With collections estimated at a staggering 164 million items and exceptionally deep coverage of virtually every imaginable subject, the Library of Congress (LC) is one of the world’s largest libraries. Established in 1800 to support the research needs of the U.S. Congress—and today serving the country as its de facto national library—the LC is open to all and actively seeks to support remote use and access to its vast collections. A noteworthy outreach service is its program for teachers—a portal of free resources offering engaging primary source teaching kits and professional development opportunities to help America’s teachers bring the LC into their classrooms.

Digitization of original documents, photographs, maps, and cultural heritage objects not only preserves the historical content of materials, but also makes it possible for multiple users to work with them simultaneously and in geographically diverse locations without concerns for the environmental or security measures needed in the LC’s bookstacks. Unlike secondary sources that recount someone else’s interpretation of events or their historical significance, primary sources allow students to study them and come to conclusions independently. The LC notes, “Bringing young people into close contact with these unique, often profoundly personal, documents and objects can give them a sense of what it was like to be alive during a long-past era. Helping students analyze primary sources can also prompt curiosity and improve critical thinking and analysis skills.”

The LC’s robust Teaching With Primary Sources (TPS) program is a consortium of organizations that was formalized in 2006 and has grown steadily to bring educational resources to K–12 classrooms, universities, literary groups, historical societies, libraries, museums, home-schooling educators, and civic groups. The LC publishes its peer-reviewed TPS Consortium Journal semiannually, and submissions focus on successful ways the library’s digitized primary sources have been used as transformative teaching tools.

LC educational specialists produce teacher’s guides outlining techniques for the study of specific information media, such as books, charts, manuscripts, maps, motion pictures, newspapers, oral histories, photographs, political cartoons, sheet music, and sound recordings. These concise downloadable manuals coach teachers on ways to guide students through interactions with various formats of historical materials so they observe and identify details, reflect, test sources, and formulate questions that prompt further inquiry and study.

CLASSROOM MATERIALS

The LC’s suite of ready-to-use classroom materials is created by teachers. Offerings include more than a hundred topically themed primary source sets, nearly as many lesson plans, and multimedia historical presentations.

The collection of primary source sets has a wide range of subjects, including broad topics such as the Civil War, ecology, poetry, women in science, and Japanese American internment. There are also state-specific information sets. Each primary source set includes a detailed teacher’s guide, a lesson overview, downloadable photographs, and additional resources.

There are 92 lesson plans that cover an amazingly varied group of topics ranging from the timely to the timeless—and all are designed to enrich the classroom experience in countless ways. Lesson plans detail course objectives, lesson preparations, and course materials and resources, along with class-by-class activities and lesson evaluations.

The LC offers teachers four presentations titled Elections, Immigration and Relocation in U.S. History, Inaugurations: Stepping Into History, and U.S. History Primary Source Timeline. LC educators guide readers though these digital web presentations, and each topic is enriched by photos, multimedia recordings, and a bibliography of further resources to explore.

SUPPLEMENTARY RESOURCES

The LC maintains myriad useful web-based resources to help teachers pinpoint caches of materials to enrich lesson plans and spark general curiosity. Want to read the headlines of America’s newspapers as far back as 1690? Chronicling America is a central hub to search the U.S. Newspaper Directory by state, newspaper title, year, and keyword phrase.

Teachers looking to inject playfulness and curiosity into the classroom likely will find Everyday Mysteries a great place to turn to for science articles that jumpstart thinking and exploration among their students. “What causes freezer burn?” “How does a touch screen work?” These articles sneak science into conversations about everyday topics students are familiar with and likely wouldn’t think of as springboards into learning.

Looking for kid-friendly activities that students can bring home? The LC’s activity kits can help families create projects such as mini-books and put on at-home puppet shows to unlock children’s storytelling talents, along with other fun activities such as charting nature walks guided by naturalist poet Walt Whitman’s writings and completing a collection of wordmatching games designed to introduce children to braille.

The LC shares millions of images, photos, maps, musical scores, sound recordings, and books from its vast digital collections in its Free to Use and Reuse Sets. Teachers looking to go beyond clip art will love these items that the LC “believes” are in the public domain, have no known copyright, or have been cleared by the copyright owner for public use.

The LC has produced about 2,000 subject research guides to help researchers navigate its vast collections. These are searchable by subject, by research center, and by using keywords. With a few clicks, teachers can pinpoint resources for, say, Ben Franklin’s kite experiments or the science behind ice skating.

