Teaching local history is an excellent way to bring the past to life for students, and many teachers are interested in finding a way to connect the classroom with the community.

Where to Start
The first place to start is by checking out our response to a similar question about local history. In it, we recommended using your state’s standards to identify important topics and concepts, making use of timelines and maps, and establishing some good guiding questions. We also provided links to some helpful resources. The National Parks Service, for instance, offers a guide on teaching with historic places, and the New England Flow of History project offers some teaching ideas and resources.

Resources on Our Site
But there are also other resources at Teachinghistory.org that offer suggestions about how to teach local history. In the Best Practices section, educator James A. Percoco offers his take on how to transport students outside of the classroom to understand the past; and, in another piece, he explains his use of Individual Field Trips. Other relevant resources on our site include a piece in which teacher Amy Trenkle demonstrates how she helps students get the most out of museum visits. A third resource, detailing Edutopia’s Geo-Literacy Project, presents an interdisciplinary, project-based approach to teaching local history. A Teaching Guide by AP teacher Roseanne Lichatin models connecting students with local museums and historical societies.

External Resources
Outside Teachinghistory.org, there are other excellent resources as well. The Library of Congress offers several good lesson plans on local history, including one that uses oral history and another in which students build their own primary source archives. Another resource, from the Massachusetts Studies Project, provides a list of tools for teaching local history—a great resource that will be helpful to those both inside and outside of the state. The Illinois Periodical Online Project offers a helpful primer on teaching local history through family history. And, in a TeacherTube video, Australian teacher Doug Bradby gives a talk about the use of local history in the classroom.

Hopefully these resources will give you some food for thought about teaching local history. Let us know how it turns out.

Graphic organizers [GOs] are essential classroom tools. They help students identify and organize significant information, understand important relationships between concepts, and make sense of difficult texts and content. Charts, timelines, Venn diagrams, cause and effect sequences—these are just a few of these visual tools that can support student learning.

So what type of GOs do students have difficulty with? Trouble for students usually lies not with a particular type of graphic organizer, but rather in how it is used in the classroom.

1. Using these tools, whether they be charts or timelines, requires that students learn how to use them. In other words, for a graphic organizer to be an effective teaching and learning tool, students have to be taught how to use that tool. So, for example, if you want to use a cause and effect chart in your classroom, it is a good idea to devote some time to introducing its features (e.g., title, arrows, space for responding) and modeling its use. Be explicit about how to use the tool even if it seems obvious to you or some of your students.
2. Keep it simple. There should not be a lot of words, shapes, or images on a graphic organizer. Visual clutter can cause problems for some of your students. Including too much information can be another problem. Students should be able to easily see relationships and connections between concepts and events on a GO. Including a lot of details or text will make it harder for them to spot those important relationships.
3. Be attentive to how you visually group information and concepts in modeling the use of a graphic organizer or creating one for your class. Make the visual representation clear and clean for your students. GOs can help students separate the significant from the more trivial, but only if connections and groupings are visually clear.
4. Evaluate the fit between your teaching goals, the task the students are completing, and the graphic organizer they will use to complete that task. Does the GO support your students in reaching the learning objectives? Does it represent concepts accurately? (Watch out for that cool tool that you couldn’t resist using.) I recommend filling out the graphic organizer yourself before using it—this is an excellent method for spotting a tool’s problems or misfit.
5. Remember, graphic organizers are scaffolds and supports for learning. If students can access the text or understand conceptual relationships without these tools, don’t use them. As with all scaffolds, the idea is that students move towards independent competence and if students are already there, adding a graphic organizer could turn the task into uninspiring “busywork.”

All in all, unfamiliar GOs or ones that are visually busy and complicated can be the ones that cause students trouble. But thoughtful use can overcome these issues. Research and practice alike suggest that GOs can be powerful learning tools when used with care.

The theme for National History Day this year is “Revolution, Reaction, Reform in History.” The NHD guidelines ask students to consider the following questions: “What factors contributed to a revolution? Why was there a need to reform at the particular time? Why did this event cause a reaction?”

There’s plenty of revolution, reaction, and reform in American history (defining those terms with students may actually be a good place to start any unit that you design). So what kinds of things might you do that are covered in your state’s standards?

