A great place to start is Oakland Unified's History and Social Studies page, specifically the left column on the page. The site offers historical questions with assessments and support materials designed to improve historical reading, writing, and thinking. Examples available were designed for the 8th and 11th grades, but the concepts can be applied to any age group.

Another place to look for performance assessments that focus on historical analysis is the College Board's website. Their "Sample Questions and Scoring Guidelines" page has free response questions—"Document Based Questions"—and scoring guidelines dating back for the past several AP US History exams.

The thematic essay from the New York Regents exam is also worth a look. It's a good example of a written assessment that asks students to apply the skills of historical analysis, and the "United States History and Government" page has tests from the past several years. The page includes a scoring key and rating guide that specifically looks at the thematic essay, and which includes a wide selection of student responses.

Benchmarks of Historical Thinking, a Canadian website, is also a good resource. They have a number of lessons available online, which include evaluation rubrics and examples of student work. This example, for instance, is an assignment that asks students to write a letter to a Holocaust survivor and includes attachments, such as the task description at the bottom of the page.

Historical Thinking Matters also has tasks and examples of student work. Their "Teacher Materials and Strategies" page gives you access to four thematic topics, each of which has examples of student responses to historical prompts that ask them to use primary sources as evidence. Two examples of student work for each topic, like this essay and this essay about the Spanish-American War, or like this essay and this essay about the Scopes trial, are also useful tools.

UPDATE (Oct. 26, 2012): Be sure to check out the Stanford History Education Group's Beyond the Bubble, a user-friendly site where you can find shorter assessments, interactive rubrics, examples of student work, and a video about how to construct your own.

There are several textbook-y resources available that we like. Consider the readers in the Bedford Series in History and Culture. Three of these paperback readers address Native American history, including The Cherokee Removal and The World Turned Upside Down: Indian Voices from Early America. Each of the readers begins with an introductory essay that provides an overview narrative of the topic and its historiographical context. Following this essay are selected primary and secondary sources accompanied by orienting background information. Depending on the ages and abilities of your students, these readers can serve as a resource for creating source-based activities and lectures, or for older and more capable students, they can be a kind of textbook. However, be forewarned, if you are working with younger students, you will likely need to further excerpt and prepare many of the provided sources.

For a lengthier survey textbook that is popular and worth investigating, try First Peoples by Colin G. Calloway. Also consider the documentary series, We Shall Remain, a recent entry in the excellent PBS series, The American Experience. You can find teaching activities and full episodes on the series’ companion website. Also see this blog for links related to this series. All of these resources can help you craft lessons that emphasize both the diversity of Native Americans and the fact that they are still with us today—two ideas that challenge many students’ misconceptions about this topic.

The National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC offers a variety of resources about American Indian history including workshops for teachers.

For resources you can use with students, see our response to a teacher who asked about classroom resources for teaching a Native American history course.

We also recommend contacting local tribes and organizations directly to see what resources they recommend that you use to learn about their history. Below are some organizations you might consider:

In Connecticut, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center provides a wealth of resources. They offer professional development to teachers as well. The center also offers workshops on how to evaluate books and other materials about Native Americans and have several educational programs for students based on the Connecticut Curriculum framework. The center designs workshops based on teacher interest as well. The Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center provides a recommended reading list and a research library.

If you will be in Minnesota for the summer you may want to check out the American Indian Policy Center in St. Paul and The Minnesota Indian Affairs Council. These organizations offer resources, and can most likely direct you to additional educational resources.

You can search the NHEC site for relevant local museums, websites, and professional development opportunities. If you have not done so already, remember to also check the course offerings at your local colleges.

The breadth/depth question is a central one in history education, but may be compounded in world history where there is so much breadth, and the possibilities for depth are seemingly endless. Teaching with cases (as you've been doing) can be an excellent strategy for tackling this dilemma in world history. However, case studies can sometimes seem episodic or isolated to students who do not fully understand what the cases they are studying are "cases of."

It is important, then, to also introduce students to the larger global or interregional patterns in world history. Understanding these patterns will allow students to make more sense of the cases that they encounter. However, classroom resources (such as the textbook) do not always provide a coherent global narrative that explains these patterns. Although there is no one agreed-upon story of the world’s history, there are several resources that can help teachers (and students) understand a big global picture. For example, the book This Fleeting World by David Christian presents a history of the world in 92 pages. Certainly there are things left out, but, in doing so, Christian has written a coherent history on the largest scale—a story that teachers can add to with investigations of events at smaller scales. Similarly the book World History: The Big Eras (a companion to the World History For Us All (WHFUA) website) includes essays focusing on large-scale global patterns that teachers can use to inform course design and assessments.

