One resource that I found in my fourth year undergrad as a history major was the Stanford History Education Group, which offers useful intro materials for writing in history and lesson plans. For this post though I want to focus on their intro material, specifically their historical thinking chart (pictured below). To me this chart helps to highlight a lot of what the article on persuasive writing touches on. The article on persuasive writing makes clear that students cannot learn how to write persuasively without first learning how to read persuasive texts. This chart nicely highlights the skills that students at any level have to exercise when reading persuasive texts under the Close Reading section. Likewise, these are things that students have to make clear when writing their own persuasive texts. I also think that teachers can easily use the IMSCI model in a historical writing context by encouraging inquiry and modelling along the lines of close reading, sourcing, contextualization, and corroboration. Like the article on persuasive writing I do not believe that these skills are too advanced for elementary students, but should be taught early. The article by Sylvia Read states that they were instructing a fourth grade class how to write persuasively and got surprisingly good results out of it. I therefore believe that if teachers model how to write persuasively in different contexts (such as science or history as appropriate to the subject) and provide scaffolding with a gradual release of responsibility they can become effective persuasive writers.
Stanford Historical Education Group. Historical Thinking Chart [Online Image].
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