Designing a Primary Source-Based Teaching Tool for Educators

Stephanie Greenhut will share the approach behind DocsTeach.org, the online tool for teaching with documents from the National Archives. The site was developed to provide educators with a platform to find, customize, and create primary source-based student activities that promote historical thinking and build inquiry skills. When we ask students to work with and learn from primary sources, we transform them into historians — that's the idea behind DocsTeach. Rather than passively receiving information from a teacher or textbook, students engage in the activities of historians — making sense of the stories, events and ideas of the past through document analysis. DocsTeach was designed to 1) model best practices for teaching with primary sources, and 2) shift the pedagogical authority from the National Archives to educators, to allow for customization of teaching materials and techniques. Educators can borrow from an ever-expanding collection of document-based activities created by the National Archives, and teachers around the world, and then copy or modify activities for their own students.