Zoom In with primary sources from Densho

  • “Waiting for the signal from home . . . “ by Dr. Seuss is divided into parts (PowerPoint slides) for use in the classroom. Follow the prompts for thethinking routine below.

To use another image from Densho:

  1. Select an image (photo, political cartoon, drawing, painting, etc.) that can serve to trigger key ideas that you would like to think about.
  2. Divide the image into four pieces (these do not need to be evenly shaped). Each part should have something provocative, but not tell the whole story.
  3. Decide the order in which you'd like the pieces to be revealed. Remember, students will build their thinking as more information is presented in each reveal. Think about how each piece may lead student thinking. Be strategic.

*Technical tip: If using power point, start with the entire image. Use blank text boxes to cover the parts of the image you want to keep hidden.

ZOOM IN
From Making Thinking Visible by Ritchhart, Morrison & Church, 2011

  1. Look closely at the small bit of image that is revealed.
  • What do you see or notice?
  • What is your hypothesis or interpretation of what this might be based on what you are seeing?
  1. Reveal more of the image.
  • What new things do you see?
  • How does this change your hypothesis or interpretation?
  • Has the new information answered any of your wonders or changed your previous ideas?
  • What new things are you wondering about?
  1. Repeat the reveal and questioning until the whole image has been revealed.
• What lingering questions remain for us about this image?

Rhonda Clevenson of Primary Source Learning, an organization devoted to helping teachers use the resources of the Library of Congress, created this routine. Clevenson was interested in helping students to learn history from primary source documents in an engaging and meaningful way. Like See-Think-Wonder, this routine focuses on looking closely and making interpretations. The difference is that this routine reveals only portions of an image over time. The idea that our interpretations in history, as well as in any other discipline, are tentative and limited by the information we have at hand is a metaphor about learning embedded in the routine itself.

PURPOSE

The routine asks learners to observe a portion of an image closely and develop a hypothesis. New visual information is presented and the learner is asked to again look closely, and then reassess his or her initial interpretation in the light of the new information. By forcing learners to deal with limited information, they know their interpretations must be tentative at best and might change as new information is presented. The process of making such tentative hypotheses enables learners to see that not only is it okay to change your mind about something, but in fact it is important to be open-minded and flexible enough to change your mind when new and sometimes conflicting information is available and the original hypothesis no longer holds true.

By revealing only portions of the image at a time, the routine fosters engagement with the source material in a way that seeing the whole image at once might not. Learners must act as detectives to build up meaning both individually and collectively.