Using Bell Ringers to Teach the Historical Method

Covering all the required content in any class is often difficult for teachers, if not impossible. History teachers face this problem every day, as they are tasked with conveying content that stretches back hundreds and sometimes thousands of years. For that reason, teaching the historical method—the way in which history is researched, interpreted, and written about—poses many challenges. Who has the time? 

Nevertheless, introducing students to the historical method will go a long way in helping them understand how history comes to us, the manner in which it is recorded and preserved, and some of the common pitfalls of studying history. Understanding the historical method can strengthen students’ writing, reading, and analytical skills.

One way for educators to teach the historical method in a busy class is by incorporating some simple questions in a few bell-ringer exercises throughout the quarter or semester. These activities need not be long. Ask students to maintain a historical method journal in which they answer a question or respond to a brief prompt at the beginning of class.

Textual Sources

Much of our knowledge of history comes from the written word, which presents many challenges. Students might not realize that many cultures left no written record, as many people didn’t have a written language. Weather, war, and the passage of time have wiped away many of our written records, too. 

Choose a current event (e.g., a conflict, an election) and ask what textual (or video) information pertaining to that event will be left to historians. Also consider the following questions:

• Besides those associated with journalistic outlets, what records are related to the event? 
• How might archivists or librarians play a role in preserving and disseminating such information? 
• What challenges might exist for future historians to review and study the records?
• Might bad actors subvert, conceal, or distort records for future historians? If so, how? Why?
• Do digital records (i.e., video) present different preservation challenges than textual information? Teachers may want to introduce students to the Internet Archive, an effort to archive the entire web.

Artifacts

Explain to students that sometimes we are left with nontextual documentation, such as clothing, tools, kitchenware, photographs, or everyday objects that people use.

Ask students a series of questions relating to artifacts in their lives: “What might historians deduce from the clothes you wear, the items in your home, or the materials you use related to school?”

Choose any historical event, and ask students to identify what artifacts might relate to it. For instance, artifacts associated with the U.S. Civil War might include Union and Confederate uniforms, weaponry, battle flags, medical instruments, currency, and photographs. 

Brainstorm artifacts related to a presidential campaign (e.g., buttons, posters, fliers, and other ephemera).

Challenge students to pinpoint artifacts that might emerge from events in their community: a festival, fair, concert, etc. Artifacts might include flyers, ticket stubs, posters, souvenirs, or fan memorabilia. Questions might include: What might these artifacts tell us about the event? What drawbacks do historians face examining artifacts? How are artifacts preserved?

Use a variation of a technique I wrote about before in which the teacher asks students to think like an anthropologist or archaeologist. 

Primary and Secondary Sources

Very often, students don’t understand the difference between primary and secondary sources, yet differentiating between the two is essential for research. 

Ask students to analyze a textbook, determining where the textbook’s author finds his or her information. Consider the questions below, or variations:

• “If a journalist were writing a piece on you, what primary sources might they use?” 
• “What do you produce in your daily life that might be considered a primary source?” e.g., artwork, homework, text messages, email, social media posts.

Consider placing a mixture of hard-copy primary and secondary sources out for students to look at. Possible primary sources to showcase include old photographs (black-and-white and sepia-toned can be particularly foreign to students), reproductions of government documents like the U.S. Constitution, well-known autobiographies, Anne Frank’s diary (or other diaries), correspondences, or artifacts such as arrowheads or even commonplace items like a smartphone or coffee mug. Secondary sources, on the other hand, could include textbooks, reference works (dictionaries and encyclopedias), or literary criticism. 

For your bell ringer, ask students to choose one source, identify whether it is a primary or secondary source, and support their answer with evidence.

Another quick bell ringer on this topic might entail presenting a source to the students, asking whether it is primary or secondary, and asking students to explain their answers. Additionally, press students to think of ways a source could be both a primary source and a secondary source. For instance, a newspaper article might be a secondary source when it is examining a historical event (such as the 1969 moon landing), while it may represent a primary source when reporting on an event as it happened. 

Reliability and Interpretation

There are many deeply philosophical questions that educators can use as bell ringers to teach about the historical method. Think of prompts and queries that address the changing interpretations of sources and the past, sources’ limitations, bias and perspective, propaganda and persuasion, and missing voices (e.g., the “losers” in a war or battle). Here are a few to consider:

• Give students a historical event, and ask them examine the ways it could be interpreted differently with the passage of time (e.g., the dropping of the atomic bomb, women’s suffrage, civil rights, contact between Native Americans and Europeans).
• Present to students a primary source, and ask them to identify possible biases of the author or authors (e.g., newspaper excerpts from either side in the U.S. Civil War, historical letters from conflicts, diary entries, memoirs).
• Ask students to reflect on people and communities who might be underrepresented or misrepresented in the historical record. Why might this be?

These bell ringers are meant to get kids thinking about the process of analyzing, interpreting, compiling, and writing about the past. They’re intended to be short questions and prompts used at the beginning of class, throughout the quarter or semester. Hopefully, kids find them fun, as well.