Under-told Stories and Simulations and Role Plays

Under-Told Stories

Our January Third Tuesday Professional Development session focused on resources to incorporate under-told stories into your classroom, particularly the histories of African Americans, women, and Chinese immigrants.

We captured the links mentioned in this Google Doc, but here are a few highlights.

African American History 

PBS Learning Media has taken the hour-long documentary, Hidden Stories: Montana's Black Past (PBS link) and broken it into shorter segments with discussion questions and a graphic organizer. Here are links to the excerpts and here are links to teaching resources. 

Montana in the Green Book Story Map is a hidden gem for anyone teaching about pre-Civil Rights US history. Between 1936 and 1967, Victor H. Green & Company published The Negro Motorist Green Book, which offered listings of lodgings, restaurants, service stations, and recreation opportunities for African American travelers. Many students may think that it was only African American travelers in the southern states who needed such a resource, but Montana had entries too! This was in part because Montana also had restaurants, bars and hotels that refused to serve African American customers (including the beloved Parrot Confectionery in Helena).  You can read more about the fight to pass a public accommodations law in Montana in the 1950s here. 

Chinese Immigration History

The Chinese Experience in Montana Hands-on History Footlocker is a great new addition to our traveling trunk program! (Learn more about that program and how to order a footlocker here.) Like many of our footlockers, The Chinese Experience in Montana includes many lessons that can be done without ordering the trunk. For an easy entry, fourth-fifth grade teacher Jodi Delaney recommends teaching the first lesson in the user guide, "Far From Home," which asks students to analyze letters that families in China wrote to men working in Montana. She said that she used the letters with struggling readers in a reading intervention group and the kids were enthralled. 

High school teacher Vicky Nytes had high praise for lessons about Chinese exclusion and the Chinese experience from the Digital Inquiry Group. You can find them by searching "Chinese" on their Sitewide Search | Digital Inquiry Group but you'll need to register to access DIG's free resources.

Jodi and Vicky also noted that Mark Johnson (who wrote the Chinese Experience in Montana footlocker) has middle and high school lessons about Montana Chinese history on his website: The Middle Kingdom under the Big Sky. 

Women's History

Jodi drew attention to one of her favorite lessons: Montana Women at Work: Clothesline Timeline Lesson Plan. This lesson plan uses historical photographs to teach students about women’s changing occupations and opportunities between the 1880s and the beginning of the 21st century.

Vicky recommended that American history and government teachers look at Montana Legal History Lesson Plan. (She doesn't teach it as written, but she likes the resources.) 

I showed everyone the resources on Montana Women's History and particularly how you can filter by topic and/or search the 100+ short essays that are on the site. Vicky said it's a very useful resource for students looking for research topics.

Thanks to MTHS Historian Kate Hampton for joining us and to Superior teacher Vicky Nytes, and Helena teacher Jodi Delaney for leading this informative session! 

Tuesday, February 17, 4:30 p.m.-5:30 p.m.: Simulation and Role Plays

Join us in February for another Social Studies Tuesday PD to learn how to bring your social studies classroom alive with simulations and role plays that develop historical empathy and help students imagine themselves in the past. Register for this session.

IEFA-Related Links and America's Field Trip

 

IEFA Related Links

Here are a few interesting, and hopefully useful, links for you!

OPI has created an updated Powwow Guide: Your Guide to Understanding and Enjoying Pow Wows (updated 2025)

Register for "We Are All Related: Planting the Seeds of Knowledge, Growing our Montana Story," the 2026 Indian Education for All Best Practices conference, March 23 – 24, in Helena and East Helena. While most of the conference will be held at the East Helena High School, the conference will move to the new Montana Heritage Center on Monday, from 2:30 p.m.-4:30 p.m., where experts will walk participants through the Montana Homeland gallery, an exhibit that covers Montana history from the Ice Age to the modern day. 

MTHS Historian Melissa Hibbard has shared two interesting IEFA-related links and lessons: 

The Invasion of America is a time lapse map project created by Claudio Saunt. 

Lesson Plan | Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center is a website that provides digitized student records, images, documents, and teaching resources. Note: I have not previewed the lesson plans for quality, but they look interesting, and the student records are fascinating! Of course, you and your students will need to analyze them carefully, using such historical thinking questions as: 

• Who wrote this?
• What is the author’s perspective?
• Why was it written?
• What was the context in which it was written? 
• What can (and what can't) these records tell us about students, their perspectives, and their experiences? 

America's Field Trip

America’s Field Trip is a nationwide contest that invites students across the country in grades 3–12 to be part of our nation’s 250th anniversary by sharing their perspectives on what America means to them — with the chance to earn an unforgettable field trip experience at some of the nation’s most iconic historic and cultural landmarks.

