American History through American Lives

Teaching Strategies

Evaluating Texts: Point of view, Author’s Purpose, Denotation/Connotation, Author’s Credibility

To teach students about an author’s point of view, you need to teach students the concepts of denotation and connotation. Many of my middle school students do not know the definitions before they enter the room, and it is so important to detect shades of meanings used by authors as they write to infer point of view. If you struggle to teach the difference between denotation and connotation, there is an excellent video that is available and student-friendly on Flocabulary; it gives many examples that you could use to show how different words may have similar meanings but different feelings behind them. When students are working to identify the author’s point of view, I often have them start by copying down a couple of sentences they think are the main ideas of the text. I have them highlight the words that have a strong connotation and show what the author may feel (which also helps with identifying bias) and then I have students use the author’s purpose acronym PIES-Persuade, Inform, Entertain, Sell to have students write what they think the author’s point of view is based on the text evidence and word choices of the author. Finally, in order to get students thinking about the reliability and credibility of the author, I have students either Google the author or check the “About Us” section of the website and have students reflect: Does this author/organization appear to be an expert on this topic? Does this seem like a group or individual that I should trust? 

Popcorn Discussion

In a popcorn discussion, the teacher acts as a facilitator of a conversation. The teacher asks a question, calls on the first person to start the conversation for the classroom, and then the next person can speak once the first person is finished. I start this procedure right at the beginning of the school year to get students comfortable with speaking in front of class and with one another. As students are speaking, I am tracking participation as well as listening to what students have to say without interrupting unless necessary to redirect the conversation. There are always a handful of students that are not comfortable talking in front of the class. I allow those students to listen and type their thoughts to each question and share them with me in an email at the end of class; that way I know that they are actively listening and thinking as well.

Notice and Note-Nonfiction Annotations

To grow in their proficiency and independence reading nonfiction text, students are taught strategies to read and annotate text independently during their first read. My colleague introduced me to the text Notice and Note for both fiction and nonfiction. We use the strategies and mini lessons in these texts to introduce students to ways that authors create meaning in both fiction and nonfiction. See the supplemental resource section for a citation for the book. Students are taught what each symbol means, have guided practice with a suggested reading from the Notice and Note text, and then use the system to annotate their first read of the text. As we have our popcorn discussion on a text, students are encouraged to add to their annotations with any new insights that they have as they participate and listen to their classmates.

Assessing Historical Knowledge

Wineburg makes an argument that is relevant to many teachers, especially for teachers that teach history in urban schools that face academic pressure to perform well on assessments. He argues that history teachers in these environments have been set up for failure because the “system conspires to make them [students] look dumb.”⁶³ When assessments align to a symmetrical bell curve using multiple-choice questions, the purpose becomes to rank students against norms. This means that questions that are created with distractors to ensure that roughly 40-60% of students can answer the question correctly. If a question yields 100% of students being able to answer it accurately; it is often considered to be a bad question. This is problematic for a number of reasons, but Wineburg identifies three factors why this happens in assessment of history: “(A) a culture of testing that rewards trickery and deception, (B) items intended to distract, not educate children, (C) a view of history that turns it into Trivial Pursuit.⁶⁴ Teachers often create assessments that mirror the type of standardized assessments that are given within their districts. Teachers face pressures to ensure that their assessment practices are standards-based and rigorous, but in doing so many may fall into the same pitfalls that are evident in the questions that are on standardized assessments. As Wineburg argues, “practices of item analysis, discrimination, biserial or item-test correlations, and spread are so ingrained in the culture of testing...results from most large-scale objective tests fit the traditional bell curve.”⁶⁵ As teachers of history, we need to think deeply about our assessment practices to ensure that we are assessing students in a way that reflects their learning. Assessment in the history classroom needs to align with classroom practices and should show what students are capable of when presented with authentic historical documents. For this unit, my assessment would be simple. I would ask students to respond to the Essential Questions drawing textual evidence from the readings that we have done in class.