Students Sourcing Skills - Annotated Bibliography

Joslyn Hunscher-Young
July 2016
Research Question:
What happens to ninth grade students historical thinking skill of sourcing as
demonstrated in their writing when the teacher models historical thinking and peer groups critically
respond to each other's ideas and writing while using mentor texts?
Annotated Bibliography:
This list is a start to what will end up being a longer list of relevant
resources for this teacher research project. Many of these sources have pointed me to other texts
and sites to examine for further guidance as I prepare for my research, and I am keeping a growing
list of these sources at the end of the annotated bibliography.
Brown, C.S. (1994).
Connecting with the past: History workshop in middle and high
schools.
Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
This book essentially provides a case study report on the implementation of a history workshop in
a secondary history classroom. In this design for a class, Brown emphasizes the importance of using
and assessing primary sources and providing History Talk Groups as a sort of peer response
group to help students think through the information and values present in sources. Although the
other aspects of the history workshop are intriguing and worth testing out to help engage and
motivate students in history, for this research purpose, the most useful information is about these
History Talk Groups.
Brown (1994) notes that these groups were likely the most challenging aspect of this project for her
and her co-teachers in the classroom due in large part to unclear expectations and a lack of time for
the groups to fully debrief. She hinted at student trust issues within groups, but also offered concrete
steps and reminders of how to structure these groups so could improve in the future. Specifically to
help with group trust, Brown (1994) suggests that students are allowed to pick a partner, and then
the pairs are matched up into groups of four for the discussions throughout the duration of the unit.
Furthermore, she says assigning specific roles to each student and finding ways to hold all students
accountable by having them present or submit work with everyones ideas represented in it can help
ensure that everyone contributes.
Dobbs, C.L., Ippolito, J. & Charner-Laird, M. (2016). Layering intermediate and disciplinary
literacy work: Lessons learned from a secondary social studies teacher team.
Journal
of Adolescent & Adult Literacy
, doi:
10.1002/jaal.547

This article summarizes the experiences and key findings of a team of six social studies teachers
(technically five teachers and one librarian who worked closely with them) who engaged in training
in teaching disciplinary literacies and inquiry cycles with each other over the course of two years.
Throughout that whole process the social studies [t]eam members learned that they must consider
disciplinary
and
intermediate skills, constantly revising instruction to ensure that all students are fully
accessing a given days material and building skills to more effectively access future material (Dobbs
et al., 2016, p. 6). Although the program of teachers professional learning and the overall goal of the
project and work by the teachers was to ultimately target and improve students disciplinary literacy

skills, the teachers found that students actually still needed help in their intermediate general literacy
skills. Then, in the course of adjusting their instruction to meet students needs, they used a
combination of teaching strategies that targeted both intermediate literacy skills, specifically like how
to identify the main idea of a text, as well as disciplinary literacy skills, like how to determine the
meaning of discipline-specific vocabulary words.
The findings indicate that teachers must adapt to meet students where they are rather than
immediately jumping into or solely targeting disciplinary literacy skills. Instead, it is best to engage in
professional learning communities and use inquiry cycles to identify where students are with their
literacy skills and then adapt and adjust curriculum and teaching strategies to meet those needs. By
targeting both the intermediate skills and the disciplinary skills, this study finds that students
eventually evidenced greater skill with both the intermediate and disciplinary literacy skills that were
taught (Dobbs et al., 2016, p. 6). Furthermore, the researchers indicate, Teachers with deep
understanding of their respective content areas must be partners in the creation of disciplinary
literacy instructional practices, and teachers must be flexible as they approach literacy in a way that
simultaneously builds students social studies skills (Dobbs et al., 2016, p. 7). This will all be
important for me to keep in mind: 1) that I must make sure to still teach other intermediate literacy
skills in combination with disciplinary literacy and historical thinking, and 2) that I should connect
with our Literature Department to identify ways to collaborate and connect and distinguish our
reading, writing, and thinking strategies for students.
Lattimer, H. (2014).
Real-world literacies: Disciplinary teaching in the high school
classroom.
Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
This book highlights a wide variety of examples of disciplinary literacy teaching and teaching
literacies in the disciplines. What this means is that it includes information about both how to read,
write, speak, and listen as experts in the discipline would (disciplinary literacy teaching) and how to
provide the more intermediate literacy skills some students may need to develop (teaching literacies
in the disciplines). Through specific examples of a variety of disciplines and classrooms, Lattimer
(2014) offers several clear take-aways about strong disciplinary literacy teaching: 1) it must be
authentic and true to the discipline, 2) it must engage students beyond the classroom, and 3) it
should apprentice students into these skills with lots of practice. This book is particularly useful for
its specific examples of how to target instruction in specific mini-lessons, which I hope to use as
guidance for writing my own lessons on source evaluations and historical thinking modeling.
Lent, R.C. (2016).
This is disciplinary literacy: Reading, writing, thinking, and doing Content
area by content area.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Literacy.
This is Disciplinary Literacy
is a practical guide for teachers of all disciplines to think through and
actually put into practice disciplinary literacy in their classes. After establishing some background and the
significance of disciplinary literacy and the role of the teacher, Lent (2016) sets out to provide teachers
with specific insight and tools for how to teach reading, writing, and inquiry within the disciplines. She
also goes on to highlight strategies for collaborative learning that can be used across all disciplines.
Interwoven into this book are concrete examples from classrooms in math, science, history, foreign
language, and literature courses as well as resources to go to for examples of mentor texts, narrative
writing, and more. I plan to use this book to help me find mentor texts, explain to my students what it
means to read, write, and inquire like a historian, and some techniques for modeling historical thinking

