Best Practices | TeachingHistory.org

Welcome to Best Practices

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

What do the contents of pockets say about their owners? TAH teachers model strategies for examining and questioning artifacts.

Pockets from the Past: Daily Life at Monticello

In Examples of Historical Thinking

Check out these sites for primary sources grouped into sets by topic, grade-level appropriateness, and other factors.

Primary Source Sets on the Web

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

Letters from the Philippines

Letters from U.S. soldiers during the Philippine-American War reveal [...] »

Women's Suffrage: Jane Addams's Article

Who was Jane Addams, and how is her article "Why Women Should Vote" still [...] »

Watch Smithsonian curator Barbara Clark Smith discuss John Smith’s Map of [...] »

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum: Personalizing History

Make large-scale historic events like the Holocaust personal with artifacts [...] »

Seeing (and Engaging in) Historical Thinking: A Tutorial

This interactive tutorial models a four-step process for analyzing [...] »

Teaching in Action

Teachers demonstrate promising teaching practices

What Does It Mean to Be an American?

An 8th-grade teacher asks: Was early 20th-century America a "melting pot" or [...] »

FDR's Fireside Chats

High school teacher Joe Jelen combines roleplaying and critical analysis—by [...] »

Using Primary Sources

Strategies for analyzing primary sources

Making Sense of American Popular Songs

Don't overlook song as a way of understanding the past.

Critically Analyzing Information Sources

This source from Cornell University's Olin and Uris Libraries includes [...] »

Teaching with Textbooks

Techniques for promoting historical inquiry

The Grammar of History Textbooks Part II: Questioning the Text

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

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 I: Language Analysis

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

Building a Conversation between Textbooks, Students, and Teachers

Class discussion and personal inquiry builds an interactive relationship [...] »

Questioning Textbook Authority

Show your students how to challenge the authority gap between the textbook [...] »