Activities
Building Background Learning Stations
The first activity in this unit is critical is garnering student interest and motivation, while also situating them in a historical context that occurred two hundred years ago. This is even more complicated for students who are missing some, or a great deal, of U.S. history knowledge, like many of my English learner students. In an effort to scaffold student understanding, I will begin the unit by helping them to make connections between their own lives, and the lives of those who lived two centuries before them.
We will begin the unit by defining primary sources and listing examples of primary sources they are familiar with: Twitter posts, text messages, emails, etc. Then, we will view some images from the Civil War era that depict daily social life. As a class, students will make observations about the people and objects in the images. They will consider how these people may have communicated, and list as many primary sources as possible. When we have brainstormed an adequate list of primary sources, I will introduce the concept of secondary sources and gather student responses of secondary source examples.
Once we have produced an adequate number of examples and some working definitions for primary and secondary sources, I will ask students to consider the benefits and drawbacks of each type of source when trying to understand a past event. If students have difficulty producing responses, I will prompt them with a specific event, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and ask them to consider what an outsider could learn about the pandemic from a Tweet versus an encyclopedia entry about the pandemic. I expect students to understand that primary sources often give more insight into personal responses to events and that secondary sources generally give information from a less personal perspective. My hope with this opening activity is that students will understand the value of using both primary and secondary sources to learn about, question, and investigate historical events.
After establishing definitions and concrete examples of primary and secondary sources, students will preview images and/or a short film about the Civil War. In this activity, students will be asked to generate at least three observations and two questions about the time period. After presenting and discussing student observations about this time period, I will model research and investigative techniques as we explore student questions. This is a critical step in modeling how to search for information about sources and their authors. A key part of this exercise is to think aloud as I research, question, and verify information I find on the internet. As a class, we will discuss credible sources and how to investigate who or what influences the information a source produces.
After modeling some research techniques and cognitive processes of good researchers, I will introduce students to the primary source protocol, developed by the National Archives. This tool requires students to “meet the document, observe its parts, try to make sense of it, and use it as historical evidence.”28 In addition to these steps, students will apply the research techniques that I modeled to investigate the author of each primary source. Before releasing responsibility to small groups, I will model the primary source protocol for the class.
The first primary source that we will analyze as a class will be an excerpt from Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave. I will select an excerpt that both demonstrates Douglass’ personal experience as a slave and is comprehensible for my English learners. As we work with this excerpt, I will model and elicit whole-class participation in researching Frederick Douglass and following the steps of document analysis. Students will be able to practice researching and analyzing a primary source while simultaneously learning about the brutality of slavery through Douglass’ firsthand account. In this way, students will build analytical and interpretive skills as they construct background knowledge about the Civil War era.
In addition to modeling research and document analysis techniques, I will introduce students to the concept of author’s purpose and the ways in which author’s use rhetoric to achieve their purpose. We may look at short, modern examples to scaffold student understanding of the new concepts. When I am satisfied that students grasp the new concepts, we will work as a class to determine Douglass’ author’s purpose in his narrative, and point out specific rhetoric that supports our conclusions. Students will incorporate their understanding of author’s purpose and associated rhetoric in the next activity of the unit.
Before moving on to the second, major unit activity, students will continue to build background knowledge about the Civil War and the main events leading up to the Battle of Gettysburg. In a station activity, students will work in small groups to interact with primary sources. From their analyses of these documents, they will interpret some of the causes of the Civil War and the “official” reasons for fighting on both the Northern and Southern sides.
The documents that students will analyze include maps showing the economic and political divide between the Northern free states and Southern slave-holding states. Students will work through a vocabulary station to define words critical for comprehension of texts within the unit. These words will include, but not be limited to: abolition, secession, slavery, Yankee, rebel, Union, and Confederacy. In another station, students will work together to sequence a timeline of major events leading up the Battle of Gettysburg. Students will also work through a station in which they read and interpret excerpts from Abraham Lincoln’s April 15th proclamation of war on the South and the Confederate States of America’s message to Congress on April 29th, 1861.29 Students will determine the “official” reasons that each side states for fighting in the Civil War. Students will notice that Lincoln does not claim that “freedom” is the cause of fighting, but rather “union.”30 I will ask students to recall this wording later in the unit when they read Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
Upon the conclusion of this activity, we will review the responses students produced during each station activity. Students will collect their materials in a portfolio or an online Google folder so that they can reference their materials in future activities. Additionally, I will ask students to consider the unifying question that will thread its way through the entirety of the unit: what were people fighting for in the Civil War? These answers will likely change as students progress through the unit.
Primary Source Exploration
In the second activity in this unit, students will draw comparisons between primary sources. Therefore, I will open the unit by explicitly teaching students comparative adjectives and transition phrases through a series of mini-lessons. Students will apply the language of comparison in their writing throughout the activity as they develop evidence-based responses comparing primary source documents in small groups. Students will also use the language of comparison in speaking during Socratic seminars.
As students continue to develop language skills in comparing and contrasting, they will read and/or watch a secondary source that describes the Battle of Gettysburg. Students will again write down three observations and two questions they have about the Battle of Gettysburg. After gathering the questions, students will work in small groups to employ research methods learned in the first activity to answer one or two questions and present their findings in a whole-class discussion. As the activity progresses, students will specifically consider how the information in the secondary source does and does not account for the conclusions drawn from the primary sources they studied.
