Educator Cross-Share: Accessibility and Primary Sources
Anthony Browne
Special Education Teacher
Brighton High School
The Challenge: How can you maintain the rigor of primary sources while also ensuring accessibility to primary source documents for students with special needs and MLLs?
My thinking behind this…
-What challenge or need were you responding to?
Students with special needs and MLLs need and deserve rigorous materials but you need to make sure accessibility.
-What were you curious about experimenting with?
History should be investigative and inquiry-driven so that students are taking on a role of a historian in analyzing historical events. My goal was to ensure students with special needs and MLLs still receive this type of instruction but with appropriate scaffolds
What I Tried
Resources and thinking
-I use the DBQ project and Digital Inquiry Group (DIG; formerly called Stanford History Education Group) as guides for inquiry driven lessons
-Students analyze primary and secondary sources to create meaning of the content to answer
-Students are in charge of their own learning
Copy/paste image here
I expected that…
And what actually happened was…
-I expected students wanting assistance to complete the task
-I expected students to ask to know the answer instead of inquiring the answers
-I expected students to dislike all of the documents and just want to copy notes down
-Some learned helplessness but the phrasing “you get to decide” was helpful and practicing annotating skills before the activity (see next slide)
-Some students wanted a yes or no answer but pushing kids to find their own answer is rewarding and higher level
-Students like a variety of sources (letters, songs, pictures, etc.) to round out the topic and engage in different strengths and skills
Modeling annotating
-”how we annotate” anchor chart is highlighted in blue
-My model annotation is in the green box and marker
-I read it aloud to students so that they can follow along
-It is tough to see but I underlined some sentences in this picture
Early impact
Some changes I have seen since we have taken a more inquiry-based approach:
-Students asked more questions about the topic
-Students enjoyed reading primary sources once the vocabulary was scaffolded (purple square below)
-Students enjoyed working with partners to discuss the documents
Lesson on Cuban Missile Crisis; JFK letter
How this looks on DIG before I adapted it to my formatting
New Deal Assessment– was the New Deal a success or failure? (DIG)
Student work samples
What I Learned
Key ingredients: what made this work?
# 1- Interesting documents in a variety of modalities and points of view
#2- Tier 2 and 3 vocabulary are given or reviewed; goal of inquiry model is not vocabulary, but inquiry so focus on inquiry, not vocabulary. Beauty of footnotes is that kids can still try to understand the word and then look at the bottom for the meaning
#3- Drill, drill, drill annotation skills so that students can use them on documents; saw a big change once we annotated several times a week for several weeks
Key ingredients: what made this work?
#4- Scaffold level of questions with low floor, high ceiling questions that are not yes or no questions; open-ended questions repeat so students become accustomed to answering them and can internalize the essential question/prompt that they will answer in an essay once they finish the documents.
#5- Adjust formatting and give students space to annotate
Next steps...
Areas for growth and further development:
Short-term goal:
-Find a way to increase independence for writing
-Continue to give students voice and choice for documents (e.g.: complete 5 out of 7 documents)
-Besides DBQ project and DIG, continue to find other ready made resources online so that I can focus on supports and not creating content
Big picture and long-term goal:
-Students don't need questions to analyze documents and can just annotate and make connecting to the essential question/prompt
-Students research their own documents on a topic