National History Education Clearinghouse

Lesson Plan Reviews

A Look at Slavery through Posters and Broadsides

Using historic posters, this lesson engages students in analyzing primary sources by identifying their author, intended audience, date, and message.

Review

This well-planned lesson, which uses posters about slavery and abolition, is particularly successful in teaching students to ask important questions when reading a primary source. First, the teacher models the task by analyzing a poster in front of the classroom. In small groups, students then analyze additional posters, locating such information as author, audience, purpose, and message. They use this information to consider the attitudes towards slavery that the posters convey.

One strength of the lesson is that the primary sources are provided in two formats: students receive historically evocative reproductions of the original posters along with easy-to-read typed transcriptions. Some teachers may choose to highlight important text, particularly for beginning readers; other teachers will want to leave it up to students to locate and identify crucial information.

This lesson appears in the December 2004 issue of History Now, a quarterly journal of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History .

Notes

This lesson plan includes links to a student worksheet and the lesson’s primary sources. Teachers can also access a map of the 1850s and a list of teacher resources.

Rubric

National History Education Clearinghouse Lesson Plan Rubric
Field	Criteria	Comments
Historical Content	Is historically accurate	Yes Lesson is accurate and up-to-date.
	Includes historical background	No The lesson plan's Teacher Resources section includes links to information about historical context. It's up to teachers, however, to decide how much background students will need.
	Requires students to read and write	Yes In class, all students read, and one student per group records information on a Poster Inquiry Sheet. In the suggested homework assignment, students each write a news story about their poster.
Analytic Thinking	Requires students to analyze or construct interpretations using evidence	Yes The Poster Inquiry Sheet provides students with a method for identifying and interpreting historical facts.
	Requires close reading and attention to source information	Yes During the modeling and the group work, students learn and practice close reading of primary sources.
Scaffolding	Is appropriate for stated audience	Yes The language used in the posters may be difficult for some students, but teachers can choose to highlight sections of text to reduce the amount or difficulty of necessary reading.
	Includes materials and strategies for scaffolding and supporting student thinking	Yes The teacher modeling step provides an important scaffold, as does the Poster Inquiry Sheet.
Lesson Structure	Includes assessment criteria and strategies that focus on historical understanding	No Although the lesson plan does not include an assessment rubric, teachers can check in with small groups to assess student learning.
	Defines clear learning goals and progresses logically	Yes The lesson plan not only helps students to learn about slavery and abolition but also gives them a clear method for analyzing the primary sources.
	Includes clear directions and is realistic in normal classroom settings	Yes The modeling provided in Steps 1, 2, and 3 is pedagogically useful. However, reading every single poster before the class may be excessively time-consuming, and so teachers may want to discuss just one poster. Later, they can go around the classroom to check in with small groups as needed.

Topic: Slavery and Abolition
Website: http://www.historynow.org/12_2004/lp4.html
Features: Multiple Sources, Focus on historical thinking, Scaffolding of close analysis of text, Further resources for teaching this content, Inclusion of multiple perspectives
Duration: 1 day
Grade(s): Fifth Grade

Lesson Format

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