Before engaging with primary sources from the participants at Gettysburg, students will make predictions about what the people at Gettysburg were fighting for. These predictions will be informed by the background activities that students completed in the first unit, though students will come to find a wider variety of responses compared to the “official” reasons outlined in the station activity. Students will discover that some participants were fighting for the “official” reasons stated by their respective leaders, while others were fighting for steady pay, honor, duty, or the abolition of slavery. Still others fought tirelessly for the total freedom of African Americans, including uninhibited access to their civil rights as citizens of the United States. Students will also discover how the Northern war aims changed from a war for union to a war for freedom after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
Students will work in pairs and small groups as they work with each primary source. In their primary source exploration, students will follow a similar routine to analyze and interpret each source, as well as to prepare for a Socratic seminar to debrief and discuss findings from each source. When students receive their primary source documents, their first task will be to apply the research techniques learned in the first activity to develop short biographies for the author of each primary source. In the next task, students will apply the primary source protocol to analyze and interpret the document. Students will then determine the author’s purpose and central message. They will support these conclusions with textual evidence of the author’s rhetorical choices. In the final step of this routine, students will be given one or two questions to prepare for a Socratic seminar in which students will discuss their findings, as well as draw comparisons between primary sources and the secondary source they studied at the outset of this activity.
In order to support student participation in each Socratic seminar, students will be provided with sentence starters and note-taking guides. Students will also receive questions in their small groups to prepare some answers before joining the Socratic seminar. The Socratic seminar will not only support student speaking and listening comprehension, but will also support student understanding of the previously analyzed documents. The Socratic seminar provides an opportunity to correct any misunderstandings, while also giving students the time and space to make new connections and form deeper understandings of the documents they analyzed. As students become more comfortable with the Socratic seminar process, I will gradually remove scaffolds as appropriate.
After researching, analyzing, and interpreting each individual primary source, students will draw comparisons between documents. Students will consider what each participant was fighting for at Gettysburg and how the author’s background contributed to their purpose. This point of consideration will be the opening of each Socratic seminar. Additionally, students will reflect upon similarities and differences between specific documents in a series of Socratic seminars. In order to scaffold student writing, students will be made gradually more responsible for collaborative writing tasks as they become more comfortable with the routine of research, analysis, and academic discussion.
I plan to have students compare the accounts of George G. Meade and Robert E. Lee, each a leader of the Union and Confederate armies respectively. After analyzing each document, students will consider how the officers’ accounts are similar or different from the “official” reasons for fighting in the Civil War as stated by their government leaders. Students will also consider the audience of each document, and how the author’s words may be different if their audience were a family member, a colleague, or a government leader. Toward the end of our class discussion, I will provide students with a compare and contrast paragraph that compares these two documents. As a class, we will deconstruct the text, point out the grammatical features of comparative writing, and discuss how the paragraph is organized.
Students will compare the accounts of Union soldier Samuel Hodgman and Confederate soldier William Edwards. In addition to considering why these young men are fighting in the war, students will also ask themselves what these authors seem to be most concerned with in their correspondences. Students will also consider how the soldiers' accounts compare to those of their leaders and reflect on what could account for those differences. When our discussion has concluded, we will construct a compare and contrast paragraph that summarizes the similarities and differences between the Hodgman and Edwards’ documents. I will elicit student input about how to organize the paragraph and employ transition words/phrases to demonstrate similarities and differences.
In a slight divergence from the typical routine, students will compare Tillie Pierce’s account of Gettysburg in the years after the war to the statue of Elizabeth Thorn that was dedicated nearly 150 years later. Students will work together to construct a paragraph that compares these two women and their participation in the Battle of Gettysburg. Students will consider each woman’s background, class status, and role in the battle as they consider Pierce’s published account and the minimal record of Thorn’s account. In this Socratic seminar, students will also note Pierce’s reference to African Americans in her narrative. Students will seek to answer why there are so few accounts of African Americans during the Battle of Gettysburg and consider what Pierce’s description of African Americans reveals about the attitudes of some white Northerners toward African Americans during the war.
Finally, in preparation for their compare and contrast essay, students will draw comparisons between Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Frederick Douglass’ Our Work is Not Done. Students will specifically consider how Lincoln’s purpose and central message changed from his April 15th proclamation that students read in the station activity. Students will also consider how Lincoln and Douglass’ rhetoric and author’s purposes are similar and different. Additionally, students will make evidence-based inferences about the meaning of Gettysburg for each author. Each student will work independently to prepare a short response that compares what each man was fighting for when they wrote their speeches. This will serve as a formative assessment to measure student understanding of the Lincoln and Douglass texts, as well as their ability to employ the language of comparison in their writing.
In the last Socratic seminar, students will respond to the following questions: Why is Lincoln’s speech read in English classrooms today? How is your understanding of Gettysburg different when you read Douglass’ speech in addition to Lincoln’s speech? During this discussion, students will also consider how their predictions of what people at Gettysburg were fighting for compare to their understanding of the motivations for fighting after analyzing primary source material of the participants at Gettysburg. The focus of this final academic discussion is to reflect deeply on what students have gleaned from their primary source exploration, and how it differs from the information they learned from the secondary source description of the Battle of Gettysburg.
These primary source investigations, comparisons, and discussions will occur over several weeks. As the unit progresses, students will collect their classwork and notes from the Socratic seminars in a portfolio. They will utilize these notes in the final activity of the unit.
Compare/Contrast Essay
In the culminating activity of the unit, students will use their portfolio notes from Socratic seminars and learning activities to develop a compare and contrast essay. In this essay, students will compare and contrast the author’s purpose, rhetoric, and central message of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Frederick Douglass’ Our Work is Not Done. Students will use the skills built during the second activity and their knowledge of comparative adjectives and transitions to successfully write their compare and contrast essays. In the concluding paragraph of their essays, students will employ their knowledge of each author and reflect on the meaning each man assigns to the symbol of Gettysburg.
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