TPS Spotlight: Collaborative for Educational Services

CES: Cairn and Noyes
Since 2010, the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) program, Emerging America, at the Collaborative for Educational Services has offered free and low cost workshops and support to K-12 teachers throughout the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and nationally via online courses on a variety of topics, including Disability History. Participants learn to work with and practice strategies for using Library of Congress online resources to engage students, teach inquiry through the use of primary sources, and help students achieve challenging literacy standards. Learn more about the Collaborative’s Emerging America Teacher Professional Development.

One of the Collaborative’s premier offerings is Accessing Inquiry, a clearinghouse of resources to support making the teaching of History and Social Science accessible to all learners. Examine the framework, Universal Design for Learning–supporting excellence for all by offering multiple paths to understanding. Integrate the histories of people with disabilities and of immigrant and foreign language communities into your curriculum–often through topics that you already teach! Gain strategies to know and support diverse students, to empower them to ask good questions, to engage them in deep thinking, and to assess what they are learning.

A new resource is History’s Mysteries K-5 Curriculum in which each lesson of every grade-level unit invites students to a series of inquiry activities grounded in the 2018 Massachusetts History & Social Science Framework. Each mystery has customizable handouts and a clickable presentation with optional narration. Sign up live webinars on Teaching the History’s Mysteries K-5 Curriculum.

Grade-level units

  • Kindergarten: What is the difference between now and then?
  • Grade 1: How do communities make decisions?
  • Grade 2: Why do people move?
  • Grade 3: Why do people celebrate the 4th of July?
  • Grade 4: How did water shape work?
  • Grade 5: What is “Free Speech”?

Additionally, the Collaborative provides an extensive set of K-12 teaching resources that include primary source sets, lesson plans, classroom assessments, and more, developed by teachers and edited for quality and consistency. These resources can be filtered by Type, Subject, Time Period, and Grade Level.

More resources and strategies are communicated through the Collaborative’s blog, which includes the content from their weekly History eNews digest. You can also follow them on Facebook and Twitter.