Models for using primary source documents

Objective:

To provide participants with tools that will enable them to design lessons for their students that effectively use primary sources

Overview:

• Best Practice in a variety of content areas
• Primary Sources - what they are and models for their use
• Putting theory into practice: museum display

Materials:

• Best Practice
• Models for using primary source documents
• Colorado Model Content Standards in History (pdf)

Strategies for Effective Instruction:

• Best Practice: Steven Zemelman, Harvey Daniels and Arthur Hyde in their book identify components of effective instruction. In every content area, they recommend the use of collaborative groups, student inquiry and content that is germane to the discipline as well as exciting and interesting.
• Literacy strategies to support students as they read: Keep in mind which of these strategies presented in the morning session might be most effective for use with students who are struggling.

Primary Source Documents

• What are primary sources?
• "Time and use" rule of primary sources
  • Example of newspapers - the one that came today or even yesterday under most circumstances would not be considered a primary source unless you were writing about a columnist like Dianne Carmen for example.
• Models for using primary source documents
  
• Tie-in with Colorado Model Content Standards in History
  • All models tie-in with History 2.2: interpret and evaluate primary and secondary sources of historical information.
  • Event from multiple perspectives - History 2.3 apply knowledge of past to analyze present-day issues and events from multiple, historically objective perspectives
  • Photographs and Themes - History 1.3 use chronology to explain historical relationships
  • History Standards 3, 4, 5, and 6 offer content applications.
    
    
• Sites for finding primary source materials on-line:
  • Library of Congress American Memory
  • Heritage Colorado, Western Trails
  • Colorado's Historic Newspaper Collection
  • Museum Display Worksheet

Putting the Theory into Practice: Museum Display

• Break into three collaborative work groups - each using one of the models previously introduced.
• As a group, decide on a topic and a standard(s) to devise a question to be answered.
• As a group, search for 1 source per person that can be used to address the overarching question.
• Put together a "museum display" of group findings using the Museum Display Worksheet, to include:
  • Question
  • Standard
  • Topic
  • Model used
  • Sources found
• Select one member to be a docent - explainer of the museum display to visitors.
  

Sharing Out

• Docent explains museum display to visitors.
• Other group members become "visitors" and travel from display to display learning about what others have discovered.
  

Wrapping Up