How We Know What Happened: The Evidence Record
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What students do
- Sort evidence into physical, documentary, and testimonial categories
- Fix a sequence of events using photo time stamps
- Compare two federal investigations that asked different questions of the same day
- Analyze the 9/11 Commission Report's own preface describing its working method
What it covers
- How investigators establish what happened when an event cannot be rerun
- Provenance, chain of custody, and corroboration between independent sources
- Why a credible report states its own limitations
Learning targets
- Sort evidence into three kinds: things, records, and words.
- Explain why a second source makes a claim stronger.
- Describe how a lab test checks an event no one can repeat.
- Put events in order using time stamps on photos.
- Explain why a good report says what it left out.
From one teacher to another
September 11 is usually the first major event my students already have an opinion about before they've studied it, which makes it the best case I know for teaching evidence instead of conclusions. They sort what survives into physical, documentary, and testimonial evidence, use photo time stamps to fix a sequence, and read the Commission's own account of what it didn't do. They leave with a checklist for evaluating a claim that has nothing to do with September 11 specifically, which is really the point.
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