Happy Teacher Appreciation Week!
I am constantly encouraged by the great work being done by teachers in our network. I get to hear stories of teachers empowering their students to think deeply about the world before them and the world around them in a way that both inspires and gives me hope. There is good work being done! For reference, take a look at our recent Partner Spotlights. The collaboration at Hamilton Heights Middle School in Arcadia, Indiana; the data-driven instruction at Birmingham Community Charter High School in Los Angeles; the promoting of deep thinking and writing at IDEA Tres Lagos in McAllen, TX. These teachers are doing the work our democracy needs!
Today, I want to highlight a project we have been working on to support all of you teachers who we APPRECIATE! As you’ll recall from a couple of months ago, we were recently awarded a Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources Grant. With this grant, we wanted to maximize the reach of our impact and have it not be confined to a particular gathering or professional development opportunity. We wanted to give every teacher access to the tools needed to shift the paradigm of social studies education.
With this in mind, our grant project, “Open Access Formative Assessments on Historical Thinking,” enables us to evaluate what we value in our classrooms: our students' ability to think historically. This project enables us to create 60 open access formative assessments across six different content areas, all aligned ot individual historical thinking skills. Using primary sources from the Library of Congress’s collections, you can assess your students’ understanding of causation, contextualization, evaluating perspective, evaluating evidence, and continuity and change over time.
The good news is that just about half of the formative assessments are already up on the dedicated web page! While most of these are in U.S. history, we will have thirty formative assessments dedicated to world history too! In fact, these are just days away from being added to the website.
Are you interested in using a letter from Hernán Cortés to assess your students' understanding of causation? We got you! Or perhaps you want students to practice evaluating perspective by reading James Lindsay Smith’s slave narrative? Give it a go! Maybe you want to prep students' ability to evaluate evidence right before state testing? You can do it by having them read Federalist no. 51, the Virginia Resolution, or Yick Wo v. Hopkins. No matter how you want to approach it, we hope these are valuable tools to use the sources of the past to assess the historical thinking in your students.
We have had so much fun mining the Library of Congress collections to find unique sources to assess empowering skills. One of my personal favorites (not yet on the website!) is using a 1669 printing of three different cosmological models to assess continuity and change over time in how Europeans understood the universe. Download the preview here before it goes live!
Is there a Library of Congress source that you’d love to see in one of these assessments? Let us know! We’d love to add it to the options on the web page.
Teachers, know that we appreciate you and love to support the amazing work you are doing for your students. You deserve the best! Thank you to the Library of Congress for enabling us to build these resources for your classrooms.