Source Analysis: The Atlantic Slave Trade

One can't roll their sleeves up to work as a History teacher without feeling comfortable with source analysis. Over my years as a teacher I've come across many scaffolds and acronyms designed to help students with this historical skill, and I think it's fair to say there's no hard and fast hierarchy to which one works the best. Whether it's AMOUR, COMBAT, TOMACPRU, OPVL, IOP CAM, TADPOLE or something else, it doesn't really matter which one is used so long as the student understands why it's used and can remember what each letter stands for. 

It's also important for the teacher to feel confident about which one they teach and that they're consistent so students don't get overwhelmed with multiple acronyms. Also, even if they're taught just one acronym, it's important for students to understand that there are other alternatives out there in the pedagogical world. If this isn't mentioned then some students may believe that the one they've been taught must be the best one (or, worse, the only one) and this can cause issues if they later find themselves in front of another teacher or in another school where a different approach is taught. 

Me, personally? I can never remember acronyms and I find them restrictive. I always prefer to try and think about sources in the way that a historian does, which means that not every source offers the same types of information. Acronyms seem a little limited in this sense. 

There's also a question of depth when looking at sources and the need to differentiate for students who may not be able to initially engage with sources at higher levels. What I want is to see students working from identifying basic information up to being able to use a source as evidence in response to a question. So this involves a levelled scaffold. I don't make any claim to inventing this - it's a synthesis of all those who come before me and is essentially just my attempt to reorganise various methods into a common approach that works for me. Anyway, here it is:

• Level 1: Basics - who wrote the source, what's it about, when was it written, where was the source found, how was the source delivered at the time of publication, and why was it written? 

This is about looking at the source in it's simplest terms and comprehending it. The student needs to locate answers to the who, what, when, where, how, and why of the source, however, it should be made clear to them that not all of the questions are applicable all of the time. These questions (like every other part of this scaffold) are simply a range of prompts to promote engagement.

• Level 2: Questioning - what's the point of this source? What makes it significant in terms of how we understand the past? That is to say, why might this be an important source for modern people to see?

This part is about 'zooming out' and looking at the source holistically to determine a central thesis or purpose behind it. It also essentially encourages students to think about the historical concept of significance. Again, just responding to one of the prompts above would be enough.

• Level 3: Closer Analysis - who was the intended audience for this source at the time of writing? Who is the audience for the source now? Do we think this source conveys information about the time authentically and, depending on the answer, why or why not? What sort of biases can be recognised? 

This is where we start looking at the reliability of the source and gauging the level of bias. I think it's important to teach students that all sources are biased in some way or another, it's just a matter of determining what that bias is or why some information has been left out. Politics and postmodernism aside, the practical problem with considering some sources as objective is that it leads to some students simply saying that a source is "biased" or "not biased" and leaving it at that. If we want students to provide detailed analysis about the nature of a source's bias then we may need to take away the option of considering sources from a binary biased/unbiased point of view. 

• Level 4: Evaluation - how useful is the source in answering a key question? How can it be used to answer a question? How would a historian use this source in the course of their own research?

This final stage is often the hardest for some students to grapple with as it involves historical thinking and some degree of higher order thinking. Students need to consider the usefulness of a source but, if they don't have a historian's purpose established, this can be really difficult. Students therefore need to have a question in mind when they answer this part of the scaffold. In the absence of a teacher-supplied question, more advanced students can be asked to consider how this source is useful in conveying a syllabus dot point, or how a historian might use it in the pursuit of a particular agenda.

Lesson Idea: The Atlantic Slave Trade

I would preface the use of this source by telegraphing the use of racist language reflective of historical context. This helps students maintain historical distance from potentially distressing content and sets the tone for how we look at this sort of language in the classroom.

The previous described scaffold has worked well for me with all stages of high school history - it's just a matter of adjusting how students engage with each level of the scaffold and pitching the language at their age group. The scaffold can be modified to connect to a specific source and students can then work their way through it by examining the source four times, moving up a level each time. 

