Welcome to Best Practices
Spotlight on Elementary Education
Example of Historical Thinking
Written primary sources only tell you so much. To learn about history that [...] »
How can you get teachers thinking about monuments and memorials as secondary [...] »
Watch Suzannah Niepold of the Smithsonian American Art Museum guide teachers [...] »
Watch this flash movie for a peek at how historians read and question [...] »
Textbooks describe segregation in a few pages, but these artists share [...] »
Teaching in Action
Watch this 9th-grade teacher lead his class in planning, writing, and [...] »
High school teacher Joe Jelen combines roleplaying and critical analysis—by [...] »
Using Primary Sources
Explore the SOCC analysis technique with this great website.
[...] »Virginia Tech’s short video shows how to analyze primary sources and put [...] »
Teaching with Textbooks
Class discussion and personal inquiry builds an interactive relationship [...] »
Turn your textbook into a conversation by scanning its language for biases [...] »
Help students identify with the past via children who lived through the [...] »
Allow students to see that history as we know it is interpretation, [...] »
Make the most of your textbook—engage students in close reading and analysis [...] »