This website shows an 8th-grade teacher in Maryland teaching a lesson based on Civil War letters. Source Analysis, a feature created for the Montgomery County (Maryland) TAH website, has three sections focused on these primary sources: Scholar Analysis, Teacher Analysis, and Classroom Practice. The latter two sections show a lesson that asks students to examine what a Union and a Confederate soldier thought about the Emancipation Proclamation. In order to investigate this, the teacher asks students to study two letters written by soldiers during the Civil War. This series of videos provides examples of two promising practices:

• Using primary sources to represent perspectives missing from the textbook and contextualize an historical event; and
• Using focus questions to help students read primary sources purposefully.

In the Classroom Practice section, we see the lesson in action. Students are introduced to the letters and asked to transcribe the two handwritten letters they are working with. The teacher then points out two major themes in the letters: why soldiers were fighting the war and their opinions about the Emancipation Proclamation.

The teacher asks students to summarize the letters, reminding them that they have their textbooks, him, and the dictionary as resources. Students are further asked to analyze the letters for at least "five good points" made by the authors of the letters and generate questions about these sources. After students have consulted in groups, the teacher leads a discussion where they fill in a Venn diagram comparing the two letters and the soldiers' perspectives on the significance of the Emancipation Proclamation. Throughout this lesson, the teacher helps students think about the context within which these letters were written. Students see that the Emancipation Proclamation's significance for these soldiers was less about freeing the slaves and more about the effects it could have on the war and the safety of their families. Also on this site is a Teacher Analysis section in which the teacher explains some of what preceded this lesson and his instructional choices—a useful complement to the classroom videos. Each of these sections presents information in a set of videos that are clearly titled and visually interesting.

This 11th-grade honors U.S. history class, using Reading Apprenticeship techniques developed by WestEd, shows students engaged in the process of reading primary source documents as a means of better understanding the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. The students in this video are in an honors classroom. The class is in an ethnically, linguistically, and economically diverse school in a high immigrant, rural community. This video provides examples of two promising practices:

• Putting students in pairs to conduct "read aloud/think aloud" work
• Providing students with strategic vocabulary for reading primary sources

Students in this lesson are in the middle of a week-long unit on Japanese American internment. Focusing on the question of the constitutionality of relocating and interning these citizens, students read several primary source documents, including the Constitution and opinions from Korematsu vs. the United States, a 1944 Supreme Court case challenging the internment.

Students work together in pairs to summarize excerpts from the Constitution relevant to the internment. They take turns reading aloud to each other and talk through the process of reading. As they do, they verbalize their reading and thinking processes, defining terms, connecting the text to prior knowledge, analyzing the meaning of the text, and asking questions about difficult passages as they go.

Before, during, and after her students read, the instructor signals key terms that need definition (e.g., ex post fact, bill of attainder, vested). While the read aloud/think aloud strategy helps students make sense of difficult texts, they still need assistance with advanced language and sophisticated concepts. By identifying and defining key terms for students, the instructor helps them decode the documents.

Many teachers ask students to read primary source documents. But students often struggle with complex language and difficult concepts, often missing the connection with the material they are studying. What makes this class unique is the way the instructor structures the class in order to support student reading.