This module is for High School QFT Lesson

For high school students, a video clip serves as the Q-Focus. They use it to generate questions and analyze primary sources to gather evidence for the guided inquiry question.

Inquiry Question:

Why was Thurgood Marshall called “Mr. Civil Rights”?

In this lesson, students engage in the Question Formulation Technique (QFT) to explore the life of Thurgood Marshall. Students investigate the guided inquiry question, “Why was Thurgood Marshall called ‘Mr. Civil Rights’?” and examine primary sources to collect evidence to answer the question.

Resources You Will Need

Please review ALL materials carefully, including videos and primary source sets, before selecting to show them to students.

 

Procedure

Begin by telling students that we will be exploring the life of Thurgood Marshall during today’s lesson.

QFT Step 1:

Q-Focus video clip of March on Washington

QFT Step 2:

Produce questions about the Q-Focus.

QFT Step 3:

Improve questions by identifying closed and open questions and then changing them.

QFT Step 4:

Prioritize questions by selecting questions that students most want to answer and those that will help most with the inquiry question.

QFT Step 5:

Guided Inquiry begins with the inquiry question: Why was Thurgood Marshall called “Mr. Civil Rights”?

  • Timeline:
    Have students take four primary source image sets and predict how they will help answer the inquiry question.
  • Introduce Inquiry Question:
    Why was Thurgood Marshall called “Mr. Civil Rights”? Have students look at the images and predict a historical claim based on the images.
  • Background reading and short video clips on Thurgood Marshall
    (Clips and quotations include information that will help students understand the images, but require more inference and analysis than the readings for Elementary and Middle levels).

Reflect

Ask students to reflect on the QFT process by considering how the lesson was different and how it impacted their learning.


  • Supreme Court Case Predictions:
    Students look at six primary source sets related to Supreme Court cases won by Thurgood Marshall. Students predict what rights he was helping to ensure/protect in those images.
  • Matching Activity:
    Students match case names with detailed descriptions of Supreme Court cases by using context clues from summaries. Students match cases to primary source image sets. Students then use a graphic organizer to summarize nine Supreme Court cases.
  • Corroboration and Extension:
    Students review quotations from Thurgood Marshall, relatives, colleagues, and scholars to develop and corroborate evidence for the inquiry question.
  • Review of Materials and Revisit Q-Focus:
    Students return to the Q-Focus by reading about the connection between Thurgood Marshall and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Students watch a short video clip that incorporates the original Q-Focus footage but makes a link between the legal work of Marshall and the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) and the protest actions of the Civil Rights Movement. Students consider the question, ”To what extent did Thurgood Marshall make the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s possible?”
  • Making a historical claim:
    Students answer the inquiry question: Why was Thurgood Marshall called “Mr Civil Rights”? Students will write/present/argue an evidence-based historical claim using a variety of evidence to support the claim (including images, quotations, and Supreme Court cases).