Introducing Evidence Logs

How can learning about the choices individuals, groups, and nations made during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the Armenian Genocide help guide how we respond to injustice in our communities and in the world today?

This assessment includes:

• 4 activities
• 5 teaching strategies
• 2 books

• Ask students to reread their journal responses from “Introducing the Writing Prompt” and then respond to the following question:
  How can learning about the choices individuals, groups, and nations made during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the Armenian Genocide help guide how we respond to injustice in our communities and in the world today?
• Have students share their ideas with a partner or small group, or you might use the Two-Minute Interview strategy and encourage students to add new ideas to their journal responses that expand or challenge their current thinking about the prompt.

If you have not yet taught students how to annotate or paraphrase sources, you might want to devote a class period to modeling and practicing this skill. You could replay part of the Armenian Genocide video segment from Lesson 6: The Rise of Nationalism and the Collapse of the Ottoman Empire or select a reading from Lesson 7: Genocide under the Cover of War to reread with the class, modeling the process of annotating and paraphrasing sources. Alternatively, you can select a new reading from Chapter 5: The Range of Choices from Crimes Against Humanity and Civilization: The Genocide of the Armenians (pages 113–144) that students haven’t read.

• We recommend that students start to gather evidence that supports or challenges their initial thinking about the writing prompt at this point in the unit. Evidence logs provide a place where students can centralize and organize evidence they collect over the course of a unit. There are two templates for evidence logs on the Teaching Strategies page of the Facing History website, and a third option is explained in Strategy 6: Evidence Logs and Index Cards (pages 35–38) of the Common Core Writing Prompts and Strategies Holocaust and Human Behavior supplement.
• Before students start to collect their own evidence, it is helpful if you model the process by doing a “think-aloud” where you complete the first row of an evidence log template on the board. In your think-aloud, you might first select a piece of evidence that is irrelevant to the topic and then explain to the class why you are not going to use it. Then select a relevant piece of evidence and enter it into the chart.
• Students should work individually, in pairs, or in small groups to gather evidence from their readings, handouts, and class notes about the Armenian Genocide that helps them answer the essay topic question.
• After students have gathered their evidence, have them share their findings and add more evidence to their logs using the Give One, Get One strategy.

In a final journal response or on exit cards, ask students to respond to the following questions:

• Has any evidence that you recorded confirmed your initial thinking about the essay prompt?
• Has any evidence that you recorded conflicted with or challenged your initial thinking about the essay prompt?
• Which choices by individuals, groups, and nations in the history that you have learned about so far in this unit seemed most significant? What made those choices powerful or impactful?