Understanding the big picture in world history is one thing, but how should we represent it to our students while also guiding them to go into more depth?

One way is to introduce an historical era, instructional unit, or even a school year by first teaching the larger global or interregional story. The World History For Us All (WHFUA) website has freely available PowerPoint slide shows that portray this type of global overview of a particular era (see here for an example). These slide shows can be modified for one's own classroom, and many teachers find them extremely useful for framing units of study. The patterns or themes that such a presentation sets up can then be used throughout the unit when discussing particular cases. Students can hold each historical case they study up to scrutiny based on the larger global or interregional patterns (e.g., is this a "case of" the larger pattern? Why or why not? How does this case compare to others?). Returning to the global patterns throughout a unit of study is crucial and this can be accomplished by frequently revisiting part or all of the opening presentation. By the end of a unit, students should be able to use the cases they have studied to provide examples and non-examples of the patterns and themes presented at the beginning of the unit.

An important aspect of this work is the use of questions. You mention having essential questions for each of the cases you present to your students. Essential questions can be extremely useful, but, perhaps surprisingly, when it comes to developing them, less can truly be more. Having one central question that can hook students and organize a unit, semester, or even a year can often be more effective than using lists of essential questions for each lesson or unit. Moreover, developing a central question that relates to a particular global pattern for a particular era can help students with their analyses of connected cases. For example, for a unit on global industrialization, you might ask, "How was the Industrial Revolution a global process?" As students explore cases of industrialism around the world, they can continually return to the question to see how the cases relate to the global pattern of industrialism (or not). The question also addresses a common misconception that the Industrial Revolution was solely a European and North American event.

Of course, you will always ask students additional questions in your lessons and units, but having students focus on one central question will allow them to better focus on making connections between unit content. Last, a well-designed central question can serve as a final assessment of students' understanding of the content of a unit, semester, or year.

There are several web-based resources that can help teachers decide what cases might be particularly rich for an historical era as well as what global or interregional patterns should be highlighted. The WHFUA website includes lessons at different scales: panorama (at a global or interregional scale), landscape, and closeup (often in-depth case studies). As mentioned above, the accompanying WHFUA book provides essays and discussion questions for each of nine eras in the curriculum. Although geared toward AP and college students, The Bridging World History website, can provide ideas for how to structure units for all students using large global patterns and specific case studies (the sample question I mention above is from the site). The site also includes interviews with historians around particular topics and provides primary and secondary source readings and images (click here for an example).

The key component to all of this work is to be able to move back and forth between smaller and larger scales so that students see how local or national events connect to larger interregional or global patterns. This is certainly not easy, but it is made more manageable by setting up global and interregional frameworks and then using carefully chosen case studies that provide examples or non-examples of the larger historical patterns.

Good luck with this important work!

To some extent the answer to this question depends on the age of the children you are teaching. Given the abstract nature of maps, formal introduction to map skills is likely best done after age six. For these young learners, I suggest that you look at the newly redesigned National Geographic Education website that includes a mini-lesson on "What is a Map." This lesson introduces the concept of a map as a simplified model of reality. From there one of the best ways to introduce map reading is to create a map of a familiar area (such as the classroom) together. That and other elementary geography projects can be found on this teacher-created site.

For slightly older students map skills should include learning the vocabulary of maps: words and concepts such as legends, scales, and compass roses. Instruction can also begin to focus on the concept that mapmakers must be selective and can show only a limited number of things on each map. Try this lesson from the United States Geological Survey that gets to this point. In any case, it is important to teach students about maps and how to use them before asking them to read and analyze content-specific maps.

Once students have a basic understanding of maps, teachers can begin to explore the use of maps to highlight important historical concepts. Elementary school is not too early to begin this type of lesson. A video example of using maps to teach history in a 4th-grade classroom can be explored here. The main goal in this lesson is to engage students in actively asking questions of the primary source document (in this case John Smith's map of Tidewater Virginia) and interpreting and understanding what they are seeing.

