Best Practices | TeachingHistory.org

Welcome to Best Practices

Turn your students into 'master chefs' by using learning menus that allow differentiated instruction.

Learning Menus: Textbooks a la Carte

In Teaching with Textbooks

Photo, "Street Arabs in Sleeping...," Jacob A. Riis, c. 1880s, History Matters.

Textbook illustrations are often overlooked as historical evidence.

Making Sense of Documentary Photography

In Using Primary Sources

How do the buildings and artifacts at Mount Vernon reflect the lives of the people who lived and worked there? Educators explore the slave quarters and question what they find.

Slave Life at Mount Vernon

In Examples of Historical Thinking

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

Cross-checking Sources and Testing Hypotheses

Challenge students to gather evidence from multiple primary sources. Here, a [...] »

Japanese American Internment: Executive Order 9066

How did the World War II internment of Japanese Americans happen? Historian [...] »

Intertextual Reading of Two Primary Documents

A student demonstrates thinking aloud reading two documents.

The Salem Witch Trials

Absolving the guilty and punishing the innocent. Historian Elizabeth Reis [...] »

Women's Suffrage: Jane Addams's Article

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

Teaching in Action

Teachers demonstrate promising teaching practices

Causes of World War I

Did two bullets begin WWI? Explore causation in your classroom.

Students in the Community

Is a school an island? James Liou talks about working to integrate schools [...] »

Using Primary Sources

Strategies for analyzing primary sources

Primary Sources: What Are They?

The National History Day’s guidelines for defining and locating [...] »

Critically Analyzing Information Sources

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

Teaching with Textbooks

Techniques for promoting historical inquiry

Building a Conversation between Textbooks, Students, and Teachers

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

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 [...] »

The Grammar of History Textbooks, Part I: Language Analysis

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

Using Historiography to Analyze the Mexican-American War

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