they learn a whole new way to talk
about and appreciate texts. They see the
value of lingering with a text, rereading
to appreciate its literary qualities.
Thinking like a writer also supports
the development of critical literacy.
Frequent discussions that speculate
about the author’s purpose and audience help students realize the intentionality behind the texts they read. For
example, a 6th grade class might read
and write feature articles. They might
discover that authors of these articles
frame their topics in persuasive ways.
They might also learn some techniques
of persuasion, such as the strategic use
of an emotionally appealing anecdote or
alarming statistics.
Young readers who are aware of such
strategies are better equipped to critique
the texts they encounter. As our
students move into adolescence and
adulthood, they are exposed to more
and more texts that aim to persuade
them to buy, vote, or think in a particular way. Thinking like a writer can help
students critically navigate these texts.
Thinking Like a Historian
We often associate history with memorizing important dates in singsong
rhymes, doing a project on a famous
American, or enacting a fun simulation
of Colonial days. But learning history
can also be an opportunity to practice
reading behaviors that can transfer into
real-world situations.
Stacie, a 7th grade language arts
teacher who teaches a class period of
history, is dismayed by the textbook’s
dry treatment of the U.S. Constitution.
She wants her students to appreciate the
importance and relevance of this document. So she finds stories of students
denied their First Amendment rights
and teaches a successful unit. Her
students are emotionally invested in the
tales of children who were affected
directly by the Constitution.
Stacie values her students’ personal
responses and helps them relate their
experiences to the texts, but she strug-
gles with connecting her strengths in
teaching reading to the discipline of
history. What is new for Stacie, and for
most of us who still think of history as
learning about what happened in the
past, is an understanding that the prac-
tice of history is a profoundly literate
activity that has an important place in
the school curriculum.
Thinking like
a writer supports
the development
of critical literacy.
History is distinctive among the disciplines in seeking out many sources of
information and wrestling with their
contradictions and problems to tell a
compelling narrative about a human
event. Historians are experts at synthesizing huge amounts of texts. But how
can the complex reading behaviors of a
professional historian help improve a
7th grader’s understanding of the world?
First, historians rarely learn from
textbooks. We must acknowledge the
limitations of the textbooks and non-
fiction trade books that are the bulk of
our school texts. The reality is that
teachers can no longer control the
amount or quality of information that
students encounter. As Wineburg and
Martin (2004) so vividly claim, “Ask any
middle schooler with a research project
how to spell the word library, and you’ll
get a six-letter response: G-O-O-G-L-E”
(p. 43). And herein lies the danger.
When a student searches for informa-
tion on how Barack Obama got elected,
for example, many of the Web sites
listed contain varying degrees of bias
and error. None of them even attempts
to answer the question of how such a
historic event happened. How can we
even begin to help students decipher
these results?
