Designing DBQs for All: A Practical Guide to Inclusive Historical Inquiry
Document-Based Questions are one of social studies education’s most powerful tools — but traditional DBQs often create unnecessary barriers for multilingual learners and students still building academic language confidence. This guide shows you how to change that without sacrificing rigor.
Designing DBQs for All gives you practical, classroom-ready frameworks for designing DBQs that center human agency, include multiple perspectives, and create genuine access for every learner in the room.
What’s inside:
- 10 before-and-after question revisions showing exactly how to reframe traditional DBQs
- A step-by-step DBQ design process grounded in culturally responsive principles
- Scaffolding strategies for emerging English learners — sentence stems, paragraph frames, talk structures, and more
- A text-set checklist for evaluating representation, accuracy, and accessibility
- Ready-to-use PD activities for teams and departments
- Planning templates and document analysis tools you can use immediately
Built for the classroom realities teachers actually face.
This guide doesn’t ask you to reinvent your curriculum. It gives you tools to strengthen what you already teach — and make your DBQs more inclusive, more engaging, and more rigorous for the diverse learners sitting in front of you every day.
Grounded in Re-Imagining Migration’s five dispositions framework, developed in collaboration with Verónica Boix-Mansilla at Harvard Project Zero.