U.S. Social Movements through Biography

Teaching Strategies

Modeling

Modeling is the explicit demonstration of a concept, and is an essential part of teaching students a new skill or in scaffolding them to achieve proficiency in a particular context²⁴.  I will use modeling in this unit to achieve both of these outcomes. 

In order to successfully analyze and interpret primary sources, students will need to learn a protocol for approaching historical documents.  This protocol will be based on the document analysis guidelines developed by the National Archives that encourage students to “meet the document, observe its parts, try to make sense of it, and use it as historical evidence.”²⁵  In addition to explicitly showing students how to complete the analysis protocol, I will also model critical thinking skills in the process of investigating a primary source.  For example, I will ask myself questions aloud about the document’s origin, author, and date to model inquiry.  Then, as we read the document as a class, I will draw verbal conclusions about the author’s purpose and central message, using textual-evidence to support my claims.  Thus, students will have an example of the physical and cognitive skills they will need to implement in an individual or small group primary source investigation.

Socratic Seminars

Socratic seminars are academic discussions in which students engage with peers and respond to open-ended questions about a text.²⁶ The Socratic seminar gives students opportunities to improve speaking and listening skills while reviewing, debating, and discussing key takeaways from a text. 

The Socratic seminar will be an important teaching method in my unit as a formative assessment of students’ grasp of the material.  Some of the sources students will investigate will reference people, places, and ideas that students may not be familiar with.  I hope to use the seminar as a space for students to ask questions and seek answers within their peer group before intervening to supplement background information or give a direct answer.  In addition to measuring student understanding, the seminars will help students build collective knowledge bases of the sources they are reading.  Socratic seminars are also crucial in strengthening students’ academic and social English language proficiency in the domains of listening and speaking.  Additionally, the seminar will serve as a whole class review of texts to support students that may need additional support in comprehending texts.

Collaborative Writing

Collaborative writing is a highly-scaffolded approach to teaching writing that occurs in three phases.  In the first phase of collaborative writing, the teacher and students “deconstruct” a mentor text as a class.  Students examine the organization and grammatical features of the mentor text, and the instructor gives explicit lessons on these features as necessary.  Then, the instructor leads the class in jointly constructing a text in the same genre as the mentor text.  During this “joint construction” phase, the teacher models the language, organization, and grammatical features of the genre that were analyzed during the deconstruction phase.  I often give students an additional opportunity to jointly construct a text in small groups or pairs.  In this way, I can more closely assess what skills or concepts students need more practice with before writing independently.  In the final phase of collaborative writing, students construct their texts independently.  This phase of “independent construction” is highly scaffolded by the previous whole-class and small-group writing practice.  Additionally, students have the benefit of referring to the jointly constructed texts (which serve as models) when constructing their own texts.²⁷

Collaborative writing will be an integral part of teaching the genre of comparison to my English learners.  This method of teaching writing gives students multiple opportunities to negotiate and practice the comparison genre before they are expected to produce a comparison essay individually.  Moreover, students will frequently work together in small groups during the primary source exploration.  Collaborative writing will be key support to students as they apply newly learned grammar and language skills to compare texts with evidence-based responses.  These short, comparative writing exercises in small groups will help students build skills and confidence to complete the final writing task, a comparative essay.