On February 13th, National History Day (NHD), a year-long, nationwide contest that challenges students to hone their historical thinking, research, and interpretation skills, received the 2011 National Humanities Medal. Presented by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the medal "honors individuals or groups whose work has deepened the nation's understanding of the humanities, broadened our citizens' engagement with the humanities, or helped preserve and expand Americans' access to important resources in the humanities." This marks the first time a K–12 education program has received the medal, according to a press release.

Interested in learning more about the program? Your first stop should be the National History Day website. Then come back to Teachinghistory.org to read what our teacher-writers have to say about their NHD experiences! Eighth-grade teacher Amy Trenkle loves the website and documentary categories, which ask students to practice 21st-century skills in their NHD presentations (read her thoughts). Mike Yell, 7th-grade teacher and former National Council for the Social Studies president, recommends using the program as a differentiation option for self-directed students (read more here).

Are you and your students already involved in NHD? Do they have questions about historical thinking and research? Do you? Remember that anyone can submit questions to Ask a Master Teacher, Ask a Historian, and Ask a Digital Historian here at Teachinghistory.org. In the past, we've answered questions about aligning NHD to state social studies standards and given tips on places to begin research and steps in developing a research topic.

Congratulations, National History Day!

It's February! Resources throughout the web stand ready to provide you with lessons and primary source materials for Black History Month (also known as African American History Month), but African American history stretches far beyond the confines of one month and the narrative litany of a handful of cultural heroes. Maybe you want to go beyond Martin Luther King, Jr., Frederick Douglass, and Jackie Robinson. What stories can you uncover beyond the headlining stories textbooks provide? Remind your students of the complexity of African American history with these resources.

• The New York Times' lesson plan "Stories to Tell: Curating an African-American History Exhibit" introduces students to the difficulties in curating a large museum—or even just one exhibit. How can curators for the developing Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture create a museum that honors all of African American history?
• Search the Carnegie Museum of Art's Teenie Harris Archive Project for photographs taken by photographer Charles "Teenie" Harris for the Pittsburgh Courier. Published from 1907 to 1965, the Courier was a major African American newspaper, and these photographs show Harris's journalistic perspective on Pittsburgh events of all scales. Use the keywords "Teenie Harris," along with others related to your topic of interest, to find images of life at school, home, community events, church, work, and out on the town.
• The Smithsonian National Museum of American History's Portraits of a City provides a similar photographic record of a place. The Scurlocks ran studios in DC for much of the 20th century, documenting African American life in the nation's capital.
• The Library of Congress's American Memory collection The African American Experience in Ohio, 1850-1920 focuses on the themes of slavery, politics, and religion. Its wide range of primary-source documents, including thousands of newspaper articles, can help students construct a view of just what the collection's title implies.
• High-quality photographs in the National Archives and Records Administration's "Pictures of African Americans During World War II" could give students a look into another kind of community—one that formed both overseas and on the home front during war.

If none of these resources fit into your curriculum or spark your interests, there's plenty where they came from. Search our Website Reviews using the topic "African Americans," and you'll turn up close to 300 websites, on topics ranging from Marcus Garvey to the construction of race to Seattle's Black Panthers to sheet music by and about African Americans. Or test your African American history knowledge in our weekly quiz feature! You and your students can take online quizzes on African American baseball players and other athletes, the historical accuracy of the film Glory, Jim Crow laws, and foodways.

You can also explore the African American History Month pages of history and educational organizations, including:

• The Library of Congress
• EDSITEment
• Verizon Thinkfinity
• Smithsonian Museum of American History and History Explorer
• Scholastic
• The History Channel
• Biography.com

For a time early in my teaching career, I lived in the historically black neighborhood in St. Augustine, FL, known as Lincolnville, which had been the home to prominent black civil rights leaders Henry and Katherine "Kat" Twine as well as the location of several stops by Martin Luther King, Jr. during the 1950s and 1960s. About three blocks from my house was the Excelsior School which served black students from the neighborhood and surrounding areas from the early 20th century to the late 1960s. I passed by the building every day on my way to teach history at a high school some 30 years after integration. After living in the neighborhood, I learned that the Excelsior building had ceased operation as a school after the 1967–68 school year when its students were finally integrated. The state took over the building some time after and used it for offices during the 1980s, but it was vacant for much of the decade before I moved into the area.

