Primary sources have great instructional power, and are increasingly important in standards, including the Common Core State Standards. In this blog, you'll hear from us every few days as we highlight engaging items from the Library's free online collections, along with ready-to-use teaching ideas.
Primary sources are more important to teachers than ever before, and the Library of Congress makes it easy not only to find great primary sources, but also to quickly and effectively use them in your teaching.
In our earlier post on Memorable Professional Development, we heard from several teachers about the shift they went through as a result of the Library’s Summer Teacher Institutes. So, if you’ve had a shift in your teaching practice as a result of using primary sources, how can you share with your colleagues?
Like many readers of the Teaching with the Library of Congress blog, we have identified strategies related to the Common Core’s instructional “shift” toward integrating more informational texts into literacy programs. Today’s summer blog round-up pulls together five posts packed with ideas for using informational texts from the Library’s collections.
“I had a paradigm shift. I went from trying to include primary and secondary sources to meet state standards to [an a-ha moment]! It is natural to include real resources because it adds quality and authenticity with a human face. I also will be able to take what I have been given and share, disseminate, using all the 'propaganda' you have given me into perpetuity, with rigor!”
Each of these historical artifacts is a part of the history of Mexican American communities in the 19th and 20th centuries. And each one can be found in the new Library of Congress primary source set, Mexican American Migrations and Communities.
Common Core State Standards, and many state content standards, emphasize reading informational text. Explore primary sources from the Library of Congress to discover informational text in many formats--including some formats that might surprise you.
When we ask teachers how they use primary sources, they often have rich and creative answers about how they hook students’ attention, deepen understanding, and even review concepts and content. We hear less about assessment, and most of the responses are questions about how to construct assessments using primary sources.
The Stanford History Education Group has created formative assessments using primary sources from the Library of Congress. With these tools, teachers can gauge students’ historical understanding and ability to apply critical thinking skills by evaluating their analysis of primary source materials.The Spring 2013 issue of the TPS Journal, an online publication focused on pedagogical approaches to teaching with the Library’s digitized primary sources in K-12 classrooms, looks at how a teacher can assess not only content knowledge, but also critical thinking skills.