The Vietnam modules are designed to promote curiosity and deep inquiry in students at a variety of academic and grade levels. Teachers may elect to present them in a series as a learning progression, or individually as stand-alone lessons.
In the Tet Offensive module, students consider the essential question “Was the U.S. public misled about the outcome of the Tet Offensive?”
Students answer text-dependent questions while viewing the documentary clip and during close readings of collaborating claims from President Lyndon Johnson, Walter Cronkite, and Vietnamese Commander Van Tran Tras.
Students think critically about the sources as they create an evidence-based conclusion to explain why the Tet Offensive was considered a turning point in the Vietnam War.
Each module is designed around an essential question, which is student-friendly and historically significant. The module's resources, which include the documentary clip, interview transcripts, primary sources, and secondary sources, lead students to answer the module's essential question.
Students will conduct close readings of one or more of the module resources, answering the text-dependent questions provided for each resource. While there is an emphasis on primary sources to answer these historical questions, students will have opportunities to explore various secondary sources as well, including works by historians and acclaimed literary authors.
Students will be asked to think critically about the authorship, historical context, audience, etc., of the documentary clip, interview transcripts, primary and secondary sources they analyze in order to draw conclusions about the usefulness of the sources as historical evidence. They will also be asked to use the resources to draw evidence-based conclusions about the essential question.
All modules have been aligned with the Common Core Literacy in History and Social Studies standards as well as College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) standards .
Throughout, students are invited to participate in the same process that historians engage in: considering a question, analyzing evidence, and developing and defending an interpretation.
These modules are designed to apply to students of a variety of grade and academic levels. Depending on their students’ abilities, teachers may opt to have students work individually or in groups. Conducting a close reading of the texts as a whole group can inspire meaningful conversations and allow teachers to prompt students to provide evidence of their thinking.
Teachers may also modify the number of sources and the passage length of the text, though using at least two different texts when implementing the modules is recommended.