence from these sources into the discussion. Other times document-based lessons make a personal connection or are high-interest topics and leave the students wanting to research more on their own to share with the class. Teachers can also opt to use a documents-based lesson to kickstart or scaffold an independent research project, similar to the way sentence starters help students craft sentences for their historical essays. Every class is unique in its make-up and interest level, but there are often times, where students feel they need additional information to answer central historical questions, argue a position, or create a historical narrative.
There are several brief mentions of the need to go beyond the documents provided in SHEG or other documents-based lessons in articles and websites. In Engagement in Teaching History: Theory and Practice for Middle and Secondary Teachers (2nd Edition) Drake and Nelson discuss the ways that teachers incorporate primary source work into their lessons. The have a unique approach where teachers build off a central document (First order document), add insights and perspectives from teacher provided documents (Second order documents), and encourage students to research and bring additional documents into the discussion (Third Order Documents).
A few years ago I wrote an article describing how third grade students took a documents-based lesson to the next level. As the students worked through the documents-based lesson, they began taking a deeper interest in their local community and talking with the parents, grandparents, or caretakers about what they were learning. The next thing the teachers knew, students were bringing in documents and artifacts about the past to show their connection to the past and the community.
Please read the following articles and please share times resources or your own experiences about going beyond the documents in a documents-based lessons:
- Teaching Historical Thinking by Frederick Drake (ERIC Digest) Links to an external site.
- Thinking Historically about the Local Community (OSSR) Links to an external site. / Lesson Plan Links to an external site.
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