The wonderful thing about teaching strategies for ELLs is that they are fabulous models of good teaching in general. Strategies like Kagan Cooperative Learning can be used with ELL and non-ELL students alike. SDAIE (Specially Designed Academic Instruction in English) activities are designed to scaffold information for ELLs, but many SDAIE strategies make for an engaging learning environment for all. Most importantly, using particular SDAIE strategies like Mix-Freeze-Match, Carousel, or Stay and Stray with a combination of ELL and non-ELL learners can be quite powerful.

So, when thinking about your question, what we really need to ask ourselves is: “What do my ELL students need to access the content, that my native speakers may not need?” That is, should we assume that because English is a student’s first language that he/she already has necessary background knowledge? No, we should not, but we know that our ELLs need more exposure to new terminology in order to access information. Below are strategies I use with my ELL population to help build background knowledge.

Bear in mind that ELLs may not understand the text as easily as native English speakers simply because they are still developing an understanding of English syntax, grammar, and vocabulary. Fifth-grade texts pose a challenge, given that they include longer and more complex words and phrasing than students have previously encountered.

So what do you do? Make history fun! Use primary sources including, but not limited to, photographs, illustrations, maps, diary entries, and letters. Build vocabulary while you build background knowledge (for all). Show pictures of artifacts labeled with their appropriate name or make it more personal and memorable by asking the students to guess what each item is and what it may have been used for before you assign a term to it.

Use the textbook in small doses. Do not ask students learning English to read the text and answer the questions at the end.

• Use the graphs, photos, and illustrations in the text to build background knowledge
• Do a picture walk of the chapter. This can be very helpful.
• Use historical picture books (fiction and nonfiction) that tell stories not only with words, but also with illustrations.
• If you have access, use Thinking Maps frequently to help students organize information and/or define terminology. (Graphic organizers can also help.)
• Finally, and these are essential for ELLs, create sentence frames that allow students to respond like historians. Post these frames up in your room so that students can access them easily and use them in their responses.

Lastly, and I know I am taking a risk by saying this—use videos! Five minutes of visual content to help students gain an understanding of the past is worth its weight in gold. But use them thoughtfully. Even though kids love watching TV they get bored after about 20 minutes, and the content and purpose of the video is lost.

These types of learning activities lower the students’ affective filter while simultaneously introducing new material. In a safe environment, students have opportunities to practice their newly acquired academic vocabulary before they are asked to share their thoughts with you, the teacher.

Below are just a few resources that I have enjoyed using in my classroom. I especially love pulling primary resources from the Internet to create PowerPoint presentations. If you have a projector in your room these images are powerful and can be displayed larger than life and in color. The students love it!

Maps

Mermaids displaying Portugal's Coat of Arms (One section of a 1562 map by Diego Gutierrez) This map depicts the “New World” and was created by Spanish cartographers. It shows North and South America. Mostly accurate, this map also has some wonderfully fanciful ideas of the New World. Find a copy of the original on the Library of Congress website.

John White's Virginia John White has a very interesting history. He worked for Sir Walter Raleigh and traveled to Virginia to establish the colony of Roanoke. During the second, and final, attempt to make Roanoke a success, John left his daughter and granddaughter in the colony when he traveled to England for supplies. Upon his return he found the colony destroyed and all the colonists missing—including his daughter and granddaughter. White’s map and images of Virginia are extremely accurate as he kept detailed drawings while exploring the area in search of his lost daughter and granddaughter.

John White's illustrations John White's map and artwork, along with the work of other artists, illustrated a published collection of descriptions of expeditions to North America written by Thomas Hariot.

Literature

Encounter by Jane Yolen Encounter is a fictional story of Columbus's arrival to the New World from the Native American perspective. Visually stunning, this story can be used to build background while allowing students to practice several ELA reading comprehension skills.

Heroes of the Revolution by David A. Adler The title says it all. There is also Black Heroes of the American Revolution by Burke Davis.

Red, White, Blue, and Uncle Who? by Teresa Bateman and John O’Brien A book about the stories behind some of America's patriotic symbols. This is a fun book with interesting and often amusing anecdotes about all things patriotic.

Thank You, Sarah by Laurie Halse Anderson and Matt Faulkner LOVE this book. It tells the story of how Thanksgiving, as an American holiday, was almost lost. The story is told with charming illustrations (and text) and Sarah's character is a great model for perseverance.

