Chapter 14 page 311Problem 14.2. Evaluating Teaching. Teacher modeling
A high school history teacher wants to model for students the process of evaluating the credibility of
historical documents. The issue the students are considering is which side (American revolutionaries or
the British) fired the first shot at Lexington Green on April 19, 1775, in the first battle of the American
Revolution. Students read the following document, among several others (Wineburg, 1991):
19 th. At 2 o'clock we began our march by wading through a very long ford to our middles; ... about
five miles on this side of a town called Lexington, which lay in our road, we heard there were some
hundreds of people collected together intending to oppose us and stop our going on; at 5 o'clock
we arrived there, and saw a number people, I believe between 200 and 300, formed in a common in
the middle of the town; we still continued advancing, keeping prepared against an attack though
without intending to attack them; but on our coming near them they fired one or two shots, upon
which our men without any orders, rushed in upon them, fired and put them to flight; several of
them were killed, we could not tell how many, because they were got behind walls and into the
woods; we had a man of the 10th light Infantry wounded, nobody else hurt. We then formed on the
Common, but with some difficulty, the men were so wild they could hear no orders; we waited a
considerable time there and at length proceeded on our way to Concord. Entry for April 19, 1775,
from the diary of Lieutenant John Barker, an officer in the British army.
Here is the teacher’s model: “The first thing I do is check the source. It’s a diary written on the 19th of
April by a lieutenant in the British army. Is he an eyewitness? Yes. The next thing I will do is to ask if it
this account is plausible. And overall, I would say that it is pretty plausible. Now I’ll compare this
account to the other documents we’ve read so far. I’d say it’s pretty consistent with those documents.
So overall, I would judge that this is a fairly credible source.”
Response: This model describes very little of the teacher’s actual thought processes, which will make it
very difficult for students to understand how to use the strategy. The teacher does not explain why it’s
important that it’s a diary rather than an official report or why it’s important that he wrote it soon after
the event. She doesn’t explain why she thinks that this document is plausible or why it is consistent with
other documents. Without any explanations, students are unlikely to be able to see how to do evaluate
the credibility of sources on their own. In addition, the teacher does not model any process of
struggling to reach a judgment. In fact, it is not easy to evaluate the credibility of sources, but the
teacher makes it seem as if it is a trivially easy process.Extensive, Varied Practice
In Chapter 13, we learned that one feature of learning environments that promote transfer is
extensive, varied opportunities for practice. It takes a great deal of practice to learn challenging strategies,
so students will need many opportunities for practice and feedback. Moreover, as we also learning in
Chapter 13, transfer is most likely when practice settings are similar to settings to which transfer should
occur. Thus, if we want students to transfer strategies, we should give them many varied opportunities to
practice the strategies in situations like the situations in which we want them to use these strategies in the
future (Chinn, Duschl, Duncan, Pluta, & Buckland, 2008a; Chinn & Malhotra, 2002b; Graham et al.,
2005; McNeill & Krajcik, 2007; Pressley & Harris, 2006). If a high-school English teacher wants her
students to use the strategy of summarizing outside of English class, she could work with her students’
other teachers so that teachers are having the students summarize in all of their classes. The teachers could
have students summarize newspaper and magazine articles out of class. They could have students practice
summarizing movie and TV plots and TV news. By practicing summarizing in many contexts outside of
English class, students become more likely to use strategies outside of their English classroom.