TO THE PAST
Through Canadian Historical Assessments of Thinking (CHATs), To The Past aims to assist teachers and learners in moving towards a deeper and more robust historical inquiry. CHATs, as small-scale formative assessments, allow students to practice sourcing, contextualizing, closely analyzing and corroborating evidence on a regular basis, developing a familiarity and sophistication when working with primary sources.
BLOG: THE FIRST THANKSGIVING – THE STARTING POINT
When beginning to draft the first Canadian History Assessments of Thinking, the most obvious space to explore for inspiration was the Stanford History Education Group’s (now Digital Inquiry Group) Beyond the Bubble Assessments.
Perhaps their most well-known is one of their flagship models, “The First Thanksgiving”. At its root, The First Thanksgiving aims to illuminate for teachers whether or not students are attending to the metadata of a source, in this case, a painting. Students are challenged to note the discrepancy between the event date and time of the source’s creation, and how that might impact the helpfulness of the source as evidence of what happened during the original event.