If you’re teaching elementary school students, consider a standard like Kentucky’s standard 1.3.1 for 5th graders:

“Students will explain the basic principles of democracy (e.g., justice, equality, responsibility, freedom) found in significant U.S. historical documents (Declaration of Independence, U. S. Constitution, Bill of Rights) and analyze why they are important to citizens today.”

Historical documents like the Declaration of Independence are evidence of a revolutionary thrust. And the U.S. Constitution, which established our current federal system, was a reaction to the Articles of Confederation that preceded it. Rounding out that trio of documents is the Bill of Rights, which Thomas Jefferson and others saw as a means of reforming the Federalist-inspired Constitution.

A similar standard is written for 8th graders, if you’re a middle school teacher interested in teaching about the nation’s founding documents. But you might also consider covering another topic like the American Civil War. Kentucky’s standard 5.2.4 for 8th grade is:

“Students will describe the political, social, economic and cultural differences (e.g., slavery, tariffs, industrialism vs. agrarianism, federal vs. states' rights) among sections of the U.S. and explain how these differences resulted in the American Civil War.”

The Confederacy’s secession from the union was a revolution of sorts, and the resulting Civil War was certainly a notable reaction. And you’d be hard-pressed to find a richer example of American reform than the period of Reconstruction after the Civil War, which, though it failed in a number of respects, brought the nation together again. So, once again, you have a lot of choices.

High school teachers have similar options for teaching. But again, you might consider a new topic or a new era. Kentucky’s standard 5.2.4 for high school, for instance, asks students to:

“explain and evaluate the impact of significant social, political and economic changes during the Progressive Movement (e.g., industrial capitalism, urbanization, political corruption, initiation of reforms), World War I (e.g., imperialism to isolationism, nationalism) and the Twenties (e.g., economic prosperity, consumerism, women’s suffrage).”

As with other examples, the Progressive movement was full of revolution, reaction, and reform. Examples listed, like women’s suffrage or the outbreak of World War I, as well as other examples like the temperance movement or the American socialist movement led by Eugene Debs would also make for interesting topics.

And, remember that in meeting the requirements for National History Day projects, you will also be meeting state standards for historical thinking. Kentucky’s standard 5.1.1 for 8th grade, for instance, asks students to use “a variety of tools (e.g., primary and secondary sources) to
describe and explain historical events and conditions and to analyze the perspectives of different individuals and groups.” Those are exactly the sorts of tools that National History Day organizers are looking to see.

You will likely need to craft your own unit, but a powerful lesson plan or two can go a long way in helping you do so. Resources like EDSITEment have content-rich plans on a number of relevant topics, including good ones on Reconstruction and the American Revolution. You can also search our website for lessons on a wide range of topics, including the Progressive Era. We also have some resources for integrating standards into your lesson plans, like this response to an earlier question.

It can be a challenge to provide homebound and hospitalized students with the sort of interaction that other students receive each day in the classroom. Fortunately, the web puts numerous highly interactive activities within reach.

You'll find links to online resources throughout the Clearinghouse website, but here are a few that we think would work well for homebound students:
A number of museums have built excellent interactive history activities. The British Museum maintains a set of sites on ancient civilizations, and the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History has a collection of activities for kids to do at home. The Center for History and New Media recently partnered with the Smithsonian to create The Object of History, a site where visitors can manipulate artifacts, listen to curators talk about their role in history, submit questions, and curate a virtual exhibit of their own.

Many smaller museums offer more focused tools. For example, try the Plimouth Plantation's investigation into the first Thanksgiving.

The Monterey Institute has created a comprehensive online course in U.S. History that combines text and multimedia content delivery with interactive activities. You'll find it online at the HippoCampus website where you can set up a space for your own students, hide topics you don't want to cover, and bookmark ones you do.

You can also use the internet to give homebound students opportunities for social interaction. If you have multiple students covering the same material, try giving assignments that let them collaborate virtually. You could provide discussion prompts or projects that they would complete using email, instant messaging, or a discussion board.

