Contextualized learning offers tremendous opportunities for developing students' appreciation of history and abilities to apply their understandings—to make sense of problems encountered every day. Learning experiences in history provide a natural context for working with students in any grade. No make-believe settings here. It's nice when it just happens… The Bradley Commission on History in Schools and the National Standards for History say to use it well.

Here-There-Then
Students should perceive past events and issues as they were experienced by people at the time, and develop historical empathy as opposed to present-mindedness. They should also understand the interplay of change and continuity, how things happen and change, and how to prepare to live with uncertainties and unfinished business. "Here-there-then" studies help students to understand and deal with the enormous changes that will occur over their lifetimes, to identify the continuities that link past and present, and to understand our society in relation to the human condition over time. Through this understanding, students can recognize the importance of individuals who have made a difference in history, and the significance of personal character for both good and ill.

Historical Thinking
Historical thinking involves the exploration and analysis of historical documents, places, artifacts, and other records from the past. According to both the Bradley Commission on History in Schools and the National Standards for History, this requires that children thoughtfully listen to and read well-written historical narratives that reveal conditions, changes, and consequences, and that explain why things happened as they did. Analysis of the events described and the explanations offered, in tandem and in comparison with historical artifacts, records, and the human figures involved, brings a child's ability to "think historically" full circle.

Thick Narrative
Whether political, economic, social, or cultural, every form of historical study offers true case studies and serious narrative. Never reduce historical records to thin recitals of successive facts and dates. By its interdisciplinary nature, history connects and can bring alive studies in any other discipline with thick narrative that relates any subject topic with biography, rich storytelling-real significance in human lives, leaders, ordinary folk, and the consequences of our actions and dreams.