I had an idea to use a room or two in the building to provide some after-school tutoring. You see, several of my students lived in this neighborhood. Some had struggled academically and a few had dropped out. I would see them, unemployed and idle on the streets at all hours. This neighborhood, which had seen hard times economically and socially since its heyday in the 1950s as an African American business hub was, by then, riddled with drugs and occasional violence. My goal was to operate a class to prepare my former students and any other neighbors for a high school diploma through the GED test. In my search for access to this historic building I learned that a former teacher and school board member was just beginning the process of renovating the property to become a museum and cultural center for the neighborhood. As I began the program, I learned more about the school and the education its teachers provided. I learned that many prominent black leaders were educated at this school. I learned that (when allowed) this school not only competed favorably with surrounding white schools in athletics, but academics as well. The artifacts, including photographs, newspaper articles, and yearbooks that were being gathered for the museum, presented a vibrant school with classroom and hallway walls covered in empowering posters and exemplary student work, a decorated debate team, Latin club, and more.

As a history teacher I was intrigued. The narrative of segregated education as presented in the textbook I used showed none of this. In my undergraduate studies in history education, I learned little beyond the traditional narrative. My students came away from my classroom with the idea that, without qualification, black schools were inferior, and I was complicit in their misunderstanding. The message was that only with integration were black students given the opportunity to get a quality education. I realized that this message failed to dig deep enough. It failed to present the complexities that existed in these disparate systems, to recognize the education that was occurring in spite of remarkable challenges. Students need opportunities to challenge the traditional narrative, and this topic is well suited to illustrate that opportunity.

Since my time at Excelsior, I have had the opportunity to talk with some former students, teachers, and administrators who shared stories from their time there. What I found from these interviews echoed the themes discovered by Vanessa Siddle Walker in her extraordinary meta-analysis of articles related to segregated schools from the Fall 2000 issue of the American Educational Research Association journal. Her findings showed that schools in segregated communities were not only centers of education but also often fundamental to neighborhood cohesiveness. Along with fostering nurturing learning environments with high academic expectations, these schools often served as community centers, social gathering places, and information hubs.

In the interest of presenting our students with a more inclusive history, teachers can presents sources to students that challenge the idea that the black community was incapable of providing quality education to their students and that only through integration into the white school system were black students able to receive a worthwhile education. With review of articles such as Siddle Walker's, teachers themselves can become more knowledgeable about the historiography of segregated education beyond the traditional narrative. Through examination of web resources from the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and others, teachers can show that even in the face of inadequate facilities and tremendous societal discrimination, many of these schools educated generations of future teachers, doctors, lawyers, civil rights leaders, and informed and active democratic citizens with constructive learning environments and challenging curriculum. For instance, "Education Resources on School Desegregation" on the National Archives website provides useful resources as well as implementation ideas and strategies for the classroom.

Allowing students the chance to discover sources for themselves, which open up this more nuanced paradigm, can also serve as an entry into this topic and provide experience in moving beyond the textbook when examining the past. Students may begin by using keywords such as "segregation and education" in the Library of Congress site to get started in their search to challenge the traditional narrative of African American education.

The notion that a segregated school system is moral or even tenable is nonsensical. Schools that educated black children during the Jim Crow era struggled with inferior facilities and resources. However, in the spirit of good history, teachers have an opportunity, within the theme of racial segregation, to challenge the traditional narrative that separate and unequal education extended to the abilities and desires of teachers, administrators, and parents to provide their students with quality education.

As you enter a classroom ask yourself this question: "If there were no students in the room, could I do what I am planning to do?" If your answer to the question is yes, don't do it. (
—General Ruben Cubero [1])

This quote says a lot about the types of teaching strategies that we should use as history teachers. A passive lecture can be given in an empty room, a PowerPoint explained, a worksheet passed out, or even a reading assigned; but you cannot engage with an empty room. An empty room cannot inquire into an historical event, idea, or person. Because interaction and engagement are the climate to set in a history class, the focus must be on more than teacher-led presentations. A lot more.

As history teachers, we know the importance of having our students wrestle intellectually with primary sources, i.e., learn to investigate history using the words and ideas of people of the past. However, it is essential that we keep in mind that the use of primary sources must be part of larger investigations in the history classroom, just as it is with historians. In an interview for Social Education, Professor Keith Barton told me “[primary sources] are not meaningful in their own right; they’re just a means to an end—they’re evidence in a broader investigation.” (2)

When you make the decision to use primary sources within a broader unit, how can they best be presented to students? Over the years, both as a secondary history teacher and now a middle school history teacher, I have found two strategies combined help students make the best use of primary sources in the context of the investigations we are conducting in class.

The first strategy that I combine to help my students understand and interact with primary sources is the DBQ strategy. DBQs, Document-Based Questions, have been long used in Advanced Placement exams. A DBQ asks students to analyze a series of six or so textual and visual primary sources in order to write an essay that addresses a historical question. (3) One adaptation that I make with DBQs in my teaching is that I do not use them as an assessment so much as a strategy for instruction with a unit.