Here is an example that would work well with examining the Atlantic Slave Trade with a Year 9 or Year 10 class. 

1. Start by giving students a question. Here's the example:

Imagine you are a historian studying the question, "What was life like for slaves in America in the 19th century?"

2. This comes with a scaffold - Source Analysis Activity.

3. Work with students through a PowerPoint that guides their response to the Slave Trade source using the four different levels of questions. This can be found here - Source Analysis PowerPoint.

The source included is a primary source related to the sale of slaves. As teacher, you might want to work through responding to the source first so that you have a good idea of the range of answers that might be possible. Students are to complete their scaffold level by level while you work through the PowerPoint as a class.

As mentioned there are more than a handful of different approaches to source analysis. This is just one that works for me and you're welcome to try it too! 

Disclaimer: The above activity was compiled specifically for this blog. 

Change in the Modern World: China

Option B of the Change in the Modern World module for HSC Modern History offers teachers and students a chance to engage with the volatile and intense recent history of China's Cultural Revolution, as well as the Tiananmen Square incident that threatened to change the lives of more than a billion people.

In the materials below, teachers are shown an overview of how this module can be taught. Each of the resources and ideas will help our Year 12 students to engage with Red China at its height. This new module and option gives us the chance to wrestle with an exciting period of modern history where huge ideas had a very real impact on the lives of both those at the top and the everyday people influenced by them.

Change in the Modern World: Option B overview - PowerPoint Presentation from the HTA NSW Conference 2017

Resources

Political and Social Conditions in China - cause and effect, background dot points.
Building the Field: China 1966-1969 - useful subject-specific vocabulary and historical terminology.
Sino-Soviet Split and Anti-Revisionism in the 1950s and 1960s - cause and effect, ideology, background dot points.
Significant Figures: China 1966-1989 - historical significance, overview of historical figures.
Deng and Mao: Changing Political Standing - significance and timelines in relation to dot points.
Getting to Grips with the Cultural Revolution - cause and effect, research scaffold.
Evaluating the Cultural Revolution - source analysis, historiography, perspectives.
Tiananmen Square: Ideology and Evaluation - source analysis, historiography, perspectives.
Impact of the Tiananmen Square Incident - guided comprehension of historical reading


Additional material can also be found in HTA's Teaching History journal, 2017.

Evaluating the Cultural Revolution

After students engage with some of the terrifying history of this period it will be necessary to guide them towards offering their own evaluation of events. This can be modelled through source analysis of what historians say about the Cultural Revolution. Students should read over the following opinions; assess them for their content, and usefulness and reliability, and then arrange them into an order of personal agreement.

Craig Dietrich, author of People's China, 1986

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution took the whole world by surprise. Suddenly, China was at war with itself... Nobody could quite understand what was going on or why, partly because systematic reporting was impossible. Millions of students were on the march; entire cities were festooned with wall posters; mighty leaders were wearing dunce caps; thousands of victims were dying in pitched battles; foreign embassies were being mobbed, even burned to the ground. And always words, a Niagara of rhetoric, slogans, accusations, denials, directives, and, above all, Mao Zedong Thought. Clearly, it was a power struggle... Mao Zedong occupied the centre of this maelstrom. It was declared to be his personal revolution. Only gradually did it become clear that he had a rational purpose, albeit an audacious one.

 Richard M. Pfeffer, author of China in Ferment, 1971

The Cultural Revolution was really three things in one: an enigmatic multiple power struggle, wrapped in a crusade, and superimposed on a scattering of more or less spontaneous, more or less politicised student riots, strikes, peasant uprisings, mutinies, and palace coups.

Anne Thurston, author of Enemies of the People, 1987

The Cultural Revolution was an extreme situation characterised by loss - loss of culture, loss of spiritual values and religion, loss of status and honour, loss of career, loss of dignity, and loss of trust.