Ask a school technology coordinator to help you install Course Management Software, or use one of the many collaborative web tools that have been developed in the last few years. Google Documents is good for collaborative writing, or you can register for a private wiki at WikiSpaces.com. They're flexible, easy to use, and free for teachers.

If you're really feeling adventurous (and if your students have access to fast Internet connections), think about using Skype voice chat or videoconferencing.

The broad scope of Social Studies that examines past and present human behaviors and interactions provides potentially rich topics for the Social Studies classroom. However, as a result of examining the human condition through such a broad lens, Social Studies teachers invariably encounter a variety of charged or difficult topics.

Issues around personal values, race, ethics, and stereotypes highlight just a few of the topics that can be potentially charged and consequently challenging for the Social Studies teacher. Teachers can also struggle with how to present controversial or contested interpretations of the past.

The Curriculum Guidelines for Multicultural Education issued by the NCSS recommends "Students should also be encouraged to examine alternative interpretations of the discrepancies between ideals and realities in the life and history of the United States."

The NCSS suggests that teachers provide students with a conceptual framework for understanding and identifying multiple perspectives. The Canadian Benchmarks of Historical Thinking offers some guidance for teachers to develop such frameworks for their students. The document describes the aspects of perspective taking as well as identifies two potential tasks that ask students to assume or critique perspectives.

Lastly, while some teachers find role-playing to be an effective way to teach perspective, other educators view such simulations as being superficial or potentially harmful to students. Regardless of what approach teachers use, students should be equipped with the skills necessary to identify and understand multiple perspectives about the past and present.

Thanks for your question. Contingency is an important concept in understanding and investigating history and helping students develop historical thinking skills. Crudely defined, it is the opposite of inevitability. When students think that World War II or women's suffrage had to happen, that these events were destined to occur, they are ignoring the contingent nature of historical events. Contingency gets at how people in the past made history and how historic events and trends result from a variety of factors coming together—they are not preordained or unavoidable.

Contingency is key to historical thinking and helping students understand that while in hindsight, the past seems to unroll in logical storylines, this was not necessarily the case for those who lived through it. If suffragettes hadn't taken to the streets in the 1910s or focused on changing state laws, would they have won the vote in 1920? If the Treaty of Versailles contained different stipulations, would Germany have taken the path it did and would WWII have happened? Historical events are dependent (or contingent) on multiple causes that shape when, how, and why an event happened the way it did.

So contingency is deeply intertwined with understanding change over time—a framework many state standards and K-12 teachers use to focus and cohere their history courses.

Resources for explicitly teaching K-12 students this concept can be relatively sparse. But some do exist and they run the gamut, from instructional frameworks to particular activities. Historians Thomas Andrews and Flannery Burke suggest using the "5 Cs" to frame history instruction in this article. While their work was developed at the college-level, it can transfer (with modifications) to the K-12 classrooms. Their fourth "C" is contingency and they suggest it may be the most difficult to teach, but their description can help clarify the concept.

UCLA's National Center for History in the Schools also includes contingency in the historical thinking skills that students should be learning. Their standards assert that students should "Challenge arguments of historical inevitability by formulating examples of historical contingency, of how different choices could have led to different consequences." (see standard 3.G) These standards also remind us that discrete historical thinking skills are "interactive and mutually supportive" and cannot be taught in the absence of particular historical content.

See this lesson for an example consistent with these recommendations. Located at the Canadian Benchmarks of Historical Thinking site created by the University of British Columbia’s Centre for the Study of Historical Consciousness, it is a fine example of how to teach this concept. Focused on historical contingency, the lesson integrates this concept with the core historical concepts of causation and change over time to investigate the Chinese experience in Canada.

You will want to pay attention to instructional steps 1-7 and don’t miss the "outcomes" section at the end of the lesson. Not only does the lesson provide a coherent example of how you can take this concept into the classroom, it also succinctly describes how historic change is contingent on individual and group actions that are influenced and constrained by larger forces. It also uses two of our favorite ways to address contingency pedagogically:

• counterfactual questioning, or "what if" questions; and
• using cause and effect in a student's daily life to illustrate the concept before applying it to historic events.

For another example of a "What if" question, see this one about U.S. involvement in World War II or check out the series of "What if" books edited by Robert Cowley.