To do this, I fold the ideas behind a particular DBQ together with the teaching strategy known as Response Groups. The Response Groups strategy was developed by the Teachers’ Curriculum Institute as a part of the History Alive! program. In this strategy students receive written and/or pictorial information and consider open-ended questions on that material. Presenters are then chosen to share their group’s ideas prior to opening the discussion to the entire class.

As an example of one of my uses of the strategy, I will site my lesson The Roman Antecedents of American Government. (4) In this lesson, my 7th graders, in groups of three or four, receive a folder with two papers with primary source quotations and visuals. The lesson has students examine the writing of a well-known Roman historian (Polybius) on the nature of government in the Roman Republic. The second paper contains quotations from the Federalist Papers. Both papers also contain visual elements (a picture of a statue of Polybius, a photocopy of a section of the Federalist Papers, and a painting of Alexander Hamilton).

In putting these two excellent strategies together, I make the following adaptations: (1) rather than use six or more documents in the DBQ, I use two or three, and (2) in addition to having written questions that I have developed to which the students respond after examining the sources, as done in both DBQs and Response Groups, I have students develop some questions as well that they wish to pursue prior to examining the sources.

On the face of it, developing questions prior to examining documents might appear difficult, but if you have heightened students’ interest in the historical period/question being studied, discussing what they wonder about out loud isn't problematic. Students developing their own questions is, of course, a basic premise of Donna Ogle’s KWL strategy—what students Know, what they Want to know, and what they have Learned.

1. Collect materials for group activity
   Essential to the response group is to have primary source information for students to read and react to. It's not hard to find social studies and history curriculum materials ripe with these types of resources. In addition to the Internet and sites like Teachinghistory.org and the Stanford History Education Group, excellent commercial curricular materials are available from organizations such as Jackdaw, the National Center for History in the Schools, and the DBQ Project.
   
   In developing the sources for examining the connections between the governing system of the Roman Republic, I did an Internet search on Roman government until I found the writings of Polybius. Finding quotations from the Federalist Papers was, of course, no problem.
2. In addition to the questions that are developed by the teacher, consider having students design group questions for the source material in order to guide their investigation
   As mentioned above, my preference has been to have my students develop some of the questions that they wish to explore (as is done in the KWL strategy). This way, the primary source materials become a part of the investigation. The development of questions by the groups for their own consideration is very important in this strategy, as it lays the groundwork for the subsequent work and discussion. The questions should be stated in an open-ended manner in order to invite discussion among the students in the group, and, later, within the entire class.
   
   As an example, an open-ended question that I have developed in the paper on Polybius is why do you feel that Polybius felt that the powers of the Roman government must be divided. This is the type of question that is referred to as “an author and me” (5) question in that the quotation that I have chosen does not specifically state the reason Polybius felt the powers of government must be divided.
3. Ask groups to report to the class
   After the groups have had time to discuss the questions and write their answers, it is time for the whole class discussion to begin. There are a number of ways to facilitate this discussion, but my preference is to use a strategy such as Numbered Heads Together. (6)
   
   During the discussion, it is important to encourage groups, and the whole class, to respond to each others’ ideas. This can be done by asking the presenters from each group to begin with “We agree/disagree with your idea because…” or by asking presenters who have not yet spoken to consider the ideas already mentioned and respond to them.
4. Individual response
   In concluding a lesson that utilizes this strategy, students should engage in individual writing about the ideas generated in the groups and the discussion.
   
   While students are working together with the primary sources, the key expectation of the teacher is the growth of each student. For this reason the cooperative learning principle of individual accountability should be incorporated in response to group work. An individual writing assignment can provide this element.

As a believer in using primary sources with my 7th-grade students, and as a practicing teacher I am in agreement with Professors Sam Wineburg and Daisy Martin when they write that we must strive to provide all students with access to the rich voices of the past. (7) This means judicious adaptation of those sources and quotations so that students have access to them while explaining what I have adapted and how I have done it. I also show them (via my Smartboard) the original source. Using primary sources is important in the teaching of history, not as an end in itself but as a means to involve students in investigation and inquiry into historical topics. Melding the basic ideas of DBQs and Response Groups and adapting them in your own classroom is a wonderful way to have your students grapple with the ideas provoked by what they study.

As classroom teachers, we often have a textbook we use in our curriculum. In my next blog, I will share a strategy that I have found most helpful in helping students think about, interact with, and get meaning from their text.