Maurice Meisner, author of Mao's China and After, 1999

Unity was to prove an elusive goal, and the nature of the victory was hard to define. The Cultural Revolution had begun with a wholesale attack on the Communist Party; it had ended with the resurrection of the Party in its orthodox Leninist form, albeit shorn of Mao's more prominent opponents. In 1966-67 a massive popular movement had flourished on the basis of the principle that 'the masses must liberate themselves'; by 1969 the mass movement had disintegrated, and selected remnants of it had been absorbed by old bureaucratic apparatuses. Much blood had been shed, but what had changed? The Cultural Revolution not only failed to produce permanent institutions of popular self-government but also failed to resolve the more immediate problems of political succession. One of the original aims of the Cultural Revolution was to 'train revolutionary successors'.

Alexander V. Pantsov, author of Deng Xiaoping, 2015

Strange to say, the nightmare that was the Cultural Revolution at least had the positive effect of restraining the potential for self-indulgence of the Chinese ruling elite.

Immanuel C. Y. Hsu, author of China Without Mao, 1990

Mao sought ideological purity through intensified class struggle and the purge of high party and government leaders and intellectuals.

Frank Dikotter, authorof The Cultural Revolution, 2016

The Cultural Revolution was about an old man settling persona scores at the end of his life. Mao had a great capacity for malice and revenge, and had little regard for loss of human life. Mao's ego meant that he saw little distinction between himself and the revolution - he was the revolution. If someone wronged him, they wronged China. Any dissatisfaction with his authority was a direct threat to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Most of the above information can be found on the downloadable sheet below. As mentioned earlier, students should analyse and engage with the opinions by comparing and contrasting their differences and similarities, and acknowledging possible reasons for bias. It would also be useful to link the content of the sources with the identified causes for the Cultural Revolution. For example, Dikotter's opinion just above links quite neatly with the idea that Mao's personality was a primary factor behind the Cultural Revolution.

Resource: Evaluations of the Cultural Revolution

I would recommend all of the above texts are great teacher resources for anyone looking to read up on the Cultural Revolution in support of the new Modern History Stage 6 syllabus.

The USSR: Collectivisation Source Analysis

Propaganda poster showing the fist of Soviet Russia smiting the greedy Kulak (rich peasant). Kulaks were the enemy of collectivisation, and a ready scapegoat on which Stalin could blame the peasantry's many woes.

I'm right in the midst of teaching the Modern History National Study, Option G: Russia and the Soviet Union (damn, that name is so catchy) and have been chatting to my students about Stalin's Five Year Plans and the process of collectivisation. 

I've come to realise that it's worth spending at least a few lessons approaching collectivisation from a few different angles. In one lesson we did a role-play activity in which students moved through the stages of Marxist society - from feudalism/capitalism to socialism, and from socialism to collectivisation (adapted from a great activity by one of my colleagues, Ashlee Horton). 

In a more recent lesson, I gave the class some sources about collectivisation so they could practice their source analysis. In previous posts I talked about taking a more grammar-based approach to source analysis - here and here - and described the way text chain identification can assist students in building their ability to decode unfamiliar words in order to increase their content-specific vocabulary. 

Let's not beat around the bush, HSC Modern History is a difficult subject. And whilst Modern History is the sort of course that rewards students who work hard, read regularly, and have no major issues writing essays, it's also a course that attracts a diverse array of students with a variety of learning styles that don't necessarily encompass those skills. For some of these students, who may also be undertaking the non-ATAR English Studies course, extra support is needed to scaffold the skills section of Modern History. Conceptual approaches like OCMAP or COMBAT can elicit some great analysis from many students, but taking a grammar-based approach can help open the process up to students who need something else. 

The first source in the sheet below is a speech from Joseph Stalin about his motivations behind thrusting the Soviet Union into a brave new world of super-farms. Students start out by identifying some text chains in the source. A text chain is a string of connected words in a text that mean the same thing. Finding and linking these synonyms allows students to build their vocabulary in relation to the content, scaffolding the reading process in order to dissuade them from disengagement before they attempt whole-text analysis.

You can start this out by modelling one or two text chains on the board. Pick a word out, such as "slow down", and join it to "put a check on" and then "reduced". Students can then do this with any number of words in the text, building up their understanding of the whole source by creating meaning within and across sentences.