A Final Recommendation

Enchanted Learning
I am sure this site is not new to most, but it is great for our ELLs. The text is simpler and illustrations are usually included.

Kudos on getting started on your NHD project. You ask a specific question about whether diplomacy and spies are related, and the shortest answer is yes, indeed, there are many events and issues you could explore that connect to both of these subjects. But before I get specific, let me share some approaches to finding those topics.

Choosing a topic for historical research can be a lengthier process that we expect. While you’ve done the key initial step of identifying a personal interest that connects to the theme, below are some tips to help you answer your own question.

Background Reading
Do some background reading on Spies and Diplomacy. You can start with something as simple as an encyclopedia or Wikipedia entry. Look for references to events, issues and people that you find intriguing or puzzling. Take notes on those specifics.

As you do this background reading, also look for sources that are cited in the footnotes, bibliography, or “further reading” sections that look interesting or that you can find easily. You will want to read multiple accounts and overviews on these topics to get a more full range of the possibilities for specific topics.

The Importance of Questions
Ultimately, your project, given that is a historical research project, will answer a question. A good research question both bounds and guides your investigation. Indeed, questions are key to all your tasks—while doing background reading, record questions you have. Look for information that seems incomplete or unexpected. Ask yourself, what do you want to know more about?

Use your questions to help you look into a topic more deeply and extensively. Ultimately, you will need to revise and craft your question so it is neither too broad nor too narrow. But this will not happen in a day. Learning more about the topic will help you finalize your question.

Available Sources
One thing you will have to figure out is: are there sources available and accessible that address this topic and question? Remember you can’t do a project on a topic that has no available sources!

You will want to use a variety of sources, including texts, photos, and so on. Using primary and secondary sources truly allows you to engage in historical research, as you investigate the voices of the past while learning about how previous historians have made sense of them. And to do this, you will have to go beyond google and explore archives and library holdings. This may sound daunting, but at the end of this answer are some resources that can help.

Next Steps
So practically, after you do some background reading, your next steps could be:

Start with three specific topics (an event or person) or questions to explore and for each, ask the following four questions:
1. Is it interesting?
2. Are there sources on it?
3. Is there a problem or mystery that can be investigated?
4. What have historians already found out about it?

Spend at most a few hours on each topic. In that time, you will hopefully get a sense of whether there is an interesting question and available sources for that topic. (You will find this out by reading more and looking for sources, both on and off line.) Then eliminate two of the three. But be forewarned, you may also discover a different person, event, or question that you find more interesting and manageable for your project. Be prepared for that possibility. Better to change topic in the early stages, than stick unnecessarily with a dull or overly difficult one because you feel you have to.

A Recursive Process
One thing to keep in mind throughout your research is that it is an iterative process. As you read more about spies, you encounter more options for topics. As you search for sources about a specific topic (for example, French Spy in 1775, Julien-Alexandre Achard de Bonvouloir), you will have additional questions. At some point, you will need to finalize your topic and question, but in these early stages, be open to changing and tweaking them. And while your topic will become more fixed as you proceed, you may find that the question you answer continues to be refined for months to come as you learn what the sources reveal.

Finally, remember that espionage is a secret enterprise. If you pick a less current topic, you may find that more sources are available.

Good Luck!

Historical literature can really grab your students' interest. Consider the following excerpt:

They had come for him just after midnight. Three men in suits and ties and black fedoras with FBI badges under their coats. 'Grab your toothbrush,' they’d said. This was back in December, right after Pearl Harbor, when they were still living in the white house on the wide street in Berkeley not far from the sea. The Christmas tree was up and the whole house smelled of pine, and from his window the boy had watched as they led his father out across the lawn in his bathrobe and slippers to the black car that was parked at the curb.

He had never seen his father leave the house without his hat on before. That was what had troubled him most. No hat. And those slippers: battered and faded, with the rubber soles curling up at the edges. If only they had let him put on his shoes then it all might have turned out differently. But there had been no time for shoes.

Grab your toothbrush.
Come on. Come on. You’re coming with us.
We just need to ask your husband a few questions.
Into the car, Papa-san

Later, the boy remembered seeing lights on in the house next door, and faces pressed to the window. One of them was Elizabeth's, he was sure of it. Elizabeth Morgana Roosevelt had seen his father taken away in his slippers.

