There is an old saying in teaching that borrowing an idea is the sincerest form of flattery. Experienced educators are always on the prowl for good ideas. One of the things many of us enjoy about attending the national Teaching American History (TAH) meeting is the chance it gives us to talk and share ideas with other TAH project directors. If you've ever looked around during the lunch session, you've seen hundreds of TAH people busily doing just that. As evidenced by the H-TAH listserve on a national level, sharing ideas and expertise enriches everyone's program. But what about state or regional level communication and collaboration?

Opening lines of communication at the state or regional level encourages the sharing of best practices, offers support to TAH directors new and old, and strengthens the overall TAH community—all at the "cost" of a few phone calls and emails. We see each other at the national conference, but what kind of communication do individual grant directors and staff have with other TAH grants in their state and region the rest of the year? Too often the answer is no communication or at best too little communication. In many states and regions, including my own state of California, TAH directors have taken steps to ensure regular communication and the sharing of information among themselves.

There are over 50 active TAH grants spread across California, which in case you haven't noticed is a pretty large state. In fact, it's an 850-mile drive from our northernmost TAH grant near the Oregon border to San Diego and attending our yearly statewide meeting requires a flight (or two) for most of us. I don't mention this merely to bore you with geographic facts you already know but to make a point—in a state or region the size of California, digital communication (a fancy term for email and the phone) is the key to keeping in contact and sharing information among the state's TAH directors and history professionals. And it is the key to creating real collaboration among the various TAH programs in a state or region.

Identify your state or region's TAH directors: The first step toward creating a collaborating group is to identify all the TAH directors in your target area. I've found the easiest way to do this is to contact your TAH supervisor in Washington, D.C., and ask for the current names, contact information, and email addresses for the state's TAH directors. What is listed on the Department of Education TAH website doesn't reflect changes in personnel. Once you have the names it is a matter of picking up the phone and/or sending an email. [Note: A state and national directory of TAH programs and personnel is now available on the National History Education Clearinghouse website.]

Start sending emails: If the longest journeys begin with one step, building a statewide TAH group begins with one email. Start by sharing information and ideas. I try to send my teachers a resource- and opportunity-laden email every few weeks. These emails might include information about summer Gilder Lehrman or NEH Landmarks of American History workshops along with information about state resources. For instance, I send a copy of the Constitutional Rights Foundation's This Month in History calendar each month. Whenever I send an email of this type, I send a second copy to the other California TAH directors to share with their teachers.

Hold a meeting: Some states like Louisiana and Florida do this quarterly, others such as California meet twice a year (once at the national meeting and once during the other semester). It all depends on your local circumstances. Agenda items can vary from state-specific issues to TAH-related issues. We invite the California Department of Education's history/social studies consultant to join our group because we feel it is important to include the state department of education in our communications—partly to ensure they know about TAH (which they didn't when we started this some years ago). Feel free to invite state or national park historians or speakers from nonprofits and other organizations to the meeting to share what they have to offer. Another idea is to meet at your state's Council for History Education or Council for Social Studies conferences—many TAH programs take teachers to these meetings so it is perfectly reasonable to ask the conference organizers (many who are involved in TAH) for the space to meet as a TAH group.

Take advantage of your own expertise: Make experienced TAH directors available to share their experience and resources with newer directors. This can all be done digitally. For instance, in past years we have shared copies of year-end reports and other report data among ourselves. When one grant unexpectedly found itself without an evaluator, the director was able to ask other directors for recommendations and in short order a suitable replacement was found.

Share resources: Grant directors have worked together to share the cost of bringing prominent speakers to California. For instance, a few years ago two TAH directors who lived about 250 miles apart collaborated to bring the Civil Right's icon Fred Shuttlesworth to speak to their teachers. Other grant directors collaborate on their summer travel—they share the cost of buses and speakers. Some grants invite each other's teachers to their sessions. I've heard that the four TAH directors in Louisiana have collaborated to create a standard teacher evaluation.

The key is to communicate—whether you meet quarterly or communicate exclusively by email; whether you communicate to discuss national or regional issues; whether you share curriculum or focus more on sharing practical advice. All it takes is a few phone calls and emails and a TAH director or small group of TAH directors willing to start the ball rolling.

On more than one occasion, teachers participating in our Teaching American History (TAH) project have speculated that one reason their middle school students often have trouble understanding historical texts may be because they have not yet developed the ability to imagine the past. Because they are young their experience is limited and many have yet to discover museums, historic houses, or other places of historical interest. In addition, the historical past is not immediately evident on the surface in New York City, where it is often difficult to see through the many layers of changes in the landscape and the built environment.

