Social Studies Teaching Strategy Helps Children Learn
Read Like a Historian is an instructional strategy that emerged from Anderson High School’s implementation of the RAISE (Reading Apprenticeship) efforts to improve academic literacy in secondary content areas. Students are taught reading strategies specifically necessary to understanding primary documents and other forms of texts found in the Social Studies classroom. Teacher modeling is an essential component of the Read Like a Historian instructional strategy.
Issues this Best Practice Addresses:
An all too real challenge facing many high school teachers revolves around their students’ reading levels. Too many students are reading way below grade level by the time they enter our middle and high schools. Without fundamental reading skills, accessing and comprehending the various types of texts found in disciplines such as Social Studies becomes insurmountable for many of our students. The Reading Apprenticeship model provides a wide variety of strategies to help develop academic literacy in students. The Read Like a Historian initiative translates those generic strategies into the context of the types of texts students encounter in Social Studies classrooms.
Major Challenges to Implementation:
- Routinely making visible the ways in which the teacher accesses historical texts for students.
- Adjusting plans and instruction to enable the extra time modeling the reading strategies requires.
- Breaking through students’ “I can’t do this” response and getting them to think differently about reading in the Social Studies context.
Benefits Derived from Implementing this Best Practice:
Students are more engaged with the documents they encounter in the Social Studies classroom and comprehend more from historical texts resulting in an increase in academic achievement and in student confidence.
Evidence Illustrating Success:
- Increases in student grades
- Qualitative data harvested from student work
- We invited students to demonstrate the skills they’ve learned at the showcase (2014)
Submitted by: Ellen Pickett, Anderson High School