When we first started looking at a unit to work on with the READi California Teacher Inquiry Network, we wanted to choose something we had struggled to teach 7th graders, so we choose a daunting topic from our curriculum: The Enlightenment. This topic seemed to baffle our students. The ideas of the Enlightenment thinkers were revolutionary at the time; however this concept was lost on our 7th graders who looked at these figures through 21st Century eyes, what historians might call “presentism.” They could not understand why different oppressed groups in their history books didn’t just “speak up” or “fight back.” We wanted our students to understand how people thought, felt and acted within their historical context, to develop historical empathy. In order to do this, they needed to build knowledge about feudalism so that they could see how life for the common person in Europe changed over time, starting with feudalism.

In this module, students read a set of five texts, practice identifying potential textual evidence, noting citations for that textual evidence, corroborating across documents, creating claims and finally creating touchstone characters from the time period (Serf Thomas and Serf Anne). For students, this turned out to be a tremendous support for our students understanding the time period. We chose a historical fiction writing piece at the end of the module because we felt that would help students get a feel for the life of a serf…walking around in the serf’s shoes for a little while. For the first time in our experience of teaching this topic, students could quickly answer why you wouldn’t talk back to your lord and who was in charge of a serf’s life. They saw that a serf was not a person who was “pushed around,” but a human who was “pushed down” by the structure of their society.

When we started this module toward the end of first quarter, our students had already been introduced to and practiced several Reading Apprenticeship routines: Think Aloud, Talking-to-the-Text, Think-Write, and working with partners. Our students did not, however, have experience with argumentation. For more about Reading Apprenticeship and routines to support students’ reading, see Reading for Understanding, by Ruth Schoenbach, Cynthia Greenleaf, and Lynn Murphy, ©2012