Students are asked to submit writing or original artwork in response to the contest’s prompt: “What does America mean to you?”

In honor of America’s 250th anniversary, America’s Field Trip is expanding with more exciting field trips, and more opportunities for students to win. A total of 250 students will be awarded a special behind-the-scenes field trip experience this summer or a cash prize.

Learn more about the criteria for submission and submit entries here. 

 

Get paid to create a digital exhibit

 Have you ever wanted to research a Montana or US history topic and share the details of your discovery with your students, including images and other primary resource materials as references? Now is your chance! 

Spend April 3 and 4, 2026, with the Montana History Portal staff learning how to create various types of digital exhibits using content from the History Portal.  

The History Portal contains over 102,000 items to help tell the story of a variety of topics – US History and World History can be taught through Montana primary source materials. 

Select a topic, gather the details, read, research and create an exhibit of your topic. Your exhibit will be published on the History Portal website, where you can access it, and it will be available to the public as a history lesson of its own. 

2026 Workshop Details 

Cost: FREE! Hotel, meals, and tours included. 

Location: Montana Heritage Center, 225 North Roberts, Helena, Montana, 59601 

• Friday, April 3
• Montana History Portal tour
• Exhibit review
• Montana History topics discussion
• Montana Heritage Center Tours 
• Historic walking tour of the Montana Capitol grounds  

• Saturday, April 4
• Brainstorm and share ideas, research, and outline creation. 

A more detailed agenda will be provided for final participants. 

Completed projects will earn 16 OPI professional development credits and a $425 stipend.

Registration is limited to 20 people and the deadline to register is March 1, 2026. 

Register Now. 

Summer Workshops (with Stipends) for Teachers

 

NEH Summer Institutes and Landmarks Workshops

The NEH is once again funding Landmark workshops (one week) and institutes (one to four weeks) for teachers this summer. The Institutes are designed to help teachers "deepen their understanding of significant topics in the humanities and enrich their capacity for effective scholarship and teaching." The Landmark workshops are designed to help teachers "incorporate place-based approaches to humanities teaching and scholarship." 

Everyone I know who's participated in one of these has found it inspiring and rejuvenating. Some people have gone so far as to call them life changing.

Programs are offered in residential, virtual, and combined formats. Participants receive stipends that are based upon program format and duration. (Stipends for one-week residential programs are $1,300. Stipends for one-week virtual programs are $650. There are larger stipends for multi-week programs). Many projects offer continuing education and/or graduate credit. 

Applications are due March 6, 2026, and the programs are quite competitive (although 20% of the spots are reserved for educators with five or fewer years of teaching experience). Bottom line: if this opportunity interests you, give yourself some time to pull together a great application.  

There are very few with a western theme this year, but I was intrigued by 250 Years of Teaching with Maps (Chicago, July 13-31) as well as The Most Southern Place on Earth: Music, History and Culture of the Mississippi Delta (Cleveland, Mississippi, June 21-27 and July 12-18). View all options.

Workshop at Heart Mountain, Wyoming

In past years, the NEH funded a Landmarks workshop at Heart Mountain, a World War II Japanese Internment Camp in Wyoming. This year, the Heart Mountain Foundation is reprising that workshop--Lessons from Incarceration--with funding from the Walk Memorial Foundation. Thirty teachers grades 5-12 will come study about the incarceration at Heart Mountain's new Mineta-Simpson Institution, June 14-19. Participating teachers will receive a $2,000 stipend to cover expenses and will receive a certificate showing 30 Professional Development hours. Participants who would like to opt for university credit can earn credits from the University of Wyoming. Learn more.

Montana: A History of Our Home Teacher's Guide--Updated and Revised

 

When You Know Better, Do Better

We recently reprinted the Teachers Guide for Montana: A History of Our Home, the fourth-grade curriculum we published in 2023, and we used this as an opportunity to update the content.

Most of the updates were straightforward: We added answers to discussion questions, updated the spellings of tribal names to align with recommendations from our Tribal Stakeholder Group, and converted the PowerPoints to Google Slides because we heard from some teachers that they couldn't open PowerPoints on their school computers. 

There's one change I was a little sad to make, and that was to the lesson "Homesteading: The Lure of Free Land." That lesson originally started with students analyzing a Northern Pacific Railway advertisement written in Polish. Because I don't read Polish, and because I knew that the Northern Pacific sent agents to Europe to recruit settlers, and because the caption in the exhibit where I found the advertisement identified it as a homestead-era advertisement, I presented this advertisement as one created by the railroad to recruit Polish farmers to immigrate to Montana.