with reading aloud and annotation skills. Furthermore, because this text addresses so many disciplines, I
hope it can help me identify opportunities to build interdisciplinary units or connections with other
courses, and potentially be a useful resource for my colleagues who want to learn more about
disciplinary literacy in their own classes.
Monte-Sano, C., De La Paz, S., Felton, M. (2014).
Reading, thinking, and writing about history:
Teaching argument writing to diverse learners in the Common Core classroom, grades
6-12
. New York City, NY: Teachers College Press & Berkeley, CA: National Writing
Project.
An incredibly useful resource book for teachers of American history, this book offers a number of
specific lessons with handouts of readings and examples of students work that teachers could pull out
and use almost immediately in their classes. However, for my research purposes, the more interesting
and important ideas come out in the theories behind the lesson designs and the ways in which the
lessons go about targeting specific historical thinking skills. Specifically, the authors describe how to
implement a cognitive apprenticeship approach to teaching literacies in history. This process is broken
down into five stages:
1. Prepare students to learn
2. Model how to read and write like a historian
3. Support students practice
4. Provide additional, more challenging forms of practice
5. Promote independence (Monte-Sano et al., 2014, p. 18).
This theory and process helped me to establish my plan for using modeling and peer response groups to
teach sourcing, and the book offers several supports for guiding students through practice after teacher
modeling that I hope to use in my classes. This book may also help to provide some of the actual model
texts I will use when teaching and some of the sources that I will use in creating my student assessments
to conduct throughout the year, and it also provides clear and specific examples for how to model
historical thinking for students. However, my ninth grade classes focus on world history rather than
American history, so I may not be able to use many of the resources in the realities of my daily teaching
practice for this research project.

A Growing List of Other Sources to Examine

Burke, J. (2009).
Content area writing.
New York, NY: Scholastic.
Fang, Z. (2014). Preparing content area teachers for disciplinary literacy instruction: The role of literacy
teacher educators.
Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 57
(6), 444-448. doi:
10.1002/jaal.269
Gillis, V. (2014). Disciplinary literacy:
Adapt
not adopt.
Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 57
(8),
614-623. doi:
10.1002/jaal.301
Lattimer, H. (2010).
Reading for learning: Using discipline-based texts to build content knowledge.
Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Piercy, T. & Piercy, W. (2011).

Disciplinary literacy: Redefining deep understanding and leadership for
21st-century demands.
Englewood, CO: The Leadership and Learning Center.
Reisman, A. (2012). The document-based lesson: Bringing disciplinary inquiry into high school history
classrooms with adolescent struggling readers.
Journal of Curriculum Studies, 44
(2), 233-264.
doi:
10.1080/00220272.2011.591436
Shanahan, T. & Shanahan, C. (2008). Teaching disciplinary literacy to adolescents: Rethinking
content-area literacy.
Harvard Educational Review, 78
(1), 40-59.
doi:
10.17763/haer.78.1.v62444321p602101
Wineburg, S. (2001).
Historical thinking and other unnatural acts.
Philadelphia, PA: Temple University
Press.