The Library of Congress has a large collection of maps that can be used for historical study. The site also has a self-directed professional development module for teachers about how to access and use maps in social studies lessons. This module is useful if you are new to using maps to teach history. To learn even more about what to look for in historical maps I encourage you to read the short demonstration essay "Making Sense of Maps" by David Stephens of Youngstown State University.

High school students with weaker geography backgrounds may require a review of terms and fundamental spatial concepts. But it is even more important for this age group for you to teach dynamic geographic analysis skills. See this Teaching Guide that includes an easy-to-use 12-step handout to guide questioning about a map. It not only lists what to look for in a map, but also engages students in asking their own questions about what is represented (and what is not) and how that influences our understanding of the map. As with other print media, students must learn to ask why was this document made, for whom, and in what context.

Finally, I am excited by the new uses for older maps that are afforded by the new Geographical Information Systems (GIS) technologies. An example of a high school lesson plan using interactive mapping features can be found here. This is just one of several history lesson plans based on GIS technology that are becoming available.

In sum, a myriad of historical maps can now be found on the Internet and their use is just beginning to be fully explored by teachers. There are so many kinds of maps. Let your imagination run free. Become familiar with the types of materials that are out there and the ways in which they might be used and then try them out with your classes. A good starting point for looking for maps can be found online here, here, and here as well as at the Library of Congress. As a geography buff, I love the number and quality of teaching materials that are now available. Kids like to work with maps and geography is fun to teach. Good luck!

It’s exciting that you are engaging your second graders in historical source analysis! I encourage you not to worry too much about making distinctions between types of sources at this age, as teaching critical reading of all texts is the most important goal. The primary versus secondary issue might be distracting. For lessons and resources to engage your second graders in historical analysis, you may wish to start on the Bringing History Home (BHH) website. BHH lesson plans engage children in history as interpretive and evidence-based. The lessons center on five skills for doing history:

1. Reading accounts for historical context (BHH uses a great deal of historical fiction).
2. Analyzing original sources.
3. Constructing timelines.
4. Mapping historic events and trends.
5. Synthesizing to create historic accounts.

The BHH 2nd-grade unit topics are U.S. immigration and environmental history. Each of the classroom-tested units focuses on engaging students in analyzing and synthesizing multiple accounts and has a variety of activities for introducing historical concepts, events, and perspectives. The project website provides free lesson plans and public domain primary sources. The only purchases necessary to implement the curriculum are the trade books used in the lessons. These may be purchased from online bookstores.

If you are eager to search for primary and secondary sources, but unsure how to find them—or simply require inspiration in order to utilize sources once you locate them—try visiting some of the following sites.

• On the General Resources view of the BHH site, you will find source analysis guides, as well as book lists and links to websites where you can enhance your own knowledge of the unit topics.
• The BHH Selected History Website view includes links to collections of sources in various formats, such as audio files, games, artifacts, etc.
• Photos and other visual images are typically the most accessible original sources for young children to analyze. The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog is easy to search and often yields a treasure trove of resources.
• The Kids.gov database links to history teaching resources provided by various U.S. government agencies, such as the Library of Congress and Smithsonian Institute.

Teachinghistory.org is also a treasure trove for resources:

• See this set of resources about primary and secondary sources.
• Visit this post to learn about what constitutes a primary source, as well as this one on secondary sources.
• Learn effective methods to analyze and annotate primary and secondary sources by clicking here.

Before you decide to use any online resource, I encourage you to scrutinize it carefully for perspective and integrity. Catherine Denial, Assistant Professor of History at Knox College in Galesburg, IL, wrote a brief guide for analyzing websites. For your purposes, sometimes you will find a site that does not meet criteria for integrity but it will include links to sites that do. It’s fine to take advantage of this scenario.

Using common sense and careful analysis as you prowl the web, you will find excellent resources to engage your second graders in history.

Like most state standards, the California history-social studies content standards provide an outline of content and skills that all students should “know and be able to do.” The standards purposefully avoid pedagogy, leaving all decisions regarding how to teach the standards to teachers.

Pedagogy, however, is addressed in the Department of Education’s primary curriculum document for history education – the History-Social Science Framework. The latest edition of the Framework, stalled in the adoption process due to a lack of funding but available on-line, is meant to help teachers and administrators implement the standards. Check out the Framework’s new chapters on instruction and differentiated instruction as they provide several suggestions for “teaching the standards.”