Contingency may be one of the harder historical thinking concepts to teach. To really grapple with it, students need to understand multiple causation and be able to think through change over time. But it's difficulty shouldn’t scare you away from teaching it as it is a critical link between history and civic preparation. As the National Center for History in the Schools says:

"A. . . trap is that of thinking that events have unfolded inevitably;that the way things are is the way they had to be, and thus that humankind lacks free will and the capacity for making choices. Unless students can conceive that history could have turned out differently, they may unconsciously accept the notion that the future is also inevitable or predetermined, and that human agency and individual action count for nothing. No attitude is more likely to feed civic apathy, cynicism, and resignation—precisely what we hope the study of history will fend off."

There are a lot of different ways you could go with this, depending on the issue you choose. So, let's choose one and explore some of the resources available.

With a growing emphasis on global awareness in the curriculum, you might consider having your elementary students look at a non-profit organization that works to advance humanitarian concerns in the world. A number of organizations offer curricular resources, and each takes a different approach to combating global poverty.

One resource is Heifer International.

Heifer distributes animals like cows, goats, rabbits, and bees to impoverished areas around the world—something your children may take an immediate interest in. In addition to the resources for teachers available on their website, there is an excellent children's book about one of the early success stories, Beatrice's Goat, that can be used in the classroom. Check out this Sixty Minutes program on the real Beatrice.

The Heifer site also contains an interactive section called "Explore the World of Hiefer" that students can use as a resource. It is engaging and can be used on a Smartboard, an LCD, opened on computers and projected onto a Smartboard or large screen via LCD. Students could explore the areas in which Heifer has projects and the history of those areas.

Ultimately, students might develop/host school or community fundraisers to buy, say, a goat or cow or other animal to be sent to one of the impoverished areas in which Heifer works.

Another organization that works to combat global poverty is Oxfam.

Oxfam has offices across the world, and works to deliver aid and conduct development work. Based in Great Britain, Oxfam's Educational wing works to empower young people to become global citizens.

Oxfam's educational resources offer age-appropriate lessons for students aged 7-11. Among the themes that their resources cover are those on children's rights, climate change, and ending poverty.

Any work on Oxfam could certainly culminate in a fund-raising effort. But students could also use resources available on Oxfam's website to educate the school community about pressing global issues.

Another organization working to end poverty and hunger across the globe is UNICEF.

UNICEF, which is the United Nations Children's Fund, works for child survival, safety, and education around the world—another approach to global humanitarian issues that your students might take an interest in.

Among their many projects, UNICEF has a new site called "MAGIC—Media Activities and Good Ideas by, with and for Children." One thing you might do is have students watch videos or listen to broadcasts created by children in other countries. Check out the MAGICbank.

In your final project, you might have your students do a radio broadcast, create a video, or establish a connection with another school via the internet. They might even decide to raise money for students working on a particular project.

A fourth great organization that works on international humanitarian concerns is Doctors Without Borders.

Doctors Without Borders has a Learning Resources page which provides materials to lead students through research projects. Although the resources are not specifically tailored for grade school students, they are open-ended enough that they can be accessed by younger students.

After your students research conflict and explore the ways that an organization like Doctors Without Borders works to bring aid to conflict regions, they might do a school-wide fundraiser for the organization.

Of course, there are plenty of great organizations working to advance humanitarian concerns in the world, but these four are a great place to start. Whether you choose one as a class, or divide students up to look at different non-profit groups, they represent an accessible way to introduce young people to public global issues, while also providing them with a way to take action.

Great idea! While we don’t know of any similar web-based projects, there are some easily accessible resources that can help you with planning and structuring student investigations into their own school’s history. Consider the ideas on the PBS website, Get Involved: Discover Your School History.

This Irish site, Ask About Ireland includes additional ideas for potential sources that students could locate and consult. One approach might be to first engage students and the community in building a school archive and this article Establishing a School Archives from The National Archives will be helpful in getting that going.

Teachers have reported on their classroom experiences with school history projects in journals published by the National Council for the Social Studies. See the September 2009 issue of Social Education for an article written by high school teacher John J. DeRose, or the January 2009 issue of Middle Level Learning for articles written by middle school teachers Amy Trenkle and Candyce Sweda. With an NCSS membership, you can access these online or check a local library to see if they subscribe to these journals.