The next morning his sister had wandered around the house looking for the last place their father had sat. Was it the red chair? Or the sofa? The edge of his bed? She had pressed her face to the bedspread and sniffed.

"The edge of my bed," their mother had said.

That evening she had lit a bonfire in the yard and burned all of the letters from Kagoshima. She burned the family photographs and the three silk kimonos she had brought over with her nineteen years ago from Japan. She burned the records of Japanese opera. She ripped up the flag of the red rising sun. She smashed the tea set and the Imari dishes and the framed portrait of the boy's uncle, who had once been a general in the Emperor's army. She smashed the abacus and tossed it into the flames. "From now on," she said, "we are counting on our fingers."

The next day, for the first time ever, she sent the boy and his sister to school with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in their lunch pails. "No more rice balls," she said. "And if anyone asks, you're Chinese."

The boy had nodded. "Chinese," he whispered. "I'm Chinese."

"And I," said the girl, "am the Queen of Spain."

"In your dreams," said the boy.

"In my dreams," said the girl, "I'm the King."

—When the Emperor Was Divine, a novel by Julie Otsuka, p. 73–75

This list includes books considered to be for adult readers as well as books considered to be for young adult readers. These labels are only somewhat useful. Occasionally the young adult books are less challenging, though perhaps equally rewarding, for the reader.

A Very Long Engagement by Sebastien Japrisot won the Prix Interallie in 1991. This nonlinear mystery is a moving and incisive portrait of life in France during and after the First World War.

An ambitious, meticulously researched, novel, The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages is set in New Mexico in 1943 and told from the viewpoint of two disenfranchised children at Los Alamos where scientists and mathematicians converge (along with their families) to construct and test the first nuclear bomb. Grades 5–up.

No Pretty Pictures, Caldecott illustrator Anita Lobel's haunting memoir of her traumatic years in Nazi-occupied Poland, is told from the perspective of a child—she is just five when the war begins—who does not fully comprehend what she is witnessing. Grade 6–up.

Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo is a slim, stunning, and easily accessible novel written by the author of War Horse. "Exquisitely written vignettes explore bonds of brotherhood that cannot be broken by the physical and psychological wars of the First World War," said Horn Book Magazine. Grade 7–up. Match with the superb photo-essay The War to End All Wars: World War I by Russell Freedman.

Bird in a Box by Andrea Davis Pinkney is a graceful, restrained, and detailed portrait of America's Great Depression, a time when the radio delivered the sound of Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington into living rooms across the country and boxing champion, Joe Lewis, the "Brown Bomber," came to represent so much more than the zenith of a sport. Grade 4–up.

Set on the Laguna Pueblo Reservation in the years immediately following World War II, Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko, focuses on Tayo, a young vet of mixed Indian ancestry. The book is Tayo's story of return and redemption. "The novel is very deliberately a ceremony in itself—demanding but confident and beautifully written," said the Boston Globe.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is an unsettling, unsentimental, poetic novel, set in World War II and narrated by Death. This is not an easy read, but it is a book that can change a life. Grade 9–up.

We Are the Ship by Kadir Nelson is a sumptuous history of Negro League Baseball from its beginning in the 1920s to 1947 when Jackie Robinson broke the major leagues’ color barrier. Dazzling, almost iconic paintings illustrate the easygoing, conversational, historically detailed text, and all in all the book illuminates more than baseball in the '20s and '30s—it is a history of all of us. Grade 4–up.

The narrator of Ruta Sepetys's Between Shades of Gray, 15-year-old Lina, begins "They took me in my nightgown." In 1941, Stalin is deporting families from Lithuania and imprisoning them in Siberia where daily life is brutal. It is the slim possibility of survival that provides hope. This book is similar to Esther Hautzig's earlier autobiographical novel, Endless Steppe in that it is similarly themed and equally searing. In Endless Steppe, 10-year-old Esther Rudmin is arrested with her family in Poland as "enemies of the people" and exiled to Siberia. Grade 6–up.

Homestead, by Rosina Lippi, is a series of interconnected vignettes beginning in 1909, about life in Rosenau, a small isolated village in the Austrian Alps. The villagers harvest, tend animals, and make cheese. Against this pastoral backdrop are all of life's vicissitudes. The prose is clean and clear, each chapter is seemingly autonomous but as we see an event (over generations) from different characters' points of view, the life of Rosenau becomes increasingly rich and complex. This novel won the 1998 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for best first fiction and was short-listed for the 2001 Orange Prize.

