Welcome to Best Practices
Spotlight on Elementary Education
Example of Historical Thinking
What can an inventory tell you about daily life in Delaware in 1804? Curator [...] »
Watch Smithsonian curator Barbara Clark Smith discuss John Smith’s Map of [...] »
What does an 1853 daguerreotype have to say? Plenty, says Frank Goodyear, [...] »
Ford's Theatre Society's Sarah Jencks leads teachers through Abraham Lincoln [...] »
See sourcing in action, as a historian reads a document about the Scopes [...] »
Teaching in Action
Watch this 9th-grade teacher lead his class in planning, writing, and [...] »
Watch 4th-graders analyze cartoons about Virginia and Brown v. Board of [...] »
Using Primary Sources
This website by the Smithsonian Portrait Gallery will help students [...] »
Work with early twentieth-century film as historical evidence. What [...] »
Teaching with Textbooks
Turn your textbook into a conversation by scanning its language for biases [...] »
The language of history textbooks challenges English language learners and [...] »
Class discussion and personal inquiry builds an interactive relationship [...] »
Turn your students into 'master chefs' by using learning menus that allow [...] »
Allow students to see that history as we know it is interpretation, [...] »