Welcome to Best Practices
Spotlight on Elementary Education
Example of Historical Thinking
Watch Suzannah Niepold of the Smithsonian American Art Museum guide teachers [...] »
What can an inventory tell you about daily life in Delaware in 1804? Curator [...] »
What does an 1853 daguerreotype have to say? Plenty, says Frank Goodyear, [...] »
How does the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial in Washington, DC, depict Grant and [...] »
See sourcing in action, as a historian reads a document about the Scopes [...] »
Teaching in Action
Watch 4th-graders analyze cartoons about Virginia and Brown v. Board of [...] »
An 8th-grade class analyzes letters about the Emancipation Proclamation.
[...] »Using Primary Sources
Check out these sites for primary sources grouped into sets by topic, grade- [...] »
Integrate these two guides into your curriculum to help students develop [...] »
Teaching with Textbooks
Turn your textbook into a conversation by scanning its language for biases [...] »
The language of history textbooks challenges English language learners and [...] »
Allow students to see that history as we know it is interpretation, [...] »
Help students identify with the past via children who lived through the [...] »
Make the most of your textbook—engage students in close reading and analysis [...] »