Introduction
The inquiries on this website are intended for use in secondary Utah Studies or U.S. History courses. Elementary school teachers may be able to use the lesson materials with adaptations.
Inquiry Lessons
Teachers can use these resources to engage students in a variety of types of inquiry, giving students greater or lesser independence based upon the students’ abilities. In structured inquiry, the entire class follows along with the teacher as they raise a historical question and work through the evidence with them. For instance, after raising the central question and providing background information in a brief PowerPoint presentation, the teacher might choose four items from the mini-archive representing different views of the event, read and analyze the documents in a whole-class discussion, and allow students to debate their interpretations as a class. In contrast, a teacher might engage students in controlled inquiry by raising the central question and providing background information in a short lecture before modeling the analysis of one of the documents. The teacher might then ask students to read and analyze in small groups five additional carefully chosen documents that represent different perspectives, seeking an answer to the central question. Teachers may also choose to end class with a debriefing session, with students explaining and questioning each other about their interpretations. In guided inquiry the teacher provides less support. After introducing the central question and giving background information, they might allow students to explore the mini-archive on their own, choosing for themselves how many and which documents to use. A debriefing at the end of the lesson would allow students to evaluate the various interpretations they and their peers developed. The materials shared on this website are not designed for free inquiry lessons because the topics students will explore have been chosen by the teacher, rather than by the students themselves.
Teachers have the flexibility to teach the lesson in a single class period using a limited number of the documents in the mini-archive, or they can extend it over several class periods, looking in depth at many or all of the documents, depending on their objectives.
Integrating Instruction on Historical Thinking Skills into Lessons
Students are unlikely to be successful in engaging in these inquiries unless they possess historical thinking skills. We encourage teachers to learn about and practice themselves the historical thinking skills described on this page. As part of each inquiry lesson, we recommend that teachers choose a target skill and teach this skill explicitly to students. Explicit strategy instruction includes the following steps that could be included in many of the inquiry lessons:
- The teacher talks about the strategy; gives it a name (ex. sourcing); talks about how to do it, when it helps (both in and out of a classroom setting), and why it is useful or important.
- The teacher models the strategy by thinking aloud as they use the strategy to analyze evidence found in one or more items from the mini-archive. Of importance, the teacher explains to the students what they are thinking at each stage of the use of the strategy, revealing their thought processes to the students.
- During guided practice, the students engage in the strategy with support from the teacher. Support might include working with peers, graphic organizers, posters or bookmarks that remind them of the steps in using the strategy, simplified documents (which are included in most of the mini-archives), advice from the teacher, or other scaffolding strategies that help students do what would be challenging or impossible for them to do without help.
- Independent practice is the last step of explicit strategy instruction. Students engage in the strategy on their own as the support is removed.
Explicit strategy instruction can be tedious, so it is better administered in small doses. We do not recommend that teachers try to model more than one new strategy in a single lesson. Teachers might focus on a target strategy for a few lessons, then move on to a new strategy.
Some of the lessons may be particularly suited to a specific strategy. For example, the lesson on the Ancestral Pueblo is designed to teach the strategies of observing and inferring. The lesson on the Bear River Massacre is especially suited to teaching corroboration. As teachers prepare to use an inquiry, they should think carefully about a target strategy that could be taught during the lesson. For some inquiries, the teacher resources include suggestions for relevant strategies.
Ideally and ultimately, students should use all of the strategies as they investigate the evidence. But it may take time before they are able to do so.
Lesson Sequence
Most lessons will proceed in this sequence:
- The teacher builds students’ background knowledge on the topic, either through a brief lecture or by having students read the background information that accompanies each inquiry lesson.
- The teacher introduces students to the central question that guides their exploration of the evidence. They may need to repeat the question a few times so that students remember their purpose in analyzing the documents in the mini-archive.
- The teacher models a historical reading strategy that is important for students to use as they investigate the evidence. See a list of historical thinking and reading strategies here.
- Students work individually or in small groups with support from the teacher, gathering evidence from the documents in the mini-archives and developing a defensible answer to the central question.
- The class engages in a debriefing during which students share and critique the different interpretations that they reached.
- Because the resources include more documents than students can read in a single lesson and the resources are available online, students might be encouraged to continue their exploration at home or in an assignment outside of class.
Evaluating Students’ Interpretations
It is important that students be given enough intellectual space to come up with their own defensible interpretations. This freedom to explore is the main defining feature of inquiry. Most of the inquiries have been prepared with resources that might lead to different defensible conclusions. Such is the nature of history, as historians often disagree about causation, significance, and even basic facts. Although different interpretations are possible, it does not mean that any interpretation must be accepted as correct. When a student reaches an interpretation that is incorrect and is not defensible given the evidence in the mini-archives, teachers should steer them in the right direction or confront their mistakes directly. For this reason, it is important that teachers familiarize themselves with lesson materials before conducting the inquiries with students.
The following criteria can be used to evaluate a students’ interpretation:
- Were the strongest sources used to reach conclusions?
- Does the interpretation take into consideration the physical and social context of the time period?
- Has the researcher avoided jumping to a conclusion by carefully considering many different interpretations?
- Does the interpretation account for all of the evidence, including evidence that seems to go against the interpretation?
- Is the interpretation logical given the evidence?
- Is the interpretation the simplest explanation for the evidence?
During their work, students may be encouraged to ask these questions about their emerging interpretations. During a debriefing at the end of an inquiry lesson, students can ask these questions of their peers. Teachers can assess and grade students’ work based upon these criteria.