Democratizing the DBQ
A System-wide Approach to Historical Thinking
Core Beliefs
- All students need to learn how to think.
- Learning to think requires practice.
- Clear thinking is hard work.
- Thinking is clarified by writing.
- Thinking is for everyone.
Why Do a Document-Based Question?
1.Content- Dig Deep into content
2.Improve Literacy (Reading and Writing - that is what historians do)
3.Inquiry Skills (Critical Thinking, Reading, Writing, Analysis, Debate, map, chart, visual observations, graphs)
4.Evaluation (best practice)-Evidence- Student writing
Why Democratize the DBQ?
•If every student writes four essays a year from 6-11th grade- by the time of senior year, that equals 24 expository essays.
•Next year all Government classes will write 2 essays- brings essay total to 26.
•By the time of 10th grade AP World History – every student has written 16 essays.
Step 1- The Hook: Engage Your Students
Step 2- The Background Essay: Focus on Literary Strategies
Step 3- Clarifying the Question: Defining Key Terms and Indentifying the Task
Step 4- Close Analysis: Predicting and Understanding the DBQ
Thinglink.com
Step 5- Bucketing: Grouping the Documents
Step 6- Writing: From thrash out- oral debate to essay, from Thesis to Final Draft
Rubics
Create rubric the students can understand
Student friendly words-
Let students have input to develop the rubric for writing an essay.
A great source is Rubistar.com to create a rubric.
Student Writing Conferences
What do Students think? Where do they see themselves?
Have students RAINBOW EDIT their own papers
Thesis/Topic Sentence in BLUE
Evidence in GREEN
Argument in ORANGE
What Next?
Question to Think About:
Strategies To Try
Pre-Write, Free-Write, Quick-Write
Big Picture Question
Agree-Disagree
You Be the Judge!
OPTIC
Backwards Reading