Content Knowledge

When planning to teach any historical topic a good place to start is to develop your own content knowledge. Go beyond simply reading about the topic in the textbook and establish deeper contextual knowledge of the period. If possible, familiarize yourself with the historiographical debates surrounding the topic. This work can be done largely on-line. A good place to start is the Gilder Lehrman web-site, which includes several, short “guided readings” on World War I and the 1920s that are helpful for developing content knowledge. Similarly, you might also check out Digital History’s short essays on the Jazz Age.

Backward Planning
Before lesson planning, consider how you might embed this material in a larger unit of study - in this case, a unit on the effects of World War 1 or the 1920s. Follow a backwards design process by first establishing the learning goals and objectives for the unit. To do this, think about how post-war literature and art relate to other topics mentioned in standard 10.6 – for example, the “widespread disillusionment with pre-war institutions, authorities, and values” (10.6.3), and the “effects of the war on…population movement, the international economy, and shifts in the geographical and political borders of Europe and the Middle East" (10.6.2).

Lesson Plan: Investigating a Standards-Based Question

One approach for teaching this standard is to investigate it as a historical question: How did World War One influence literature, art, and intellectual life? Or, perhaps, How did artists interpret and depict the consequences of World War One? Begin by providing students some background content on pre-war art movements (e.g., realism and modernism) and information on artists who emerged out of the war. Next, have students examine a number of artifacts that address the question from different perspectives and genres. The standard includes some places to start searching for documents – namely, Picasso, Stein, and Hemingway. You might also take a look at T.S Eliot’s The Wasteland and Otto Dix’s painting, Assault By Gas (1924). Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) includes some vividly dark recollections of the war and Wilfred Owens’ Dulce Et Decorum Est (How Sweet It Is) (1921) satirically captures the horrors of trench warfare. It is important here to excerpt strategically - include short passages of written work that speak directly to the lesson’s historical question.

Collaboration
Finally, yet perhaps most importantly, this standard is unique in that it promotes collaboration between history and English classes. If you are teaching a 9th or 10th grade world history course, seek out the members of your English department to see if they teach, or might be willing the teach, any literature of the “lost generation.”

Music can be a great resource for American history teachers. Just like textual primary sources, songs have historical meaning that students have to work to uncover. A song, no less than a presidential address, reflects the time in which it was created, as well as the perspective of its author. Consequently, you’ll want to ask students to consider who wrote the lyrics, what those lyrics mean, who the audience for the song was, and what was going on in the United States at the time. You might want to pair the song with other sources—newspaper clippings, radio addresses, photographs of protests, etc.—that students can piece together to better understand a particular historical era.

Folk music, of course, is distinct from popular music in one general regard: unlike music created by professional recording artists, folk music is generally made by ordinary people and integrated into everyday life. So, while many well-known artists like Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan certainly played folk music, it can often be used as a way of better understanding the lives of people frequently left out of history textbooks. PBS’s brief history of American folk music might be a good place to start, establishing the unique nature of the genre and helping you focus your search for resources.

As always when looking for classroom resources, teachinghistory.org can help. Our Teaching in Action section, for instance, includes an example of how a song might be used in the classroom, providing links to videos in which 4th grade students learn about John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry by analyzing the song “John Brown’s Body.”

Our Using Primary Sources section also has some appropriate resources for you. One entry on Making Sense of American Popular Song highlights a website that provides questions to ask when using music in the history classroom, a model interpretation of a popular song, and links to resources. Another entry, on Document Analysis Worksheets, includes a link to the National Archives, which has a special “Sound Recording Analysis Worksheet.”

Beyond the Teachinghistory.org website, you might want to look at some of the other usual suspects for high quality materials and lesson plans. EDSITEment—a project of the National Endowment for the Humanities—is always a good place to look. They have a lesson entitled “Music from Across America” that explores the intersection of music and popular song. The Library of Congress is always a good resource, and they have a full page of links, as well as some specific lesson plans like one on California folk music in the 1930s. Finally, PBS’s American Roots Music website has four lesson plans as well as a bibliography that you might find useful.

There are also some specific music-related sites worth exploring. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame also has a page of lesson plans dedicated to teaching with music. You might also want to explore Smithsonian Folkways to see what music they have available.

Teaching history with technology can be a great way to engage students while also building bridges between the history classroom and the technology department at your school.

