Best for
Senior social studies, history, English, research projects, and assessment preparation where students must analyse and compare sources with real precision.
Aotearoa histories • English • Years 10-13 • Deep inquiry
Deep Primary Source Analysis Template
Use this template when students are ready for fuller inquiry. It slows them down enough to test provenance, context, language, corroboration, and missing voices before they make a historical claim or start writing a counter-narrative response.
Free inquiry template, premium adaptation path
This version is ready for deeper inquiry tomorrow. Te Wānanga becomes useful when you want this analysis structure rebuilt for a local archive pack, an internal assessment, or a bilingual senior history sequence.
- Generate a class-specific source pack and build the template around it.
- Add teacher feedback boxes, rubric cues, or scholarly source prompts.
- Save the adapted version into My Kete and refine it for next year.
Kaiako planning snapshot
- Use length: 45-70 minutes depending on whether students analyse one source deeply or a paired source set.
- Grouping: Individual note-making works best after shared context-setting and short pair discussion.
- Prep: Choose a source worth wrestling with, and decide whether students also need a corroborating source on the desk.
- Teaching move: Push students to separate description from judgement. They should be able to show how their interpretation grows from evidence.
- Support / stretch: Offer the quick template to support learners; extension students should test how interpretation shifts across time, language, or audience.
Resources already provided
- Detailed provenance, context, language, corroboration, and judgement prompts
- Space for evidence capture, source limitations, and missing-voice analysis
- A final synthesis frame that can feed directly into seminar or essay work
- A teacher-only curriculum companion for planning and reporting
- Natural continuation into the counter-narrative writing guide
This is designed to remove the usual “make your own note sheet tonight” workload for kaiako running deeper source work.
Ngā Whāinga Akoranga / Learning Intentions
- We are learning how to analyse a source in depth using provenance, context, and evidence.
- We are learning how perspective, translation, and power shape historical interpretation.
- We are learning how to build a defensible historical judgement and use it in writing.
Paearu Angitu / Success Criteria
- I can explain the source’s provenance and historical setting clearly.
- I can identify the source’s perspective, limitations, and missing voices.
- I can support a historical judgement with precise evidence and corroboration.
Curriculum integration / Te Marautanga alignment
The companion page makes the fit explicit around historical inquiry, evidence-based interpretation, English text-study, perspective, and Aotearoa source work that takes mātauranga Māori seriously.
Mātauranga Māori note
If you are analysing kōrero tuku iho, oral histories, iwi publications, or whakapapa-based material, treat provenance and permission differently from a newspaper article. Authority, relationship, and context still matter, but not all source integrity is measured by the same archive rules.
1. Provenance
Record the source title, creator, date, location, genre, intended audience, and likely purpose.
2. Historical context
What was happening in Aotearoa at the time? Which relationships, tensions, or policy settings help explain this source?
3. Language and framing
Which words, images, omissions, tone, or structure shape meaning? What is presented as normal, urgent, justified, or threatening?
4. Perspective and power
Whose perspective is being centred? Which people or communities are being represented without full voice or agency?
Corroboration and limitation table
| What this source helps me see | What still needs checking | Best second source to place beside it |
|---|---|---|
5. Missing voices
Whose knowledge, interest, or lived experience is missing here? How might a Māori, hapū, whānau, or community source shift the story?
6. Final historical judgement
Write 3-4 sentences explaining what this source is most useful for, what caution is needed, and what bigger historical insight it supports.
Synthesis bridge into writing
Use your strongest notes to complete this planning statement.
- Main claim: This source suggests that...
- Best evidence: The strongest detail is...
- Needed caution: I still need to remember that...
- Writing direction: This could support a paragraph about...
Tautoko / Support
- Allow students to complete only sections 1-4 first, then add judgement later.
- Provide a corroborating source in advance instead of asking them to select one.
- Use oral rehearsal or conferencing before the final synthesis box.
Whakawhānui / Extend
- Compare two sources that describe the same event from different power positions.
- Ask how translation or later reinterpretation shifts meaning.
- Move directly into the counter-narrative writing guide using these notes.