Happily for historical accuracy, Melissa Hibbard does read Polish, and she informed me that the poster dated from around 1928 (long after the homesteading era was over) and that it was directed to Polish speakers living in Minnesota, Nebraska, and other parts of the Midwest. It was never circulated in Poland!

With this new knowledge, I edited the lesson. Now, students analyze a postcard image produced by the Great Northern Railway to lure homesteaders west. Just as before, they use Visual Thinking Strategies to do a close reading of the picture. And just as before that activity is followed by reading (and then illustrating) Danish immigrant Bertha Josephsen Anderson's reminiscence about her family's 1890 trip to Montana and first year on their homestead. 

Here's the old image. 

Here's the new image.

Both show prosperous farms, neither of which look anything like actual Montana homesteads, making them good pieces to use when teaching students media literacy and about the importance of critically evaluating sources. 

Note: I will be updating the Coming to Montana footlocker user guide, where this lesson plan originated, this summer when the footlocker returns to MTHS. (For more on how to order this or other footlockers, visit the footlocker page of our website.) 

Free In Person PDs

 

Evaluating Student Argumentation in Historical Research Educators Workshop

Not only is the workshop free, but travel stipends will be awarded! The two-day workshop is intended for grades 6-12 social studies educators in North Dakota and Montana. Educators will learn about strategies for primary source analysis and historical interpretation in student-led research and how to evaluate these works. 

These workshops are a collaboration between Montana Historical Society and the State Historical Society of North Dakota. These workshops are sponsored in part by the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources Great Plains Region, coordinated by the National Council for History Education.

Date: March 16 and 17, 8 a.m.-4 p.m.
Location: Dickinson State University

For North Dakota educators: A certificate for 16 professional development hours is offered.
For Montana educators: 16 Office of Public Instruction renewal units are offered.

Lunch and a travel stipend are included.

Capacity is limited. Applications are due by March 1.  

Apply now.

For more information, Melissa Hibbard.

Objectives

• Learn how to locate and integrate diverse primary sources from digital archives, local collections, and community resources.
• Evaluate student work using the official NHD evaluation criteria, including historical argumentation, use of evidence, and clarity of presentation.
• Design classroom activities and scaffolds that build research, writing, and presentation skills over time.

Presenters

Madison Milbrath, education outreach supervisor, State Historical Society of North Dakota

Melissa Hibbard, interpretive historian, Montana Historical Society

Recommended/Required Materials

Bring your tablet or laptop.

Cost

Workshop attendance is free.

A travel and lodging stipend will be awarded.  

Where to Stay

A block of rooms will be reserved until March 5 at the La Quinta Inn & Suites, 552 12th St. W, Dickinson, North Dakota. Call 701.300.8906 to book a room.

Agenda

March 16
Learn how to teach and evaluate primary source analysis and historical thinking skills such as corroboration, contextualization, and perspective in student work. See how this is exemplified in the National History Day framework.  

March 17
Complete judges' orientation and evaluate student projects at the Eastern Montana/Western North Dakota Regional National History Day contest. Offer written feedback to students and rank projects for advancement to the state contest.  

Judge at a National History Day Competition 

National History Day is recruiting judges for their regional and statewide contests: 

• Northern Regional, Flathead Valley Community College, Kalispell (Saturday, February 7)
• West/Central Regional, Montana Heritage Center, Helena (Saturday, February 14)
• Eastern Regional, Dickinson State University, Dickinson, ND (Tuesday, March 17)
• State Contest, Montana State University, Bozeman, MT (Saturday, April 25)

Training, lunch, and OPI renewal units provided!  

• If you are interested in being a judge, please sign up here.
• Learn more about National History Day here.

 

January Professional Development

 

Indian Education for All Across the Content Area Webinar  

January 13, 4:00 – 5:00 p.m.

This OPI webinar will focus on resources for teaching about Indigenous oral traditions. Educators will receive one renewal unit for attending. Here's the Zoom Meeting Link.

Under-told Stories

January 20, 4:30 p.m.-5:30 p.m.

The Montana Historical Society Teacher Leaders Social Studies Third Tuesdays is picking up again with this session on integrating under-told stories. History is full of people from different backgrounds, many of whose stories don't make the textbooks. Learn about resources to integrate African American, Chinese, and women's history into your social studies classroom. Participants will earn one renewal unit. Advance registration required. Register for this session.

 

P.S. In my last email, I asked folks to complete a survey about what tech you have available (with questions like, "can you show PowerPoints"?) BUT: I didn't set the permissions on the link correctly. So--if you tried and were frustrated, please consider trying again. It works this time! Promise!