Evaluating Primary Sources Through a See, Think, Wonder

When seventh-grade students arrive at Meredith Howard’s class at Albert Hill Middle School in Richmond, Virginia, there’s one thing they always know to expect: They’ll pick up a See, Think, Wonder worksheet and take it to their desk. What don’t they know? Which document, photo, political cartoon, or other primary source they’ll see on the worksheet. That’s when they have to draw on their skills to observe, infer, and question the source. This daily activity gets students’ brains working—before the bell even rings.

Howard selects primary sources that connect to the current unit. Students are given a few minutes to work independently, or to confer with table mates, to look closely at the source. They first see, noting the details of who/what/when/where that can be observed without bias. Then they think, making inferences about what the source might represent, who may have authored it, and who the audience is. Finally, they wonder, asking questions about what they’d like to learn about the source and how it connects to the history they’re studying.

After the students work independently, Howard leads the class in a discussion. At this point, the students switch to a pencil, pen, or marker with a different color. Howard asks for student contributions, always following up with more detailed questions: Where do you see that? How do you know? Is that an observation or an inference? She projects her own copy of the source and demonstrates how she fills out the worksheet—including making notes on the source itself. The students follow along, adding and correcting in the different color.

At the end of the week, Howard asks students to turn in one of the See, Think, Wonder worksheets from that week, and she grades them on completeness. For her, the value in this activity is not assessment but rather fostering skills in media literacy. As students encounter information from an increasingly fractured media environment, she sees it as more important than ever that students learn to slow down and evaluate sources, and ask tough questions about their trustworthiness.

See, Think, Wonder is one of the routines developed to help make thinking visible by Project Zero at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. To explore this activity and one other thinking routine from Project Zero more deeply, read Jorge Valenzuela’s article for Edutopia titled “Boosting Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum.”