Historical thinking skills in the classroom, Part 3: Sourcing

Note: If you have not read Historical thinking skills in the classroom, Part 1: Shifting your mindset, do that before reading this article!

We’ve finally made it to the portion of this series where I detail what the skills are and how to teach them in the classroom! As always, this has come a year after the first parts of this series, which if you have not read them, go do that now. Better late than never I suppose. For each of the subsequent articles, I will define the skill, provide strategies for instruction and assessment, include some pitfalls I’ve seen in the classroom and how to avoid them, and include extra resources for teachers.

Scope and sequence

Before we get started on sourcing, I want to provide some information on how I have sequenced this course in the past. The literature on the subject does not provide much in the way of a recommended sequence, and it really is up to the teacher. But I am going to detail what I think is a great way to approach this. Note that the progression I have used is for introducing these skills in high school, and ideally, students should be working with these skills well before that. With that said, the first thing I do is introduce them to the idea of thinking like a historians by discussing what history is (a reconstruction of the past using available evidence), why we study it (not to “learn from the past” or avoid making the “same mistakes,” but to better understand our world and what it means to be human), and the Bruce VanSledright model of historical thinking. Since this approach to history courses is likely to be foreign to students, the goal of this is to make clear what they will be learning, and to provide a portfolio template we will use throughout the year to track skills development.

From there, I move into sourcing first, then evidence shortly thereafter. The logic is that sources are the building blocks of historical knowledge, and no interpretation of the past can be made without critically evaluating sources and determining how to use them as evidence. Furthermore, once students have a good grasp on sourcing and evidence – which usually takes about a month – they have the basic tools needed to examine a document set and formulate an evidence-based answer to an inquiry question. This becomes the cornerstone of classroom instruction thereafter.

After some brief instruction on gathering sources (more on that later in this article), they are ready to do their first research project. These projects, which become the standard form of assessment for the rest of the course, assess the “Four Core” competencies: gathering sources, sourcing, evidence, and argumentation, along with whichever other skills (significance, cause and effect, context, perspective, etc.) we are focusing on developing at any given moment. 

At this point, the sequence of further skill development is up to the teacher. I would recommend doing cause and effect, context, and corroboration next, as they are central to strengthening historical arguments. But beyond that, it’s entirely up to the teacher, and may largely depend on the content of the course. For example, I have always done perspective with World War I since I have an excellent project where students have to take a primary source account of the war and create an interview with that author, doing careful research about how their worldview affected their experience during the war. At the same time new skills are being introduced, the teacher should also be working to elevate the development of the core skills using more advanced instruction, reflection, and analysis of student examples.

Through the careful tracking of these skills over the year (or multiple years), students will not only develop the skills, but also be able to see and reflect upon progress.

Content vs. Skills Instruction

While all Social Studies teachers are familiar with the myriad methods to deliver historical content knowledge, instruction of skills is trickier, and one of the last pieces of the puzzle that I was able to figure out. It is not the case that students automatically possess many of these research and argumentation skills, so they must be taught. The direct instruction method I use is known as “cognitive apprenticeship” and it involves explaining the process then modeling it for students to observe. To preface, I will ask the students to watch what I do and write down three observations about the process. I will then perform the skill for them, thinking my thoughts out loud while I do it. We will then review and discuss what the students noticed about what I did. For the purpose of this series, when I use a cognitive apprenticeship approach, I will include a sample script to help teachers. Once the students have seen this process, we will do a few more examples together before I let the students practice on their own – an “I do, We do, You do” approach for those who are familiar. From here, taking the skills to the next level often involves analyzing student responses/exemplars, reflecting on one’s own responses and what they could improve, and practicing the skills on more advanced examples. It’s important to note that these skills need to be constantly practiced, or, just like anything else, will be forgotten. Thus, we practice the “Four Core” skills all year such that by the end of the course, students can do sourcing and evidence in their sleep.

What is sourcing?