Hononga Marautanga · Curriculum Alignment
Social Sciences — Tikanga ā-Iwi
Level 3–4: Investigate how historical, political, and economic processes shape societies; understand how people participate in communities to create change; analyse different perspectives on social, cultural, and environmental issues.
English — Research and Literacy
Level 3–4: Gather, evaluate, and synthesise information from multiple sources; construct well-reasoned arguments using evidence; communicate social science understanding clearly in written, oral, and visual forms.
Aronga Mātauranga Māori
Social Sciences taught well in Aotearoa should be uncomfortable — because the history of this land is one in which Māori and other communities have faced injustice, and in which those injustices are not yet fully addressed. Mātauranga Māori offers frameworks for thinking about social change that go beyond Western political theory: the concept of tino rangatiratanga (self-determination), of kotahitanga (unity in purpose), of utu (reciprocity across time) — these are not abstract ideas but working tools for analysing how power has been distributed and how it might be redistributed more justly. Social Sciences that centres these frameworks gives students the analytical vocabulary to name what they see in the world and imagine what could be different.
Ngā Rauemi Tautoko · Support Materials
This handout is designed to be used alongside the broader unit resources available at Te Kete Ako handouts library. Related resources from the same unit are linked in the unit planner. All resources are provided — no additional preparation is required to use this handout in your classroom.
📋 Teacher Planning Snapshot
Ngā Whāinga Ako — Learning Intentions
Students will engage with this resource to develop a decolonized understanding of Aotearoa's history — reading the past through the eyes of tangata whenua, examining primary sources critically, and understanding how colonisation continues to shape the present. This unit centres mana Māori as the starting point, not a footnote.
Ngā Paearu Angitū — Success Criteria
- ✅ Students can analyse a historical source for perspective, reliability, and significance — including identifying whose voices are centred or absent.
- ✅ Students can explain how a specific historical event — such as the NZ Wars, land confiscations, or the Dawn Raids — connects to present-day inequities and Māori-led responses.
Differentiation & Inclusion
Scaffold support: Provide annotated source analysis frames for entry-level access — guiding students through the OPCVL or SOLO process step by step. Offer extension tasks asking students to compare a colonial-era source with a contemporary Māori account of the same event, analysing how the historical narrative has been contested and reclaimed.
ELL / ESOL: Primary source language (particularly 19th-century English) presents specific challenges — pre-read sources with students and pre-teach archaic or specialist vocabulary. Allow students to express historical analysis in their home language first before translating to English. Bilingual glossaries support engagement without reducing intellectual demand. Some ELL students may bring first-hand experience of colonisation from other contexts — honour these as valid comparative perspectives.
Inclusion: Decolonized history can surface difficult emotions for Māori students encountering colonial violence and injustice in the curriculum for the first time. Create a trauma-informed classroom. Neurodiverse learners benefit from chunked tasks and clear analytical scaffolds. Ensure all students understand that the purpose of this unit is not guilt but understanding — and that understanding is the foundation of partnership and change.
Mātauranga Māori lens: Decolonizing history means more than "adding Māori perspectives" — it means recognising that the dominant historical narrative itself is a colonial artefact. Whakapapa is an alternative historical framework: tracing connections, obligations, and continuity across time. The NZ Wars were not distant events — their consequences live in land ownership patterns, economic disparities, and community structures today. Tino rangatiratanga — the right of self-determination — was not surrendered at Waitangi and has been asserted continuously through protest, legislation, and resurgence. Teaching this history is an obligation of Te Tiriti partnership.
Prior knowledge: Students benefit from foundational knowledge of the Treaty of Waitangi and its context. No specialist prior knowledge required for entry-level source analysis tasks — scaffolds are provided.
Curriculum alignment
- Aotearoa New Zealand Histories — Know: Understand that colonisation was a global process that had a specific and profound impact on tangata whenua in Aotearoa, and that Māori responses to colonisation have been continuous and varied.
- Do — Social Studies: Explore perspectives, use evidence to form conclusions, and share ideas — analyse primary sources, compare historical perspectives, and present findings.