The next couple of questions then follow on from this understanding to get the students engaging with the content and the reasons for Stalin's choice of language. For teachers looking (or needing) to differentiate their work more substantially due to the presence of students with a wide range of learning abilities, this grammatical approach provides an alternative way-in for any kids struggling to get to grips with the usual methods for analysing historical sources.

After the Stalin speech there are some tables about production and collectivisation in 1930s USSR, and an activity where this information needs to be converted into a graph. I like this sort of stuff because it's a legitimately useful way to use numeracy skills in Modern History, and it can make the learning more concrete for those students who are more mathematically-minded. 

Anyway, the activities are all below on the sheet.

Resource:


A Source on Collectivisation

Source Analysis: The Grammatical Approach

Art by the blogger, modeled on a photo of soldiers in the trenches.

At the time of writing (though this may change with some of the proposed changes to the incoming new syllabus), Modern History's HSC Core Study is WWI, with a focus on source analysis. 

Studying the 'Great War' is a gift of sorts as it's such an intensely source-rich area of history due to continuing interest from the public. It is, however, a rather large and unwieldy beast that can threaten to swallow historians whole. Thankfully, the current syllabus is focused enough to reign things in, and the decision to make this topic a source analysis one seems almost a relief to the teacher.

That is, until you take the sources into a mixed ability classroom. 

Over the years I have found the concept of teaching source analysis to History students a bit of a double-edged sword. Whilst it can be incredibly useful to students who have the requisite ability to skim, scan, deconstruct and evaluate texts, it can also be a very daunting task for students with lower literacy. Acronym approaches such as OCMAP (Origin Context Motivation Audience Perspective) and COMBAT (Content Origin Motivation Bias Audience Tone) can be overwhelming for these students, and only serve to push them further into disengagement.

I have found instead that taking a grammar-styled approach can be a more useful way in for these students. By attacking the paragraph at word- or sentence-level, students can build up a whole-text understanding of the source piece by piece, and then evaluate it afterwards. 

Step 1

Give the students the Resource below; an English translation of a German soldier's letter about the trenches. The source is relatively short but has been spaced out so that students can annotate the sheet. Read through the text as a class first, explaining any tricky words the students may be stuck on.

Step 2

The first question on the sheet asks the students to create some text chains. This means that they need to find and underline a word and then join it with an arrow to a later word that refers to the same thing. Some examples from the source:

• Somme > here > front line.
• One shell crater > next > one continuous trench.
• Terrible > dreadful > chilled through, dead tired and mentally crushed
• We > company of people

Step 3

With a highlighter, students identify any adjectives that describe verbs or nouns. The three main examples are "dead", "mentally", and "continuous".

Step 4

Students then look at three adjectives (most likely the ones above) and describe what they mean.

Step 5

The last three questions are more traditional content-related questions. These questions should, however, hopefully be a bit easier for the students to engage with now that they've unpacked the source. 

This approach can be replicated for any written source, and can be extended in other ways - noun identification, verb identification, how many simple or complex sentences have been used and why, etc. Once a student grapples with these 'mechanics' of the language they will then feel like they have a more in-depth understanding of the text and can begin to look at the wider meanings behind the combinations of words. 

I've found it to be a really empowering way of making history accessible to students of all abilities.

Resource: Trench Source Analysis

The Rise of China: Lesson 7

Well, here we are, at the end of a metaphorical silk road with the final lesson in my unit on 20th century China. At the beginning of the unit we looked at China circa 1900 in order to get a baseline before looking at how Mao impacted on the country between the 1950s and 1976. Over the last few lessons the students had a selected tour of the Cultural Revolution to get an idea of how Chinese society changed under the Chairman's influence, so now it makes sense to look at what came afterwards and how China reacted to Mao's passing. This final lesson looks at his successor, Deng Xiaoping, and how he assessed Mao's time and instigated various reforms.

The focus question here is Who is Deng Xiaoping and What Did He Do for China?