In the discipline of history, it is wrong to say that sourcing means finding a yes or no answer to the question, “Is this source reliable?” I would argue that very few, if any, historical sources are entirely without value. Therefore, the verb “to source” is the process by which students make a detailed evaluation of a source within an inquiry. For the students’ skills portfolios, I have worded it as follows: “I can determine how the author, date produced, purpose, intended audience, and perspective of a historical source impact the reliability and useability of that source for answering an inquiry question.” Another way to view this is determining the extent to which a source can provide useful evidence based on the factors listed. This, by necessity, implies that even questionable sources may be able to provide some evidence in the right conditions, insofar as there is corroborating evidence from other sources or if it is the only extant source with such evidence. In this case, students will be required to explain these evidentiary weaknesses as part of their final argument.

Prerequisite to the aforementioned is simply being able to determine the author, date produced, audience, purpose, perspective, etc. While this is something that should be mastered in the early grades, I often find that high school students need extra support in these areas. Consequently, it is a good idea for teachers to briefly discuss methods of determining basic sourcing information so they can make their evaluations.

Digital literacy

Before I introduce historical sources to students, I spend a week on digital literacy using materials from Digital Inquiry Group’s (formerly Stanford History Education Group) Civic Online Reasoning curriculum. The goal is to teach students how to determine whether information they find online is reliable or not, which translates seamlessly into the historical sourcing process. To introduce this concept, I use an adaptation of Sam Wineburg’s study with articles on bullying from the American Academy of Pediatrics and American College of Pediatricians. First, I ask students what they’ve been taught about how to determine if information is reliable. Most still give answers that focus on the look, feel, and URL of a webpage. Then, I ask them to determine which of these two websites is more trustworthy, and I let them know that there is a definitively correct answer along with a correct method to determine this. They need to get both (the website and the method) right to be correct in this exercise. Upon finishing, it’s usually the case that most students guess the ACP article as the correct one, and I will have them share some reasons why.

Once I’ve listened to a few students, I will model the process for them. I start by explaining that most of the methods we (myself included) were taught about how to determine if a website is reliable are wrong. For example, many teachers still tell students that .org websites are more reliable. But rather, anyone can register a .org domain name if it’s available. Then, I explain that professional fact-checkers use a method known as “lateral reading” which involves opening up a separate tab and Googling information about the source to see if they’re reliable. Students are instructed to observe as I model this process.

When I open up a new tab and Google American Academy of Pediatrics, the first thing that comes up, of course, is Wikipedia. I pose the million dollar question to them: do I want to click that? Most students will say no, but I say yes! Of course I do! This is a valuable teaching moment. While Wikipedia is not a source you can cite directly in a Works Cited or take evidence from directly on a research project, it is a great starting point to get your brain oriented around an unfamiliar topic, and it is invaluable for lateral reading purposes. Since our ultimate goal is to get students to be able to complete this process in under a minute, Wikipedia is usually the fastest way to do that. So, according to Wikipedia, the AAP was formed in 1930 and is the “largest professional association of pediatricians in the United States,” boasting 67,000 members. On the other hand, Wikipedia describes the ACP as a “socially conservative advocacy group of [700] pediatricians” founded 22 years ago. Furthermore, it is stated that the “ACPeds has been listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for pushing ‘anti-LGBTQ junk science’.” [sic] At this point, I would not even read the ACP article because I know there is political bias. Given the political climate, I make careful note to mention that there is nothing inherently wrong with being conservative or liberal, but rather our goal is to find the most unbiased information about the topic.

After completing the lateral reading process, it’s obvious to see which one is more reliable, but only by opening up a new tab and Googling the sources were we able to determine that. The ACP article even had the name of a medical doctor, which throws many students and leads to another teachable moment: both the organization and the author should be sourced. If the two are reliable, you can trust the source. But what if there is no author listed? In this case, source the organization.

One challenge students face is knowing what makes a good source to begin with. While it is intuitive for most teachers to see “socially conservative advocacy group” and know that it implies political bias, that is not automatic for the students. Therefore, I follow this activity up with direct instruction on what makes a source reliable – authority, perspective, bias, something to gain? etc – and a full week of practice and assessment on lateral reading.

