Welcome to Best Practices
Spotlight on Elementary Education
Example of Historical Thinking
Historian Christopher Hamner introduces educators to the World War II [...] »
Watch Smithsonian curator Barbara Clark Smith discuss John Smith’s Map of [...] »
Can you trust a biography? Historian Tiya Miles analyzes an 1869 biography [...] »
What can a photograph of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 reveal? Donald A. [...] »
Absolving the guilty and punishing the innocent. Historian Elizabeth Reis [...] »
Teaching in Action
An 8th-grade class analyzes letters about the Emancipation Proclamation.
[...] »A 3rd-grade teacher leads her students through analysis of child labor [...] »
Using Primary Sources
The National History Day’s guidelines for defining and locating [...] »
Work with oral history interviews as historical evidence.
[...] »Teaching with Textbooks
Turn your students into 'master chefs' by using learning menus that allow [...] »
Make the most of your textbook—engage students in close reading and analysis [...] »
Allow students to see that history as we know it is interpretation, [...] »
Show your students how to challenge the authority gap between the textbook [...] »
Help students identify with the past via children who lived through the [...] »