Step 1

Students are given a prediction activity on a slip of paper (Resource 7-1) that features a list of modal statements suggesting possible evaluations of China. On this paper they are asked to tick the things that they agree with. It should help them focus on the lesson at hand; they're required to think about what they're going to read and what they've already read. And once the students have read the text (featured in the next step) they then go back and tick which of the statements the author of the text agreed with.

Step 2

Students read Resource 7-2, an information sheet about Deng Xiaoping, which asks them to unpack (or decode) some of the trickier noun groups. It's another kind of vocabulary / comprehension activity that will help students achieve confidence when reading. It also gets them to think about what they're reading a little more - building up their concept of connotation and how noun groups can construct specific meanings that supersede the meanings of the individual words. 

Afterwards, there's some more traditional questions about source reliability that should hopefully be a bit easier for the students now that they've worked through the grammar of the text in a bit of detail. 

Step 3

If there's time left over at the end, ask the students to identify text chains in the text. They should already be able to do this from the earlier lesson on text chains, but it could also be done as a whole class activity with teacher modelling of examples on the board. This is always a useful activity because it explicitly shows students how to create a 'whole text' level of meaning rather than just word or sentence-level meaning.

Links to resources:
Resource 7-1: Prediction
Resource 7-2: Deng Xiaoping

And that brings us to the end of the unit. 

You'll note the absence of an assessment task from this program. I have one, it's a source analysis examination with an extended question on Mao's impact, but I'm not going to put it up on the blog because... well, that's probably just asking for trouble. Imagine if students found this blog and downloaded the assessment task before they had to sit it? I mean, it would show initiative and great organisational skills, but those aren't the things I want to assess.

The Rise of China: Lesson 6

This is the second last lesson in The Rise of China sequence and, as such, it starts off with an overview of some key points that can assist students for the upcoming assessment task. The rest of the lesson focuses A) Deepening student knowledge of the points covered in the overview, and B) Building up monitoring and decoding skills for use in source analysis. 

Anyway, here's the lesson itself...

Step 1

Project Resource 6-1 onto the white board and have students copy the mind map into their books so that they have some background knowledge on Chinese society (1958-1976) that they can use as study notes. 

Step 2

Following on from Step 1, students are to work on deepening their knowledge of Chinese society further by selecting a text from a wide reading set (Resources 6-3 and 6-4). I know two texts isn't really that 'wide', but in the class room I also include two other extracts gleamed from the excellent comic Little White Duck. I don't want to flagrantly break copyright law by scanning it and putting it up for download so I'll instead recommend that you purchase this comic for yourself as a class set.

Step 3

Students use Resource 6-2, a schema sheet that scaffolds deconstruction of sources, to analyse their selected text. This sheet asks a series of questions that assist the student in identifying tricky vocabulary and making sense of it, and then directs the student to drill down into the content of the source by categorising the words and evaluating their usage. 

This activity pulls in various elements from throughout the unit in order to combine the array of previously-taught skills into a literacy-based approach to source analysis. The hope would be that (as this is the penultimate lesson) students would complete this unit with a new understanding of how to decode sources and comprehend increasingly difficult text.

Links to resources
Resource 6-1: Chinese Society
Resource 6-2: Using Sources
Resource 6-3: Text #1 'Mao the Unknown Story'
Resource 6-4: Text #2 'Prisoner of Mao'

The Rise of China: Lesson 4

By this point in the sequence the students should (hopefully!) have some background knowledge about 20th century China and Chairman Mao, so it's time to drill down into one of the big grey areas of history - the Cultural Revolution.

Euphemistically-named, the Cultural Revolution is one of the great largely-unacknowledged tragedies of the 20th century. Many historians have plainly said that they still don't fully understand what happened during this time; that the motivation for an entire society to systematically and brutally destroy its own culture is beyond understanding. With that in mind, how should we approach teaching it to 15 year olds?

In short; we avoid taking a comprehensive approach.

