Russell Tarr and "The Big Picture": Using pictures to help students get a sense of the, well, the big picture

Do you subscribe to Russell Tarr's blog, Tarr's Toolbox? I think you should. At any rate, I do, which is where I find some great strategies for improving student learning.

Back in November, I shared his Time Travel exercise (he has students write a vacation brochure promoting a trip to the past and then a complaint letter from an unhappy customer, talking about how the trip didn't live up to the hype).

Here's another Russell Tarr idea I think could easily translate to teaching Montana history, particularly in middle school: “The Big Picture”: convert a new topic into pictures, then the pictures into galleries.

Russell seems to shape a lot of his curriculum around investigating big questions: "Was industrialization good or bad?" for example. But before having students jump into answering a focus question, he sometimes uses images to help them see the "big picture," or larger context of a historic period.

At the beginning of the unit study, he provides

each student with a different image from a collection shared between the class (paintings, cartoons, photographs of buildings/artefacts/individuals) and challenge[s] them to interpret their meaning. Then, working in groups and then as a class, the students decide upon the best ways of categorising the images. Finally, each student conducts independent research to produce a panel of information to put alongside their own image before putting them all up to create an impressive classroom display.

He details how this works in his blog post, using the Victorian era as his example. The activity starts with quick gallery walk, so each student can see all of the images and decide which are their favorites. Then Russell used

the random name picker at ClassTools.net to select one student, who sat down at the chair in front of her favoured image. I then repeated this process until all students were seated alongside one image. All the students were then asked to consider what title they would give to the image, how they would describe it to someone else, and what deductions they could draw from it. These findings were exchanged in small groups, with other members of the team encouraged to offer further ideas to note down so that each student ended up with plenty of thoughts. For good measure I then jigsawed the groups to get a further round of discussion.

Finally he had students work as a whole class to categorize the images (with no less than three and no more than five images per category).

Once this process appeared complete, each team discussed what their images had in common and therefore what title they would give to their ‘section’ of the gallery exhibition we were working towards ('work', “leisure”, “children” being popular choices). The final stage of the exhibition task was for each student to research their image further and complete a writing frame to summarise their key findings.

 I can see this project working well with any number of Montana history topics. The trick, of course, is finding relevant and provocative images. Let's say you planning on having your class explore the overall theme of agriculture. Perhaps your guiding question is “How did agricultural settlement change Montana?” Or maybe “Was homesteading a great opportunity or a bad bet?” Or even "Was the Homesteading Act good for Montana?"

• One option is to start with the pictures illustrating Montana: Stories of the Land: Just download the PDF of chapters 8 (ranching), 13 (homesteading) and 18 (the Great Depression), print them out, and cut out the images. (You might want to take a few pages from chapter  11--the reservation period--as well.)
• Another option is to look at the educator resources we've collected for the homesteading chapter and see if there are associated images. I found a link to the online exhibit Homesteading: The Dream and The Realities created by the staff of the Archives and Special Collections, Maureen and Mike Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula that has great material. 
• A third option is to select images from the Montana Memory Project. My quick search came up with maps like this and this, photographs like this, this,  and this, and promotional material like this.  Fair warning: searching the Montana Memory Project is not entirely self-explanatory, but it is getting easier. And the staff there has put together a short (7 minute) video tutorial on "How to Search the Collections Page" that is well worth watching (even if you've been on the site before.) 

You can find more great teaching strategies for all grade levels over at Russell Tarr's site. Happy surfing!

This is the third in a series of posts I've been writing on teaching Montana history. See this earlier post on a jigsaw exploration of the fur trade and this one on time traveling back to the open range (expanding on a different strategy that Russell Tarr introduced me to).  If you have something that's worked especially well in your classroom, let me know and I'll share it out!