We here at Teachinghistory.org use the term a lot and you have probably heard it bandied about lately. But what does it mean? Why is it important to teaching history in the 21st century? And most importantly, what does teaching and learning historical thinking look like in the classroom?

In this first of a series of blogs about historical thinking, we identify resources that introduce and frame this complex set of processes. We also identify features here at Teachinghistory.org that you can explore to see what historical thinking looks like in real classroom lessons and materials.

We recommend starting with our seven-minute "What is Historical Thinking?" video available on our home page. In it we define historical thinking as the reading, analysis, and writing that is necessary to develop our understanding of the past.

The past is difficult to retrieve and these ways of reading and analysis help us write accurate stories about what happened and what those events meant. In the video we use the question, "How do we know what we know?" to frame historical thinking.

Five core components of historical thinking help us answer that question. These are:

1. Multiple Accounts & Perspectives
2. Analysis of Primary Documents
3. Sourcing
4. Understanding Historical Context
5. Claim-Evidence Connection

Frameworks like this one can help you and your students make sense of complex thinking processes. Use it to plan instruction and consider the kinds of tasks that students tackle in your classroom. Introduce it to your students and refer back to it as you teach lessons that incorporate these components.

Browse digital resources that offer related frameworks that can be used in the same way. This movie at Historical Thinking Matters introduces the nature of historical reading and includes a rationale for the civic importance of building your students' historical reading skills. Based on empirical research done by Stanford Professor Sam Wineburg, the video introduces and models four historical reading and thinking strategies: sourcing, contextualization, corroboration, and close reading. Continue exploring Historical Thinking Matters and the Stanford History Education Group website to find instructional resources for using this framework in middle and high school classrooms.

Check out this entry about the Historical Inquiry: Scaffolding Wise Practices in the History Classroom project produced by scholars at Virginia Tech. Explore video tutorials and text that demonstrate historical reading and thinking using their SCIM-C (summarizing, contextualizing, inferring, monitoring, corroborating) framework. While you’re there, browse their list of links to find related teaching materials.

Visit the Benchmarks of Historical Thinking produced by the Canadian Centre for Historical Consciousness for another helpful framework. Focused on six core concepts including historical significance and the ethical dimensions of history, this site includes lesson plans that show each concept in action.

Don’t forget the Historical Thinking Standards produced by UCLA’s National Center for History in the Schools. Chunked into five sets of skills, including chronological thinking and historical research capabilities, these standards identify composite skills that can help you conceptualize historical thinking in concrete and practical ways.

Investigate any of these frameworks to learn more about the nature of "historical thinking.” Consider using one of them to help you make choices about how you will scaffold and segment instruction and to help your students name and understand the thinking skills they will learn in your class.

Visit features here at Teachinghistory.org to see real-world examples of teaching for historical thinking. Browse Teaching in Action to see teachers and students engaged in classroom lessons that integrate historical thinking. Watch fourth-grade students closely analyze John Smith's 1612 map or secondary students use evidence from primary sources to discuss the Black Codes in the post Civil War South.

Explore Examples of Historical Thinking to see short videos of historians and students actively analyzing historical sources. Browse these to strengthen your understanding of these thinking processes and use them to model the same for your students.

Explore Lesson Plan Reviews to find K–12 lesson plans that have earned our gold seal of approval—each includes an aspect of teaching for historical thinking. Check out the rubric we use to evaluate these plans and notice the lesson descriptors that directly relate to historical thinking:

• Requires students to read and write
• Requires close reading and attention to source information
• Requires students to analyze or construct interpretations using evidence

Teaching Guides detail specific instructional approaches for building your students' historical thinking capabilities. Try this one about closely analyzing images with elementary students, this one about creating service projects with local history museums, or this one about coaching secondary students in writing thesis statements.

Don't miss our Teaching with Textbooks feature to find methods for challenging the textbook's privileged place as the final word in the classroom and helping students see it as one account among many.

There are many more resources at Teachinghistory.org for exploring the nature of historical thinking and how to teach for it. Because, yes, it is our mission to bring you quality resources for integrating this vital, engaging, and necessary aspect of understanding history into your classroom. So explore!

As you browse the Internet for sources, searching for photographs of this event or that monument, do you ever get frustrated by the ins and outs of copyright law? In most situations, it won't be an issue—images you choose to use won't go beyond your classroom and it's unlikely your students will question your adherence to the rules of fair use.

But what if you or your students are working on something that will travel beyond your classroom? Maybe your students are creating short digital documentaries, and you want to host the finished projects on a website—or even upload them to YouTube? Maybe you want students to create small websites themselves, or produce other types of presentations that will be shared with the public online?

Now you're talking distribution, and stakes go up a little. Before you get deep into the project, you may want to take the time to orient your students to copyright and public domain. Even if you doubt your students' work will draw a large audience or generate any rights challenges, consider this a teachable moment. In a world of easy downloading, it's possible your students have never thought about the complicated web of laws that surrounds every image they encounter every day.

A good place to start is Tales from the Public Domain: BOUND BY LAW?, a comic book created by Keith Aoki, James Boyle, and Jennifer Jenkins for the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain. In this good-natured tour of copyright law, the main character, Akiko, just wants to make a documentary about a day in the life of New York City. What challenges will she face, and does she have the right to use the images she captures? Remember that this comic came out in 2006, and copyright laws are constantly changing!