Today in History is a fun page to bookmark and visit daily. It tracks noteworthy events and interesting happenings of footnote caliber for each day and provides resources for further exploration. Beyond using it as a teaching tool, it could be used to build up a collection of unusual icebreakers.

LC facilitators launched a Virtual Student Workshops pilot project to guide groups of 10–30 students through 45-minute Zoom sessions. Current offerings are:

• Collecting, Creating and Witnessing History, for grades 9–12
• Stories in the Stars: Mythology at the Library of Congress, for grades 4–8
• Rosa Parks: Freedom Fighter, for grades 5–8
• Imagination: Everyone’s Superpower, for grades 3–5

Workshops are supplemented with downloadable curriculum materials, checklists, and pre- and post-program resources.

The LC created a concise citation style guide for commonly used sources such as photographs, newspapers, maps, and sound recordings. Educators teaching citation skills can cover the fundamentals for both the Chicago and Modern Language Association styles and direct students to a one-stop reference page that is handy to bookmark.

COLLABORATIONS

The LC helps teachers connect with networks beyond its doors. It lists professional education journals and interactive civics-based programs such as PBS NewsHour’s Journalism in Action, Second Avenue Learning’s Voices for Suffrage, Muzzy Lane Software’s KidCitizen, and the Indiana University Center on Representative Government’s Action Citizen project.

National History Day’s special prizes to recognize student excellence in numerous categories include one for Discovery or Exploration in History, which the LC sponsors. The National History Day program offers teachers a wealth of classroom tools and lesson plans on nearly 200 topics.

The TPS Consortium network consists of 200-plus partner organizations in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. Members from colleges and universities, state agencies, libraries, advocacy organizations, and other educational stakeholders share ideas and materials and may even collaborate on TPS projects. They provide professional development workshops and academic courses and write curricula for others to adapt.

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Beyond offering a suite of course materials for teachers to bring into their classroom, the teachers program provides an extensive collection of professional development opportunities tailored specifically to help with integrating primary source learning into lesson plans.

Free, 3-day, in-person workshops are available in the summer. The LC’s education specialists teach instructional practices and strategies for bringing primary source materials into K–12 classrooms and coach educators on ways to encourage critical thinking skills and engagement with students. Interested participants must apply and submit a letter of support from a school administrator. Educators are encouraged to watch the LC website for submission deadlines for 2025. The program covers tuition and materials, but participants are responsible for personal expenses such as travel, lodging, and meals.

Not every teacher can attend in-person workshops, so the LC offers two self-paced, remote training modules: Analyzing Primary Sources and Multiple Sources for Multiple Perspectives. Each prerecorded, hour-long session is focused on pedagogical strategies for analyzing and understanding primary resources. Teachers who complete these web sessions receive a certificate for an hour of professional development.

LC educational specialists lead an active calendar of instructional webinars, and they post recordings of past events to the library’s website. Past topics include Teaching Civic Ideals Through Primary Sources, Pairing Primary Sources and Picture Books, When Was This Photograph Taken?, and Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month With the Library of Congress and the Palabra Archive. In a related resource, teachers can watch 20-minute recorded sessions on a range of topics and previously recorded webinars as part of the LC’s Online Office Hours resource collection.

The LC offers 30–60-minute skill-building activities that were originally designed for its professional development workshops and makes them available for self-guided use. They include activities to help educators understand copyright restrictions and connect teachers with primary sources, as well as activities designed to help learners critically view and understand photographs, maps, and other visual sources.

Stretching back over a decade, the LC’s archive of professional development videos features, for example, panel discussions on how teachers can engage librarians to enrich their lesson planning, as well as videos that encourage and guide student reflection during instructional activities.

MAKING A CONNECTION

For the 2023–2024 school year, the LC had Teacher in Residence and Distinguished Educator Fellow programs as part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellowship Program. There will be two Einstein Fellows for the 2024–2025 school year. Teachers interested in applying to these highly competitive programs can visit the LC’s Internships and Fellowships page and the John W. Kluge Center for more information.

K–12 teachers looking for specific educational or instructional resources can suggest programming topics for the LC to develop into webinars and workshops. The LC reviews programming requests on a rolling basis and typically needs 3 months’ lead time to produce resources. Through the Ask a Librarian portal, teachers can reach out with inquiries about the program and the library’s vast collections. The teachers program has a dedicated blog, Teaching With the Library, for educators to follow for the best techniques for using LC primary sources in the classroom and other teaching strategies.