• When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka
• A Very Long Engagement by Sebastien Japrisot
• The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages
• No Pretty Pictures: A Child of War by Anita Lobel
• Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo
• The War to End All Wars: World War I by Russell Freedman
• Bird in a Box by Andrea Davis Pinkney
• Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
• The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
• We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball by Kadir Nelson
• Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys
• The Endless Steppe: Growing Up in Siberia by Esther Hautzig
• Homestead by Rosina Lippi

Learning history through a local lens can be an engaging and powerful way to study the past. It sounds like your town (in Indiana, I presume?) has a rich history to mine with elementary students. For curricular resources, first try local museums, libraries, and historic sites. Their local collections often have interesting and evocative primary sources and orienting secondary material that can be curricular building blocks.

Some of these local institutions even provide lessons, resources, and field trips designed especially for the K-5 classroom. See this site's Museum and Historic Sites search for locating institutions near your community.

But even without specific curriculum, repositories of historic photographs, documents, maps, and other sources can get you well on your way to creating classroom plans.

Here are some tips for creating local history curricula for the elementary classroom:

Remember your state's standards—these can help you identify important topics, themes, and concepts at each of the grade levels. (Click here to search state standards.)

Timelines and maps are invaluable tools for helping students of all ages study history. From using a timeline to understand photographs that show a changing town landscape to using maps to understand settlement patterns, these tools help young students locate primary sources in concrete ways and read and analyze these sources. Connections between local and regional or national events can also be more transparent for students when timelines and maps are compared. For instance, compare a timeline of national events with a timeline of local events to help students see these connections.

Guiding questions are important. Use them to help students read and look carefully at sources and consider the significance of what they see.

Remember that walking tours can help students engage with the past. Seek out local history experts to help you identify promising sources, stories, and sites.

Use existing curricula and lesson ideas on this site to help you plan questions, activities, and lesson structures. For example, see this teaching guide about reading historic photographs closely and using them as doors into larger historic questions, or this video for a teacher who uses walking tours to help students learn their local colonial history. And don't forget to explore our Primary Source Guides. The entry about the National Parks Service may be especially helpful.

Other national organizations also provide resources for teaching local history. See the Regional Education Resources of the National Archives, National History Day's state pages, and a list of resources from the Library of Congress's American Memory site. Finally, the New England Flow of History project has some teaching ideas and resources that can be helpful.

Please come back and tell us about your successes and challenges—this is a topic that is important to many educators!

Some of the best and most easily available sources for lists of appropriate books for 9th and 11th graders come from school districts and teachers who have compiled them and shared them on the internet.

An excellent example of this can be found at Oxnard Unified High School District. This annotated list includes both fiction and nonfiction titles related to high school U.S. history. Another example of this type of list has been posted by a classroom teacher. This list highlights nonfiction titles on a range of U.S. history topics but also includes a brief list of recommended historical fiction.

Libraries are another obvious choice for booklists. Library Booklists is a clearinghouse of public libraries across the nation, providing links to lists of books put together by librarians on diverse topics. You can search for nonfiction as well as historical fiction lists, and it differentiates between young adult and children's literature.

The American Library Association's Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) has annotated lists of suggestions for teen readers. Many, but not all, of their nonfiction history titles relate to U.S. history. They also have excellent annotated lists of fiction, but they do not differentiate historical fiction from general works.

Another approach to finding books would be to use a search engine to generate a personalized list on a particular topic. The reading measurement company Lexile has an online feature that can be used to search for book titles. To use Lexile, go to Find a Book, then follow the prompts to enter information about your students (for average 9th-11th grade readers the Lexile range would be 880–1165), and then you enter your search terms. The California Department of Education also has a reading list generator. These sites can be tricky, and you may want to try a variety of searches as often a search will bring up too few results or so many that it is hard to tell what might be worthwhile.

Finally, there are many excellent high school booklists on specific topics that might be of interest to you. Check out the lists for Black History Month, (extensive and divided by grade level, but not annotated), and Lincoln and the Civil War which offers an annotated list on the topic for young adults.

Kudos to you for bringing books into your curriculum! And happy reading.

