First, let me say Welcome to all of you who recently joined our C3 Group.  Our membership has now reached 124!  I hope you will respond to existing posts or start your own new discussions.  I am eager to hear your thoughts about using C3 with Primary Sources and TPS strategies.

TPS is aligned with three of the components in the C3 Inquiry Design Model (IDM), Featured Sources, Formative Tasks, and the Summative Task. Once a teacher has decided on a compelling question for a student inquiry, the next step is to find featured sources that will support students in answering that compelling question. TPS search strategies for loc.gov digital archives is a great place to start looking for featured primary sources. The third step is to decide on a formative task that will structure the students’ interpretation of the primary sources. The Library of Congress Analysis Tool works well as a C3 formative task. The fourth step is to design a summative performance task in which students write or present an argument based on evidence from different perspectives. We have found that the Teacher Page Blogs, Collection Connections and the numerous articles written by Library staff to accompany the Digital Collections and Exhibits at loc.gov are invaluable in identifying multiple sources as evidence that represent different perspectives on a given subject. 

In 2016, TPS-ER facilitators John Lee, David Hicks and Ann Canning taught an online PD course, “Designing C3 Inquiries with Library of Congress Political Cartoons”. John Lee demonstrated an IDM he created from a Library of Congress Herblock Exhibit on Peace in the Middle East. Participants then worked in teams to create their own IDMs with featured primary sources, formative tasks and summative tasks. 

Here’s a link to that online class and the related  IDMS.http://tps.waynesburg.edu/documents/1250-participant-projects-and-workshop-content-c3-fall-2016/file