Some of the activities and resources important to doing local history with students or collecting oral histories are likely relevant and you may want to scan this NHEC blog on third-graders investigating local history, this one about working with middle-schoolers, and this one about how to get elementary students started with local history. Also see this entry about an adult collaboration to recapture a local school’s history.

We hope these are helpful—and good luck!

Kudos for looking for ways to engage your students with challenging historical tasks. Teaching students how to craft interpretations from multiple sources is central to history but it is hard, and even harder when students struggle with reading.

You may need to raid existing DBQs and tailor documents and tasks for your students. Consider starting small--use two documents that clearly contrast with one another to help students learn how to approach documents and read them closely. For a model of this, see the warm-up activity at www.historicalthinkingmatters.org. See this page for the same documents that have been further modified to make for more accessible reading.

Don't be shy about excerpting documents or using a smaller sample from an existing DBQ. This can help students understand the nature of the task and give them practice with reading, analyzing documents, and crafting arguments.

There are some helpful printed resources out there. Try the dbqproject.com. They have books of DBQs in both long and short versions.

Another resource to consider is Mindsparks.

Thanks for your question and good luck!

Things have changed since teachers had to go through their private and local libraries to create slideshows using art to teach history. Now with a click of a mouse and a projector, we can show students provocative works of art. And while including art in your teaching will, no doubt, engage some of your reluctant students and add variety and aesthetic appeal to your curriculum, deliberate methods are required when teaching students to analyze the visual fine arts as a means to learn about the past. And those methods require slowing down when we observe and discuss a piece of art.

It may be useful to think about three things as critical to teaching students how to analyze art as historical artifacts:

• Close reading (and we use the term “reading” broadly here, referring to observing the item closely);
• Feeling and considering the emotional impact of the piece;
• Considering the historical context of the piece.

You’ve started with a good entry that introduces some key aspects of using art. Author Carolyn Halpin-Healy, talking about how to use material culture, explains that analyzing these kinds of sources should “begin by describing the object--to analyze its structure, to consider the circumstance of its creation--and only then to propose an interpretation of the meaning of the piece.” She goes on to identify specific steps in this process that include the key aspects above.

Deliberate methods are required when teaching students to analyze the visual fine arts as a means to learn about the past. Those methods require slowing down when we observe and discuss a piece of art.

EDSITEMENT
We have other resources at teachinghistory.org that address art analysis. Visit this review of a lesson plan that uses art and documents to investigate Paul Revere’s ride. The lesson comes from Edsitement, a site created by the National Endowment for the Humanities [NEH] that includes lesson plans using a variety of material culture for both World and American history. These plans can serve as inspiration, models, and resource banks for analyzing art in the history/social studies classroom.

And don’t miss the NEH’s Picturing America program. It was designed to encourage and support teachers in using art to teach history and social studies. This tremendous resource includes a set of artistic works to use in the classroom, information about the works and artists, links to other sites with resources for teaching with art, and a teacher’s resource book.

See this entry to listen to two educators talk about how they use Picturing America in their Teaching American history grant. The third video in this series may be most helpful to you since it concerns the ideas of slowing down with a piece and closely observing it while considering one’s emotional response to it.

There are also many resources designed for teaching photo analysis in the history/social studies classroom.

PHOTOGRAPHS
At teachinghistory.org, see our “Using Primary Sources” feature for links to worksheets that can be used to analyze varied kinds of sources, including photos and art. See both our entry about the National Archive’s worksheets and the Library of Congress’ worksheets. In the Library’s excellent Prints and Photograph collection, you can also find help in preparing to teach students and teachers about analyzing photos as historical sources rather than as truth-telling images. Check out their resources on Dorothea Lange’s iconic migrant mother photo here and here to help you use this photo to illustrate the choices and selection that the photographer makes.

See “Using documentary photography” for a comprehensive guide that uses the photos of Jacob Riis to illustrate the process of photo analysis. Especially helpful may be the guide’s list of questions.

Good luck! And we’d love to hear what was most helpful to you.