Best Practices | TeachingHistory.org

Welcome to Best Practices

Introducing your students to primary sources for the first time? Watch fourth-grade teacher Marty MacKenzie guide her students through analyzing John White's drawings of the Powhatans.

How to Introduce Students to Primary Sources

In Teaching in Action

Photo, me & Jackie's antique shopping field trip, tray, 2010, Flickr

Use this guide developed by PBS and the Antiques Roadshow to teach about material culture.

Integrating Material Culture into the Classroom

In Using Primary Sources

Teaching the Reconstruction? Ford's Theatre's Sarah Jencks leads teachers through Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address and follow-up activities.

Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address

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

Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener"

Is reading a piece of historic literature once enough? Not if you want to [...] »

My Lai Massacre Political Cartoon

Professor Meredith Lair examines a 1971 political cartoon and what it says [...] »

Reading for Context

If students lack historical context, they can miss the substance of a [...] »

Japanese American Internment: Executive Order 9066

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

What do slave receipts reveal? Ever considered using similar documents to [...] »

Teaching in Action

Teachers demonstrate promising teaching practices

Teaching the Bill of Rights

Daunted by teaching the Bill of Rights and its complex vocabulary to [...] »

The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln

Teacher Bill Kendrat demonstrates the techniques he uses to draw students in [...] »

Using Primary Sources

Strategies for analyzing primary sources

Local History and Student Historians

So you don't live near Gettysburg or the Alamo—can you still teach with [...] »

Document Analysis Worksheets

Find the National Archive's worksheets for analyzing a variety of primary [...] »

Teaching with Textbooks

Techniques for promoting historical inquiry

Opening Up the Textbook

Make the most of your textbook—engage students in close reading and analysis [...] »

Children’s Voices from the Civil War

Help students identify with the past via children who lived through the [...] »

Questioning Textbook Authority

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

Using Historiography to Analyze the Mexican-American War

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

Learning Menus: Textbooks a la Carte

Turn your students into 'master chefs' by using learning menus that allow [...] »