COLLABORATE serves as the virtual meeting place for members of the National Archives education team in Washington, DC, and colleagues from schools, institutions, and organizations across the nation to share innovative ideas and best practices. These conversations will serve as a basis for an exciting new web site and will also offer important feedback and commentary on the site as it develops.

Students as Historians: Doing What Historians Really Do

November 30, 2009

DocsTeach is really starting to take shape! We’ve been working on the design of the new site and have been writing lessons that teachers will be able to grab and use right away with students.

We’ve also decided on the basic structure for six different lesson or activity templates that teachers will be able to plug primary source documents into to create customized lessons. We designed these lesson templates around historical thinking skills. They were made to help students practice the kinds of activities that historians really do. Now we need to come up with a name for each template that reflects the skill being practiced.

What names for these activities would reflect that historians really do these things?

  • Analyzing primary sources including charts, graphs, and tables of data to form meaning and understand history through data analysis.
  • Sorting through primary sources and finding documents that relate to one another to tell a broader story.
  • Pulling apart primary sources, zooming in on specific content, and encountering a document cold and trying to make sense of what is going on.
  • Making sense of history by connecting events and the primary sources that describe them, linking documents together to formulate the whole story.
  • Locating historical events spatially in order to understand history in a way they could not have without thinking geographically.
Written By: Collaborate Team, 3:00 pm
  1 message in the forum Add a message in the forum