DBQ.
Document-Based Question.
If you teach high school social studies just about anywhere, working with primary source documents is likely a central feature to your course. This has been a major shift in teaching social studies in the past thirty years and it is a good one!
Retired now, I taught high school social studies for 18 of my 35 years on the job. Over that time, I developed a large collection of document-based tasks and training lessons to teach students to use them properly to reconstruct the likely past.
Most of my document-based tasks followed the structure of the New York State Regents Examinations for social studies: the enduring issue essay and constructed-response question (CRQ) in grades nine and ten and the short essay and civic literacy essay in US History grade 11. But incorporating one lengthy primary source text in each unit was also important to me and having students respond in a standard essay format was key for my units. I invite the reader to read more about using extended primary source tasks here.
In the DBQ shop, you will find document-based tasks that I edited and created. They are arranged by category. The sources are cited and this is especially important because students are supposed to consider the sources carefully. If you are interested in lessons for teaching students about primary sources, you may find something you like in the PowerPoint shop!
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