There are lots of great resources on the Web for planning a unit on the origins of American government. A good place to start is the National Archives website, which has some excellent resources for teachers. For your purposes, the Teaching with Documents: Images of the American Revolution page is most relevant, while the American Revolution section gives background information, primary documents, teaching activities, and worksheets.

Another good resource for teachers is EDSITEment, a project of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Their Voices of the American Revolution page gathers resources from a wide variety of websites and includes different activities for the classroom. The Colonial Broadsides and the American Revolution page, though designed for middle school teachers, has resources that could be adapted for older students.

Also consider the colleges and universities that have participated in the Teaching American History program. Many of these schools have web pages where participants post materials and lesson plans. Fitchburg State College, for instance, offers teacher-created plans on the American Revolution that you can browse.

The National Park Service provides great resources for history and social studies teachers. Their Teacher’s Guide to the American Revolution includes five separate lessons as well as primary source documents. Though sometimes lengthy, these units are packed with interesting details and materials.

A peerless source of classroom materials is the Public Broadcasting System. Among PBS web pages that focus on the American Revolution is Rediscovering George Washington, which includes a unit on Washington as military leader during the war for independence. Another excellent site is Africans in America, which comes with a teacher’s guide, complete with lessons, questions, activities, and resources.

Though it doesn't feature lesson plans, TeacherServe, a project of the National Humanities Center, can guide you to useful resources that focus on the Revolution and the Colonial era. Their section on religion, Divining America: Religion in American History, contains essays that offer different perspectives on the importance of religion during the period.

This is a mere sampling of what's out there on the origins of our democracy. Good luck with your unit planning!

Examining historical events from multiple perspectives introduces elementary students to core aspects of history and historical thinking. And as with much of history, it has relevance to helping students become more prepared for the responsibilities of citizenship, college, and career.

Imagine that students are learning about early American settlements. Depending on where you teach and your curriculum, this might include learning about the Mayflower and Plymouth, Jamestown, or the Missions in California. Students read stories or textbook accounts of these early settlements and they learn the difficulties of the passage here and making a new life in a foreign land.

Yet, this is only part of the story and to get a fuller picture, students need to consider the perspectives of those not necessarily represented in these accounts—most obviously, the perspective of the indigenous peoples who were here when the settlers arrived. (Viewing the settlements from this alternative perspective is not necessarily easy given that the historical record is incomplete, but using artifacts, surviving legends, historic sites, or even settlers’ first hand accounts can help students imagine this perspective.) Considering this missing perspective helps students recognize and articulate that people can experience the same event in different ways.

Students can learn to ask, whose voices are we not hearing? What perspective is not represented? What alternative stories are told about these events? Did participants in these events agree on their meaning? What might account for these differences in perspective?

This is a key piece of doing history—understanding that there are multiple perspectives and multiple stories that surround historical phenomena. And elementary students can learn this. Connections to daily life can be made, as students are familiar with such things as sifting through playmates’ differing accounts of recess events. Multiple perspectives can also be introduced in very concrete ways to young students. They could view something from different locations to see different aspects of it, or use tools such as a cardboard picture frame to see how a frame is selective--including some aspects of the view while ignoring others.

Ideally, students can learn to ask the same questions of daily life and sources that they learn to ask of history: Whose voices are we not hearing? What are the other stories that people tell about this issue? How and why do they differ?

You ask particularly about the use of fiction and nonfiction to teach multiple perspectives. See this entry about “book sets” a strategy for including both to engage students and guide them toward deep understanding of historical events. Also see this roundtable where panelists discuss the use of fiction in the elementary classroom or this blog.

Using both fiction and nonfiction allows students to engage with multiple kinds of text and it allows you, as teacher, to use the texts for different purposes. Good fiction can be used to engage and interest students in the past and help them imagine that past or create a picture of the historical context of the events you are studying. Non-fictional texts, such as primary sources, can be used to explore an experience or perspective in more depth and to represent missing perspectives. Both can be used to challenge students to look across and synthesize texts to create a fuller picture of the past.

A critical aspect of using both fiction and non-fiction texts together is that they give you an opportunity to teach students the difference between the two. Young students can learn that history is an evidentiary discipline and strives for the most accurate and complete picture of the past, whereas fiction does not have this constraint. While there are examples of fictional stories that try to do the same, this basic distinction is an important one for students to learn.