When given such a limited amount of time (my school's Year 10 History classes are spread out as 4 lessons a fortnight) it's nigh impossible to examine this event in enough detail. This is doubly relevant when we consider that most historians find it impossible to do it across an entire career, so it would have been foolish for me to even try (not that I'm always above such folly!)

Therefore, the main purpose of this lesson is to examine Mao's role in the Cultural Revolution, which should focus our attention somewhat.

Step 1

Teacher hands out sheet (Resource 4-1), which contains a five paragraph summary of the Cultural Revolution. Read through as a class (teacher either reads while class reads along, or you can have students take turns reading aloud). Students then have a go at answering the question at the end of the sheet, which asks them to begin making judgments about Mao's role in the way China's society changed in the 20th century. It also implicitly introduces the idea of a 'Cult of Personality' - something which will become more relevant and significant should students choose to do Modern History (especially if they study Russia and Stalin).

Step 2

Here's the grammar bit. Project Resource 4-2 onto your board and ask your students to examine the word bank to the side. Note the use of the phrase "some of these words". Tell the students that this is a hidden text and that they have to guess which words from the word bank would fit in a description of the Cultural Revolution. They should be able to do since they've just come hot off of Resource 4-1. As they tell you words, pick a few random but workable spots for these to go. The trick is that there is no actual hidden text, you are actually getting your students to engage in a joint text construction exercise. Once you have a few big content words up on the board tell the students to fill in the rest of the blanks to turn it into a paragraph. 

This open-ended variation on the tried-and-true cloze passage activity is a good way to build student confidence in composing paragraphs. By telling them that it is a 'hidden' text, and by doing it as a class activity, you take the risk factor out of the equation for the students. They don't have to risk looking like they don't know how to write a paragraph as this exercise scaffolds them in both a practical and a psychological way. 

Afterwards, if the majority do it successfully, you're welcome to tell them that there was no original text and that they all just wrote their own paragraph about the Cultural Revolution.

Step 3

No study of 1960s/70s China would be complete without a look at Chairman Mao's infamous book of quotations, the Little Red Book. Students should be familiar with this text from Step 1 of this lesson (it's mentioned in Resource 4-1) . Get students to work in groups examining the text, I've abbreviated it somewhat as Resource 4-3. 

Students are to choose 3-5 quotes from the Little Red Book and explain their meaning in their books. The teacher should pick a quote first and put it up on the board, demonstrating some methods to decode the meaning. This may include using text chains (which students should remember from Lesson 1), or the teacher modelling other techniques for inferring the meaning of previously unknown words (EG. Getting the gist by looking at the sentence around the word, swapping the word for other words that might fit, looking up the definition, etc). 

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Students aren't expected to read the whole text but it's important that they're given the booklet to look at rather than just one page-long extract as this places a larger degree of choice into their hands. This harks back to the Focus on Reading stuff I mentioned in the Lesson 3 breakdown - students are more likely to engage with reading if they are given some choice in the matter. With that in mind, several sections of the Little Red Book have been presented so students can pick an area that may be of more interest to them than others.

Step 4

If you have time, or have students that you want to extend, pose the discussion question, "Is The Little Red Book good or bad?" This would work well as a class evaluation and can be done on the board as a table if you have enough opinionated students. Critical engagement with historical sources like this can lead to some interesting debates within the class room.

Links to resources:
Resource 4-1: Recap of the Cultural Revolution
Resource 4-2: Cultural Revolution 
Resource 4-3: Little Red Book

The Rise of China: Lesson 3

Hello there! Now that the students have been introduced to a few historical terms and gathered some background information about 20th century China it's time for them to start learning about the colossal keystone of modern Chinese history: Mao Tse-Tung. Lesson 3 of this Rise of China unit asks the question 'Who is Chairman Mao?'

I think, predominantly, it's helpful to remember that today's student knows little to nothing about Chairman Mao. You might think that this should go without saying but, heck, I said it because when I was a student (in the 1990s) the spectre of Chairman Mao still hung over pop culture in a big way. I remember the Tiananmen Square Massacre being all over the TV, and I grew up knowing that Mao was one of the 'big guys' in terms of recent history and current world events.