For more information, teachers should consult the following resources:

Teaching sourcing

First, I introduce the concept of sourcing by explaining the skill and why it’s important, and then explain what we look for in a historical source. Here, I rely on SHEG’s historical thinking skills chart, but teachers can use any resources they choose to explain the process. Then, I model the process using my own adaptation of The First Thanksgiving. I start by asking students to observe what I do and write down three things they notice. I then proceed as such:

“I have a painting here that shows Pilgrims and Native Americans sharing a meal. I want to know whether this source helps historians understand the first Thanksgiving. Before I look at the painting itself, I’m going to look at the sourcing information. This painting is called The First Thanksgiving 1621 by J.L.G Ferris in 1932. On one hand, Ferris painted a series of paintings about American history [this information is on my version], so he may have been knowledgeable on the subject. But on the other hand, this was painted over 300 years after the event, so it’s a secondary source. On its own, this would not seem to provide good information about the Pilgrim/Native relations at the time. In fact, this may provide better evidence about America in 1932 and how they viewed the first Thanksgiving. But I want to know more information, so I’m going to do lateral reading on Ferris. Wikipedia tells me that Ferris was known for painting over glorified scenes of American history that confuse truth with myth. This confirms that this source does not provide good evidence to help historians understand the first Thanksgiving. But it also says that his paintings were praised for accuracy of clothing and landscapes by an art historian. So if I’m investigating the clothing that the Natives and settlers wore, this may be a strong source for that.”

After I do this, I ask students to rehash what they observed about the process, then have them analyze the student responses that are on DIG’s website for the activity. More practice examples (found on DIG’s website) ensue. Make sure to emphasize the fact that you will always look at the sourcing information prior to examining or reading a source.

From here, we move into talking about strengths and limitations of sources (in my opinion, the next step up) given an inquiry question, based on this activity from SHEG’s website. You can create some of your own scenarios here to add on, or have AI do it. Now, students should be good enough to do basic sourcing on their own.

When you’re ready to take sourcing to the next level after some assessment and practice, you can have students bring in their own sources or find some online to have them practice with. It also makes a good teachable moment about not trusting everything, even if it comes off of your school’s database. I use the following example for advanced sourcing. This is a picture with the caption as it appears exactly on a widely-used high school database.

I start by having the students read the caption and give initial impressions about the source. What do they think is happening? Who do they think the people in this source are? Then I do the lateral reading. One of the first things we discover is that the author’s name is spelled wrong; it’s Rashid al-Din. Then, after a lot of digging, we find out that this source is a depiction of a battle which took place in 976 CE – approximately 300 years before the source was created – during a struggle for succession between two brothers of the Persian Buyid Dynasty. Contrary to initial impressions, there are no actual Mongols in this picture. Instead, this is an artistic recreation of the battle – using Mongol weapons and armor – similar to how artists make renditions in modern textbooks. Of course, this opens up further questions for research, the obvious one being why are they drawn with Mongol armor? As it turns out, al-Din was working with the regional Mongol leader to create this history, and it could be viewed as a form of Mongol propaganda.

In this example, the caption was misleading, and doing lateral reading equipped our brains with a more accurate view of the source.

Primary and secondary sources

Even at the high school level, students will need instruction on what constitutes a primary vs. a secondary source. They will likely come equipped with some idea that a primary source is “someone who was there,” but at the high school level it becomes more complicated. A primary source is any source that provides direct, primary evidence for answering an inquiry question. This definition highlights some important implications. ANY source can be a primary source depending on the inquiry question. Furthermore, whether a source is a primary or secondary source depends on the inquiry question or topic of study. When I ask my students (and fellow history teaching colleagues) whether a textbook is a primary or secondary source, they almost always, without fault, say secondary.

But is there a situation where a textbook can be a primary source, and not just because it has primary sources in it? Let’s look at an example. What if I had a passage about the causes of the Civil War written for a textbook published in 1960s Alabama? Is it primary or secondary? That depends. If my inquiry question is “What caused the Civil War?” then it is a secondary source because it was written a century later. But what if my inquiry question is “How were race relations during the Civil Rights Movement?” In this case, it would be a primary source. All sources are created in a certain temporal space, and therefore will in some way reflect that time and place in history. The textbook passage would likely display the biases of the authors, while also providing evidence as to how creators of educational materials used history to cement their long-established racial hierarchy.

For instruction, I explain all of this to students and then have them practice determining primary and secondary sources. Key to this practice is providing students with an inquiry question to go along with the sources, because without that, it is next to impossible to tell whether a source is primary or secondary. Another good activity I use involves having students brainstorm any physical/digital traces they left behind from the previous day that someone may find, and having partner groups attempt to piece together the person’s day.

