Best Practices | TeachingHistory.org

Welcome to Best Practices

Ad, 1954, Linit Perfect Laundry Starch, Ad*Access

Advertisements have surrounded us for years. How can you interpret them? Where can you find them?

Making Sense of Advertisements

In Using Primary Sources

Photo, Police Evidence Room, November 14, 2008, th.omas, Flickr

Challenge students to gather evidence from multiple primary sources. Here, a high school student uses two related primary sources to understand the civil rights movement.

Cross-checking Sources and Testing Hypotheses

In Examples of Historical Thinking

So you don't live near Gettysburg or the Alamo—can you still teach with historic place? Of course!

Local History and Student Historians

In Using Primary Sources

Spotlight on Elementary Education

Oral histories and interviews are a unique form of historical documentation. This guide by Linda Shopes offers an overview of the various ways oral history can be integrated into classroom discussions. Though some of the techniques will have to be adapted for elementary students, the ideas Shopes presents are extremely useful. FIND OUT MORE »

Example of Historical Thinking

Scholars, students, and teachers model historical thinking

Women's Suffrage Cartoon

How does a political cartoon use popular beliefs about women to make its [...] »

Japanese American Internment: Ansel Adams Photos

If the U.S. interned you and your family, how would you respond?

Reading Place with the National Building Museum

What does architecture say about the past and the present? TAH teachers [...] »

FDR's Fireside Chats

Historian Allida Black analyzes FDR's April 28, 1935 Fireside Chat. What [...] »

Intertextual Reading of Two Primary Documents

A student demonstrates thinking aloud reading two documents.

Teaching in Action

Teachers demonstrate promising teaching practices

The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln

Teacher Bill Kendrat demonstrates the techniques he uses to draw students in [...] »

Recreating the Cuban Missile Crisis

Ninth-grade teacher Jamie Kimbrough asked her students to stand in Kennedy's [...] »

Using Primary Sources

Strategies for analyzing primary sources

Making Sense of Maps

What questions should you ask when viewing maps as historical evidence?

The Civil War in Art: Teaching and Learning Through Chicago Collections

Integrate these two guides into your curriculum to help students develop [...] »

Teaching with Textbooks

Techniques for promoting historical inquiry

The Grammar of History Textbooks, Part I: Language Analysis

The language of history textbooks challenges English language learners and [...] »

Children’s Voices from the Civil War

Help students identify with the past via children who lived through the [...] »

The Grammar of History Textbooks Part II: Questioning the Text

Turn your textbook into a conversation by scanning its language for biases [...] »

Using Historiography to Analyze the Mexican-American War

Allow students to see that history as we know it is interpretation, [...] »

Opening Up the Textbook

Make the most of your textbook—engage students in close reading and analysis [...] »