The first step in building a GBS is to lay out the target skills. What target skills might we identify for the Civil War GBS? By taking as our model the skills a historian employs, here is a set of skills we might want our students to learn:
Explaining Phenomena from the Period
- Recognize the major players in the period, and their motivations
- Know important roles (e.g., President)
- Reason from own motivations
- Describe the rise and fall of slavery
- Identify the differences between the North and the South
- Specify the relationship between geography and politics in American history
- Reason about the period using analogies from personal experience
Predicting
- Develop an argument about a failure of Lincoln's
- Suggest how the South might have won
- Relate aspects of the Civil War to current events (e.g., Super South Primary, Martin Luther King, Los Angeles riots)
Historical Data Gathering
- Read news accounts from the data
- Recognize biases
- Read maps
- Develop strategies of information gathering
- Use bibliographies, library search, reader's guide, etc.
- Find economic data
- Piece together information to form an account of a scene
- Reconcile multiple viewpoints
- Hypothesize about missing detail
- Relate specific stories to abstract principles (such as the release of the Emancipation Proclamation)
Where am I in the content of the book?