Teaching young students that history includes multiple stories and perspectives aligns with the Common Core State Standards, and can prepare students for future history classes and academic work. But, more significantly, it is critical for helping students understand that their perspective can be partial and does not represent all peoples—it can help them develop empathy and be more skeptical of the single account as the one true answer in our complex world.

California State History-Social Science Content Standard 8.1.4: Describe the nation’s blend of civic republicanism, classical liberal principles, and English parliamentary traditions.

There is a famous story about the day the Constitutional Convention ended in September 1787. Benjamin Franklin was walking out of Independence Hall, and a woman ran to him and asked, “Dr. Franklin, what kind of government have you given us?” He replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Whether apocryphal or not, this statement shapes the definition of active citizenship in this country. At the heart of Franklin’s challenge is the idea of civic republicanism. The notion that it is imperative for people of this country to remain attentive and devoted to the maintenance of our institutions for their sustainability is still one of America’s cherished ideals.

The California State History Standards ask that the background of civic republican traditions be covered during students’ 6th, 7th, and 8th grade years. A student begins the middle years with Greek and Roman political contributions, continues with the Enlightenment’s influence on democratic thought and its links to Greek, Roman, and Christian pasts, and then blends those ideas with the evolving republic of the United States. In other words, the idea of civic republicanism is not meant to be a one-shot assignment that can be covered with a worksheet. It is an ongoing theme and discussion throughout the middle school years. While the various ideas that emanate from civic responsibility can certainly be weighty to teach, their density is manageable if presented consistently over the years. Since the traditions of civic republicanism extend back to colonial America, it is fitting that they should be enmeshed in the curriculum throughout the students’ 8th-grade year of study.

Students must understand that while citizenship is a right it is also a responsibility. We all have responsibilities to our families, communities, schools, places of worship, the state, the country, the world, and, especially, our descendents. Many schools now require students to complete a set number of hours for community service. A discussion about why it is important to complete community service is a great place to start when tackling the ideas of civic republicanism with eighth graders. Before moving on to the relationships between our government’s structure and how it is influenced by past traditions, it is useful to conduct a discussion or writing assignment about what students do to make their communities better, why it is important to do so, and what benefits result from such participation.

Many textbooks have sections regarding the roles of citizenship that can prove quite useful when introducing the concept of civic republicanism. This lesson plan and this plan, both from the Center for Civic Education, can be used to help students explore and identify what it means to play an active role in our republic. This would also be an appropriate time to review ideas from students’ 6th- and 7th-grade classes, such as Pericles’s praise of public service and the Roman Republic’s expectation of its citizens to perform public service, and various Enlightenment ideas from thinkers like Locke, Rousseau, and Montesquieu.

This handout can be used as part of a class discussion. The first page would be done by students in groups or as an entire class while sharing common ideas. (It may also be helpful to identify pages in your textbook that can help students answer these questions.) The second page includes some of the content that could come out in the discussion of the second question and particular principles.

Again, this concept is not an easy one to teach, especially with the limited time our school schedules are allowing year after year. While teaching our subject matter is essential, we must remember that ultimately our responsibility as educators demands that we are constantly guiding our students to be active citizens who are energized by their potential to play a part in achieving a better society. Citizens in a republic must stay engaged in the social fabric of making their institutions better. Our students must be reassured and impressed with the idea that civic participation has benefited civilization since ancient times, as can be seen throughout their studies of history in the middle years.

America: The Story of US is a 12-hour, six-part survey by cable channel History, formerly known as The History Channel. The most watched and highest rated program in the network's history, the series is also going to be sent free of charge to every school in the country. So how historically accurate is the program, and how useful is it for the classroom?

As Dr. Jeremy Stern writes for History News Network, the answer is: not enough. "History’s much-touted event is, in reality," he writes, "a shallow and fragmentary jumble." Dramatic moments are "ripped from any larger historical context or explanation in a welter of reenactments and frenzied CGI animation, while celebrity talking-heads [. . .] spout feel-good banalities and populist clichés." Leaning towards "unquestioningly laudatory and simplistic patriotism," the series is not likely to offend.