One good place to start is by exploring some of the technologies available to you in the classroom. The National History Education Clearinghouse, for instance, has an article on the use of digital whiteboards in the classroom, which you might find useful. "Wiki Wisdom," an article from Education Week, focuses on how teachers can use wikis in the classroom, emphasizing their ease of use, and listing considerations accompanying their integration into the classroom. Reel American History, a project at Lehigh University, is a site that encourages teachers and students to think about the ways movies help us construct understandings of history. The site includes a list of films dealing with history, as well as suggestions for how to use them. (Check back in the coming weeks and the National History Education Clearinghouse will also have new resources about using film to teach history.)

In terms of blogs, the American Historical Association has an article on how blogs connect students outside the classroom that might be useful for your purposes. Social studies teachers, particularly those who focus on current events, may also be interested in digital storytelling. Edutopia has a great article about digital storytelling that will direct you to additional resources.

Another angle you can take in looking for resources is to pursue sites that specifically explore technology-related content for the history classroom. One great resource is National Council for the Social Studies Community Network which has a variety of resources for teaching with technology. You can also join their Teaching with Technology group to be connected with other teachers who are interested in integrating technology into history and social studies classrooms. Many other sites have resources to help you.The Center for History and New Media’s Episodes page, for instance, has multimedia resources for a number of different historical periods. SCORE, the Schools of California Online Resources for Education webpage, also has some great materials that utilize technology in the history and social science classroom. The page has a virtual web museum, virtual interactive projects, and virtual field trips. Science, Technology, and the CIA, a project of the National Security Archive, provides 44 government documents that track the organizational and operational history of various CIA departments designed to coordinate science and technology research with intelligence operations.

Another way to approach your question is to look for models of projects merging technology and history. On the National History Education Clearinghouse site, there’s a blog entry describing a project conducted at Harpers Ferry National Historic Park in which students used a host of new technologies to explore the history of Harpers Ferry and John Brown—definitely worth checking out.

Good luck with your lesson planning!

Looking through the NHEC website is always a good place to start when you’re searching for teaching materials. Our Lesson Plan Reviews section, for instance (listed under Teaching Resources), includes dozens of entries, including one on the Progressive Era by Bringing History Home. These lesson plans have already been vetted by our staff according to an evaluation rubric that is posted at the bottom of each review. Use our Lesson Plan Gateway to do a keyword search for lesson plans on the web. But do be a savvy consumer; while we have vetted the websites, we have not reviewed the individual plans.

Another useful approach when searching for lesson plans is to look in digital archives. The Library of Congress, for instance, has lesson plans for various grade levels, organized by historical theme. Among the several lessons on the Progressive Era are lessons on child labor and women’s suffrage. Each lesson includes classroom activities, as well as primary sources from the Library’s American Memory collection. The National Archives, similarly, has a whole host of lesson plans, including one on the Progressive Era that uses political cartoons to understand the period. The lesson includes historical background, teaching activities, and resources from the National Archives.

There are also a number of excellent websites, designed with teachers in mind, that pair lesson plans with digitized primary sources. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, for instance, is always a good place to look for teaching ideas. They have four lessons on the Progressive Era—one for high school teachers, two for middle school teachers, and one for elementary school teachers&#8212that include background information, suggested activities, and links to relevant materials. Digital History, a project hosted by the University of Houston, is another good resource for lesson plans. Their lesson plan on the Progressive Era includes historical background, links to primary documents, timelines, and teaching activities.

Finally, you might also look to other, more specialized sources for lesson plans. When focusing on the Progressive Era, for instance, you might look for a lesson on working conditions. A quick search turns up a PBS Frontline lesson that centers on Upton Sinclair’s seminal work The Jungle, and includes links to chapters of the book. You might also search for lessons about the political activism of women when considering what to teach about the Progressive Era. Women and Social Movements in the United States, hosted by the Center for the Historical Study of Women and Gender, is a great resource for teaching materials. They have a number of specific lesson plans, many of which examine Progressive Era reforms, like one on New York suffragists and electoral politics from 1919-1926.

Most of these lesson plans include some degree of group work. When they don’t, you can always make the adjustment yourself. When a plan calls for students to read primary sources, for instance, you might have them work in teams to conduct a group analysis.

Finally, as you go through these various websites looking for a lesson plan that you like, you might want to bookmark them in your web browser. All of them are worth returning to at some point.