One of the biggest challenges for teachers today is increasing the contextual knowledge held by students. With so many cat videos and songified news stories demanding our attention on Youtube, today's kid isn't as au fait with the 'canon' of world events that were common knowledge to previous Australian generations. Newspapers aren't a thing anymore, and the aspects of history that once permeated our curriculum have become decentered due to the continuing influence of postmodernism. This isn't necessarily a bad thing.

So - whereas we once considered certain Western historical narratives (EG. Britain's colonisation of Australia, the sinking of the Titanic, the assassination of JFK) to be of the highest significance (the aforementioned 'canon' of world events) - our view of history is now a lot more cosmopolitan and egalitarian. This is great in terms of addressing Anglo-Saxon bias, but it's also a challenge because the sheer dearth of information makes it next to impossible for today's generation to know which historical facts are worth remembering.

This means that it's necessary to get the context stuff in before we expect students to start analysing sources and perspectives.

The purpose of this lesson is for students to gather some biographical information on Chairman Mao before reading an appropriate source and unpacking information from it in order to further build their contextual knowledge. It might take two lessons rather than one.

Step 1

Teacher shows students PowerPoint presentation (Resource 3-1) about Chairman Mao while students collect information onto sheets (Resources 3-2, 3-2A, 3-2E). 

These sheets have been differentiated to cater for varied levels of student ability within the classroom. The core/standard group (the majority of the class) are given a range of comprehension questions to read through (3-2) that will facilitate engagement with the text in the PPT. For the lower ability students, a separate version of the sheet (3-2A) has been adjusted to allow for more direct gathering of information - students fill in cloze passage answers and are not required to decode questions before transferring information from the PPT onto the sheet. Meanwhile, higher ability students are given a sheet (3-2E) that asks more open-ended questions that require students to formulate their own opinions - incorporating higher order skills such as assessing the impact of Mao's leadership and independent summarising of information.

Step 2

The second part of the lesson involves students engaging with a wide reading text set (this idea is lifted from the research contained in the Focus on Reading 2 modules). 

The purpose of a wide reading set is to allow students to pick a text to read. Putting the choice of text into the hands of students encourages independent thought and a higher level of engagement, and the range of texts provided here (3-3, 3-4, 3-5) also works as a form of differentiation. Each text is an extract of a larger text about Chairman Mao, and they range in terms of reading difficulty. 

The Focus on Reading 2 modules support the theory that students should be engaging with texts that are 'just right', these being historical sources that are easy enough for the students to read without stopping too frequently (and hence allowing a suitable level of fluency), but also difficult enough to challenge them occasionally in regards to learning new vocabulary.

Step 3

After the students pick and read one of the texts from the wide reading set (the origins of which are cited within the resources), they then use a table (3-7) to sort words into three categories.

These categories are: words that students can understand and use, words that students are familiar with but are not sure they can use, and words that are unfamiliar. This taxonomising of terms is an important part of increasing vocabulary and understanding of context, and through the use of the table students are scaffolded into using this skill on their own. It's never too late for students to learn this!

Take note, if students have not collected enough unfamiliar words from their text then they have chosen a text that is too easy and they should therefore be pushed towards a more difficult text next time.

Step 4

Teacher collects some of the unfamiliar terms that students have identified and puts them up on the board as a glossary. The teacher can then use the teacher notes (Resource 3-8) to define some of these words.

As probably mentioned previously on this blog, students should not copy new word definitions into their books. Whilst it's important for students to be able to work from or learn a glossary,  this kind of old-school 'rote' learning has been proven by research (Focus on Reading 2) to be relatively ineffective for the majority of learners. What is more effective is for students to observe these new words and their definitions on the board (or, preferably, discuss them as a class) and then place the new terms into sentences. In this case, ask the students to pick 5-10 new terms and use them in sentences about Chairman Mao and/or China. By using the terms in a proper context, students are far more likely to learn their purpose and remember them in the future. The key is taking new words and using them appropriately - a student can copy a new word down but they also need to be able to use it. That's the real bit.

Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that I haven't included Resource 3-6. This was an extra text for use in the wide reading set, an extract from the excellent graphic novel Little White Duck. I haven't included it here for two reasons - the first is that I haven't got an electronic version of it, and the second is that I don't want to infringe on copyright too overtly. The other texts I've included are extracts that are out of print and small enough, or sourced from elsewhere on the internet.

Links to resources:
Resource 3-1: Who is Chairman Mao PPT
Resource 3-2: Who is Chairman Mao sheet
Resource 3-2A: Who is Chairman Mao adjusted sheet
Resource 3-2E: Who is Chairman Mao extension sheet
Resource 3-3: Mao Tse-Tung and I Were Beggars text
Resource 3-4: Mao and the Chinese Revolution text
Resource 3-5: Chairman Mao the Deadly Dictator text
Resource 3-7: Mao Texts Vocabulary
Resource 3-8: Vocabulary Teacher Notes 

The Rise of China: Lesson 2

Lesson 2 of this Rise of China unit is designed to get students to start engaging with source work within the context of the historical period. As with the previous lesson there is still an emphasis on literacy and vocabulary usage, and this therefore means that I've taken a 'bottom-up' approach to teaching the requisite Stage 5 source skills - the idea being that students learn to look at sources from a literacy-based standpoint before we even start thinking about higher order History skills like reliability and usefulness.

Step 1

Project Resource 2-1 onto the board. This document contains three photographs of Shanghai - from 1900, 1950, and 2014. The majority of students in the class (your core or standard group in terms of ability) are to approach these images by writing a paragraph that describes the differences between the three time periods.

Meanwhile, lower ability students (the adjusted group) are given Resource 2-1A, a scaffold that helps them differentiate and table-ise their thoughts before assembling a few sentences in a more formal paragraph. Higher ability students (the extension group) can be given Resource 2-1E, a slip of paper with a higher order question that prompts them to argue from a firm and explicit position.

Step 2

Following on from the previous lesson (especially if they didn't get up to the last step of said lesson), the students are to conduct their own lexical density test on the paragraph that they've just written. The teacher should collect student lexical density percentages as a diagnostic score to assist with further identifying (or confirming) streams of ability within the class, and also as a tool for measuring writing ability for purposes of later comparison. 

If you feel, however, like your students are not conducive to the lexical density testing (or you've already had the chance to collect this information) then you can just skip forward to Step 3. It won't be a big deal.

Step 3

Building a bit further on the idea of analysing visual sources, the students are now given Resource 2-2, a written text about early 20th century cultural relations between China and the West that has two accompanying cartoons (one from a Chinese perspective and one from a Western perspective). Students are to read this text whilst collecting information in a 'Making Sense of Visual Representations' table (Resource 2-3, adapted from the Focus on Reading 2 modules).

Students can either pick one cartoon to examine or do a separate sheet for each one. The main goal here is to build an understanding of the relationship between text and image, specifically the way in which both work together to enhance meaning. This is typically a literacy/English-based skill but in History it becomes really useful because it helps to build context - allowing students to decode unfamiliar visual texts and start accessing meaning in a more fluent way that will allow for higher order analysis. 

As much as students find historical cartoons and propaganda quite visually striking, I've found that they still often lack the context to really appreciate what's being said. A lot of Year 11 Modern History students are quite unwilling to draw connections between their own experiences and the commentary contained in early 20th century satirical cartoons, so I think it's important that they learn at this Year 10 level to independently create contextual knowledge in the way demonstrated by Resource 2-3. It'll build confidence and make these sorts of texts a bit less intimidating for them.

Some teacher notes on Step 3 are also included in Resource 2-4.

Links to each of the resources can be found here: 
Resource 2-1: Comparison of Time Periods
Resource 2-1A: Comparison of Time Periods
Resource 2-1E: Comparison of Time Periods
Resource 2-2: Comparing Perspectives
Resource 2-3: Making Sense of Visual Representations
Resource 2-4: Teacher Notes for Visual Representations

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