Assessment

Sourcing can be assessed in a number of ways depending on teacher preference. If a teacher prefers tests, it is not difficult to curate some examples from SHEG’s website with images and some “strength and limitation” scenarios. In fact, the only test I give my students is on sourcing and evidence using some curated document sets. A key factor to keep in mind is that since these skills are content independent insofar as they can be utilized with sources from any historical topic, the best way to isolate assessment of skills on a test is to give them sources from an unfamiliar topic, and provide them with just enough context. This makes it so students can’t “cheat” with background knowledge, and makes the line between background knowledge and skill clear. That is not to say that down the line you wouldn’t want students to be able to access background knowledge in the process, but that comes with its own challenge of determining where memorized content knowledge ends and skills proficiency begins. This is something I’ve seen AP history teachers struggle with: students don’t memorize the content for tests so teachers can’t assess the skills. Providing students with all information necessary to proficiently perform a skill precludes this issue.

Most of my assessments throughout the year come in the form of research projects. For these, I have a very specific format. Every project has a details document, which explains the directions and expectations, and a research and note-taking document, where students do all of their work. There is also often a final product which could be anything from a video, to an infographic, to a podcast or essay. But since I’m assessing skills, I don’t grade the project based on the final product. Instead, I focus heavily on the research and notetaking document, which, in its particular format, allows me to assess the skills separately.

The research and notetaking document is broken down into the following sections: a two-column annotated sources list (numbered), an area to take evidence and cite every piece of information with the corresponding number on the sources list, and a section to synthesize the evidence into an argument. The sources list looks like this:

This format allows me to quickly give a grade for both Gathering Sources and Sourcing competencies. Of course, I instruct students on what we are looking for for “Evaluation of source” and we do some practice on what makes a good source evaluation. For teachers who want to focus on different aspects of sourcing, such as audience or purpose (which I teach students to put under the “About the author” section), those items can be added to the source information on the right hand column. While I don’t have a fully developed multi-point competency rubric for these skills yet, I can give some general information on the levels of sourcing:

  1. Cannot determine sourcing information and may not be able to distinguish between primary and secondary sources.
  2. Determines sourcing information, but evaluation of source does not focus on sourcing information. Instead, student gives a response such as “has good information on my topic.”
  3. Student makes an attempt to evaluate the source for reliability, but the explanation gives no reason or vague reasons why. For example, “this is a reliable source” or “this is a reliable source because the author is credible.”
  4. Student uses specific sourcing information (perspective, audience, purpose, etc.) to give a detailed evaluation of source, maybe in the format of strengths and limitations (always a good way to get students started on source evaluations).

Gathering sources

How students gather sources will depend largely on the resources available. Are students 1:1? Is there a large library of books the students can utilize within the classroom or elsewhere? Regardless, students will need practice with this. After instructing them on how to use the available resources, give them an inquiry question or topic of study and have them find a series of primary and secondary sources in both print and digital formats. Students tend to have a harder time finding primary sources, so make sure you model this process for them. I have found that keeping primary source anthology books in your classroom is helpful, as they are often quicker to utilize than the internet.

Final tips and thoughts

Here are some final summary thoughts and tips for teachers:

  • Make sure you have the students engage in sourcing with almost everything you do throughout the year. I have my students source everything they come across throughout the course, even myself! This teaches students the importance of making sure all sources are reliable, which is something they will use for the rest of their lives (hopefully).
  • In order to teach sourcing, teachers themselves have to be good at sourcing. It is recommended that teachers practice this within their PLCs.
  • There are a number of different sourcing acronyms and methods out there (HAPPY, SOAP, SOAPSTONE, HIPPO, etc.). I don’t think it really matters which approach you use. In fact, I don’t use any of the acronyms for my teaching. What matters is that students know they should find out as much information about a source as possible to determine its usefulness before looking at its contents.
  • The process of “lateral reading” from digital literacy instruction is inextricably linked with historical sourcing in my instruction. I always have students do lateral reading on all sources they use, whether they are modern digital articles or historical primary sources. This is why I spend time on digital literacy prior to the introduction of historical sources.
  • Sourcing should be done across all disciplines, not just for history. Especially in science, teachers can focus on how to source scientific studies for strengths and weaknesses, along with talking about the peer-review process.

Tools and Resources

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