One way to do this is by thinking of it as another secondary account, similar to a textbook. You might employ the technique of "opening up the textbook." Even though the series is a TV production, the same techniques apply. In the "Superpower" episode, for instance, the series, tells the story of the creation of the interstate highway. As one commentator notes, "the car was your ticket to personal freedom." Such an excerpt might be paired with documents for students to analyze. Did all Americans feel positively about the interstate highway system? Who was in favor of it? Who was against it? When was each source produced and for what purpose? How does this influence the story they tell? After comparing the video excerpt with additional sources, ask students to synthesize the information and make a claim that can be supported by the evidence.

Another way the series might be used in the classroom is as an "authority" to challenge. The technique of "questioning textbook authority", like the technique of opening up the textbook, works equally well with
a video source. For this exercise, you might show students a clip from the "Millennium" episode focusing on Vietnam War protests. Start by giving students sources on the topic. Then, after students have digested them, show them the clip and ask them to critique it. What does the video get right? What does it get wrong? What is included? What is left out? Which claims are supported and which ones aren't?

Alternatively, have them analyze a short clip closely. Ask students to identify the argument or viewpoint represented by the clip and how it conveys that argument. Have students consider features such as word choice, camera angles, soundtrack, and sequencing of images to uncover how the clip conveys its message. Ask students whose voices and perspectives are missing from the clip.

We haven't watched the whole series, and it's too long to show students in it's entirety. But America: The Story of US can potentially be used in a number of productive ways in the classroom; just remember that it's a source like any other and that students should be encouraged to question, examine, and evaluate it.

In the past two decades, researchers in the United States have generated a substantial and informative body of knowledge about the nature of historical cognition, how students make sense of historical texts and tasks, and how teachers can promote or stifle students’ historical understanding. Below I identify a few key works and resources in this field that are useful for teachers.

A definitive and accessible source for what we know about how students learn in K-12 settings and implications for classroom practice continues to be the National Research Council’s How People Learn series. The volume in this series titled How Students Learn: History in the Classroom is most relevant to your question. You can browse this volume for free at the National Academies Website. Here you will find Professor Robert Bain’s study where he put into practice core principles of learning in his World History classroom and investigated the impact those practices had on student understanding. For a brief summary of Bain’s study, see our research brief. Additional chapters introduce core principles of learning such as engaging students’ prior understandings and organizing knowledge around core concepts, and include reports of studies done by British researchers Rosalyn Ashby, Peter J. Lee, and Denis Shemilt.

You will also want to investigate Stanford professor and cognitive psychologist Sam Wineburg’s research. Wineburg’s seminal work on historical cognition uncovered specific reading processes that distinguished expert historical thinkers from those more novice in the discipline. You can find his book Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts at your favorite bookstore. Check out Chapter Two of this book for an overview of investigations into history learning and teaching (still relevant even if first published a decade ago). Also see this research brief summarizing one of Wineburg’s important studies.

Browse additional research briefs to find more studies specific and relevant to history teaching and learning. The number of researchers working in this field is growing, and you will find several whose work is represented here. (With a few exceptions, we focus on research done by researchers in the United States. But the international landscape also encompasses a burgeoning and significant field.)

Exploring any of the above resources will lead you to additional useful studies if you pay attention to the works cited by the authors.

• Not only can you find studies and people who are investigating history teaching and learning through browsing our research briefs, each of these briefs includes a set of classroom implications or “teaching tips.”
• Annenberg Media offers a free professional development course titled The Learning Classroom: Theory Into Practice that focuses on translating what scholars know about how people learn into classroom approaches and practices. This course, based on the How People Learn series, addresses all the subject areas; but there are a few segments focused specifically on history (find one here).
• The Research and Practice feature that appears periodically in the National Council of Social Studies journal, Social Education, can be a good resource as can research journals like Cognition and Instruction where scholars initially publish their studies.

Cognitive research has much to offer educators in understanding how to structure and shape learning environments, teaching practices, and student tasks. Just beware of the cottage industry that has built up around this field. As with other educational hot topics, some vendors are building resources where profit, rather than accuracy or reliability, is the goal.

Your approach is a good one to guard against this. Go to the studies, read the research yourself, and find trusted and reliable sources. Check the citations used by those marketing these ideas and ask questions like: are these studies published in respected and peer-reviewed scholarly journals? Do they build on existing bodies of scholarship? Is the theory sound? Are there empirical studies that back up these approaches? Are teaching implications closely tied to findings?

Good luck!