As a museum educator, I have been encouraging teachers to bring the tools of art history and material culture studies to their classrooms by presenting works of art and architecture, photographs, and historical artifacts to students. In this way, the definition of the primary source is expanded beyond the written word to include the visual and the tactile; the historical source material available for consideration and evaluation is greatly increased; and students are offered the possibility of a sensory as well as intellectual encounter with the past.

In periodic visits to art museums, historical collections, and historic houses in New York City, as well as in a series of after-school workshops, our group of middle school teachers has explored a range of art and artifacts with an eye toward conducting similar explorations with their students. Teachers are learning a process of investigation that involves observation, deduction, speculation, and interpretive analysis to uncover the meaning of art and objects.

The technique, standard in museum education, is simple and direct: It asks students (or anyone seriously approaching a work of art) to begin by describing the object, to analyze its structure, to consider the circumstance of its creation, and only then to propose an interpretation of the meaning of the piece.

Here are the basic guidelines for exploring a work of art or artifact of culture:

1. Sensory experience is at the heart of our interaction with works of art or artifacts of culture. Observe the piece for at least one full minute—this is surprisingly long for many students.

2. Take note of your first response. Aesthetic response is personal and often emotional. It deserves our attention. Here students can register their reaction and then set emotion and opinion aside.

3. Describe the work. Make note of the obvious in neutral language, e.g. "seated female figure in green dress, landscape background . . ." This constructs a visual/verbal inventory that serves to focus our viewing. It is especially important in conversational settings with students because we cannot assume that we all see the same things. Articulating the description brings everyone to a kind of consensus about what is being looked at.

Articulating the description brings everyone to a kind of consensus about what is being looked at.

4. The formal elements of a work of art or artifact of culture constitute the language by which it communicates. Analyze the piece by examining the use of line, shape, color, form, composition, format, medium, etc.

5. Consider the context where the work would originally have been seen; the purpose it might have served; the physical condition in which the work has survived; when, where, and by whom the piece was made; and the title. All of these conditions contribute to the meaning of an object.

6. Make historical connections. How does the piece connect with the broader historical context? Young students exercise their chronological thinking here to contextualize the piece at hand. Recalling contemporaneous events and issues, students consider how the object relates to the larger historical picture. Steps five and six often require additional research outside the object itself.

7. Reevaluate your response. Has it changed? Has it become more nuanced? Is it possible to appreciate the work on multiple levels (intellectual, emotional, historical)? Close reading of objects deepens our understanding of the historical past and teaches us to consider the evidence before forming opinions.

This process has been developed primarily for group conversations, the principal mode of teaching in the museum context. In the classroom or on a self-guided museum visit, teachers may have their students work individually or in small groups to create a written record of their investigations. This allows the students to choose the object of their investigations, either from the museum collection, a museum's online resource, or a collection of photographs or reproductions.

Whether in the classroom or the museum, requiring students, even reluctant artists, to draw their chosen object serves to slow down their observation process and forces them to notice all the aspects of the piece from overall structure to fine details. In this way, they are firmly grounded in the actuality of the object before advancing speculation about its function, meaning, or historical significance.

When conducted in a disciplined yet free-flowing and open-ended fashion in the hands of an experienced teacher, this type of engagement with art and artifacts empowers students to enjoy the materiality of the past, develop their powers of reasoning, make critical historical connections, and furnish their historical imaginations. It encourages students to propose possible alternative meanings and to develop the ability to hold multiple, sometimes contradictory interpretations simultaneously. This method provides authentic contact with art and artifacts and teaches close reading of objects, thereby engaging students in the type of work historians do on a daily basis.

At the very least, aesthetic experience can spark excitement and curiosity in students. Many times, teachers have remarked to me that a particular student who is not normally engaged in the classroom was very responsive to a work of art or more generally to the excitement of a museum visit.

A few years ago, I had an experience that forever convinced me of the value of this work. I was working with a group of 4th-grade students in a series of classroom visits in which we had looked at, considered, and discussed a variety of works in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. With the goals of sparking their curiosity, introducing the idea of connections between art, history, and culture and developing their critical-thinking skills, we looked at projected images of art and artifacts from Ancient Egypt, colonial America, and the modern period.

On a class visit to the museum, students were eager to encounter the real thing in person. As we made our way to our destination, Romare Bearden's six-panel collage entitled The Block, I could feel the excitement mounting. As the children seated themselves in front of the work on the floor there were murmurings of recognition among the students who remembered seeing photographs of the piece in their classroom. As I was about to invite the students to look quietly at the work, 10-year-old Leticia, who was normally very quiet in class, raised her hand impatiently, bursting to say what was on her mind. "I think art is about ideas," she said. "It's about the ideas the artist has—and those can change. And it's about the ideas we have when we look at it." This is precisely the lesson I wish to share with my TAH teachers and their students.