After this orientation to thinking about copyright, ask your students to consider places they might find images. Take a look around some of the major online public archives, like the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Collection or the National Archives and Research Administration's ARC.

Have students search for topics both historical and contemporary, and see what the entries for the images they turn up say about copyright. "No known restrictions on publication?" "Unrestricted?" Images created before 1923 should be in the public domain, free of copyright restrictions, as should images created by government organizations. More recent sources may note copyright restrictions, including specific caveats about how a source may be reproduced.

Compare the copyright notices on the Library of Congress and NARA's sites to those on sites that make copyright restriction on their images clear, such as the National Geographic Photo Collection or Getty Images. Are these sites archives in the same way the Library of Congress and NARA's collections are? What information do they provide about their images? What seems to be their purpose in providing the images?

Another informative stop might be Yahoo's Flickr. Type any word in the search box and you'll come up with thousands of images taken by photographers worldwide, from amateurs to professionals. Looking for a modern-day image of a historic site to contrast with a historical image? A picture of a monument or memorial, a museum or a work of art? Chances are, you'll find it here. But the social nature of the site doesn't mean copyright doesn't apply to these images! Check out the license information in the right-hand column. Are all rights reserved? Or does the photo have a Creative Commons license? (Flickr's Advanced Search lets you search just for Creative Commons-licensed images.)

After all of this, are you or your students still having a difficult time finding a usable image of something or somewhere? Maybe you need a picture of the casters on the back of the main statue on the FDR Memorial in Washington, DC, or a photo of the interior of the Old Stone House at the Manassas National Battlefield Park. Many people have worked to fill in gaps in the documentation of our history and the world around us, today and in the past. For instance, during the New Deal, photographers for the Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information took thousands of photographs of people and places all across the U.S.—government creations that were (and still are) largely in the public domain. Today, individuals like photographer Carol Highsmith donate their photographs to the public domain. Inspired by Frances Benjamin Johnston, an early female photographer who gave many of her photographs to the Library of Congress, Highwater plans to spend more than a decade travelling the U.S., taking photographs that she will give to the Library of Congress as public-domain donations.

Now that your students understand how tricky it may be to find sources that can be freely used to tell the story of history, they're in a position to help out, themselves! What historic sites or other traces of history exist in your local area? Are there Creative Commons-licensed images of these on, say, Flickr? If not, how about collecting some? Students can help fill in the gaps in our public record of place and time, and add to the resources available to students like themselves.

Ready for spring? How about summer? It's never too early to start planning ahead for professional development. Historical societies, museums, libraries, and other institutions across the nation offer workshops, seminars, conferences, and more for U.S. history educators. Visit the websites of your local and state institutions to see what they're planning, and check out these offerings from national institutions:

• American Bar Association and Federal Judicial Center:
  Offer a week-long institute on federal trials and great debates in U.S. history. Applications are due by Mar. 1, 2013.
• Bill of Rights Institute:
  Offers a week-long Founders Fellowship for high school teachers, Jul. 22-26. Fellows explore the intersection of civil and economic liberty in lectures, discussions, and site visits in Washington, DC. Fellows receive a $400 travel stipend, as well as $100 upon completion of post-program activities. Applications are due by Mar. 26, 2013.
• Civil War Trust:
  Offers two-day regional institutes and one four-day national institute. Institutes require a refundable registration deposit. Registration begins February 2013 for the national institute.
• C-SPAN Classroom:
  Offers a four-week fellowship for middle and high school teachers. Participants will develop teaching materials using C-SPAN's resources. Fellows receive a $7,000 award. Registration ends Feb. 8, 2013.
• Dirksen Congressional Center:
  Offers a week-long workshop on teaching about Congress for middle and high school teachers. Requires a nonrefundable $135 registration fee.
• Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History:
  Offers week-long seminars for full-time K–12 teachers. Seminars take place at locations across the U.S. and treat topics from the era of George Washington to 9/11. Requires a nonrefundable $25 registration fee; participants can also register to receive graduate credit. Applications are due by Feb. 15, 2013.
• Library of Congress:
  Offers summer teacher institutes. Applications are due Feb. 4, 2013.
• National Archives and Records Administration:
  Offers "Primarily Teaching" workshops for upper elementary- through college-level educators. Workshops introduce teachers to the holdings of the Archives and techniques for using them with students. Requires $100 nonrefundable fee, with graduate credit available for an additional fee.
• National Endowment for the Humanities:
  Offers two- to five-week seminars and three- to five-week institutes for K–12 educators as well as week-long workshops on landmarks of U.S. history and culture (see the full listing). Seminars, institutes, and workshops cover a wide range of topics and emphasize introducing participants to the scholarly process. Provides stipends from $1,200 to $4,500. Applications are due by Mar. 4, 2013.
• Smithsonian American Art Museum:
  Offers the Clarice Smith National Teacher Institutes, week-long institutes for 6–12 teachers featuring strategies for connecting art, language arts, and social studies. Requires $200 nonrefundable fee, with graduate credit available for an additional fee; $500 scholarships available. Applications are due by Apr. 1, 2013.
• Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture:
  Together with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, offers a free online conference, "Oh Freedom!," on teaching African American civil rights history with art. The conference will take place on Feb. 6, 2013; register on the website to participate.