Each year my colleagues and I embark upon an historical research journey with our students that we inevitably tweak for the following class. Students are asked to write a 5-page research paper about a topic from the North American continent between the years of 1600 and 1776. Easy, right?
This year, the focus of our tweaking is analysis.
A research paper is NOT a report. Just like the idea of our history class is not to bore kids to death with memorization but is to give them a chance to think critically and problem solve, so, too is the research paper. In his book Why Won’t You Just Tell Us the Answer, Bruce A. Lesh perfectly describes what history and historical research are all about: questions.
“History is posing questions that drive the study of the past and then using information to answer those questions.”- Bruce Lesh, from Why Won’t You Just Tell Us the Answer
My colleagues and I knew this long before Mr. Lesh put it into such perfect words; however, we were always at a loss to help our students understand what their task was in their research papers. We expect them to develop a question and answer it using the information they find, similar to the way a scientist develops a hypothesis and performs an experiment. But getting to develop those overarching research questions was hard because we hadn’t thought of a way to have them work with analyzing historical facts from day one. Que in LENS QUESTIONS.
- What lenses will you use to view history?
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
A lens question is a very broad question that a student can use to navigate and narrow down their research. Let’s face it, telling a thirteen-year-old kid to analyze American slavery in the Colonial period is really hard. I can only do it because I’m an adult with a lot of practice narrowing down a research topic, but if I were in another profession besides teaching and perpetual grad student, I don’t think I could easily make that topic manageable. Before students even choose a topic to work with, they have to choose 2-3 lens questions to determine the perspective from which they will view Colonial society.
8th Grade Research Lens Questions
- How do people organize themselves?
- How do people meet their needs?
- How do beliefs and value systems affect how people live?
- How and why do people in societies change?
- How can I use the information I find to challenge the traditional interpretation of a person, group of people, or event?
- Is the topic open to debate about the role, agency, or effects of key events, factors, or individuals?
- How did past events, political decisions, and/or social norms impact particular individuals or groups?
- How do a combination of race, gender, socioeconomic status, and/or politics intersect to determine a group’s or an individual’s life experience?
We are just at the beginning of testing this method of research. Our hope is that these questions direct students toward analysis of a topic rather than listing facts on a paper. The point is to train their brain to be looking for certain types of information to help them answer a broader, more complex question. Many students have chosen to look at the intersection of gender and race in Colonial slavery. Some have chosen to view Colonial cooking through the lens of people meeting their needs. As the process continues and students get deeper into the project, they may find something new or something that changes their minds, but they’ll continually have these lens questions to return to in order to assist them in analysis and historical thinking.