Five Things the National Portrait Gallery Can Do for Your Classroom (Aside from Field Trips)

By Thor Whitlock, Eighth grade U.S. History Teacher, Fort Wayne, Indiana
Teacher Advisory Board member

The average cost for a field trip to Washington, D.C., for my students would be just over $800 per student. I teach at a Title 1 school, so this is pretty much out of the question. But I can still use the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery as a resource in my classroom. Here are five ways that the National Portrait Gallery can help you in your classroom.

Take a virtual field trip

If your classroom is anything like mine, then Washington is just too far away and too expensive for most of your students. That doesn’t mean that you can’t visit the National Portrait Gallery. Thanks to the fine people at Google, if you have Wi-Fi, you and your class can explore the entire museum just like you have already been exploring with Google Earth’s street view.

You could start out on the museum’s third-floor mezzanine by looking at a portrait of Elvis Presley, walk down the hall and  down the stairs, visiting every portrait until you get to the first floor and stop at Pocahontas. If you were to explore the entire museum this way, you would see 290 portraits. I’m sure that you can figure out some way to use this in your classroom. 

Steal a Lesson Plan

I suppose I shouldn’t use the word “steal.” These plans are here specifically for you—for classrooms for kindergarteners to honors students in twelfth grade. They are all up to date and ready to go with step-by-step instructions. Almost every plan on the site incorporates social studies, writing, and art, and many also include science and math.

Have Students Make Their Own Collections

This one is brand new—still in the beta stage—and I’m excited to tell you about it. The Smithsonian Learning Lab site houses digital images, videos, documents, and artifacts from all nineteen Smithsonian museums. Students and teachers can create their own free accounts and save their own collections.

Let’s say you have students creating a presentation on Abraham Lincoln. Your students now only need to go to one place now to get all of their virtual artifacts. They can find Lincoln’s life mask from the Portrait Gallery as well as a suit Lincoln often wore from the National Museum of American History. After they create their own collections, they’ll be able to share, edit, and present them. 

Even MORE Lesson Plans?!?

I didn’t even know about one of the coolest features of the National Portrait Gallery’s website until I was asked to write this article, when I found two links, “Current Exhibitions” and “Past Exhibitions.” Some of the descriptions provide a link to the online exhibition. I had to stop playing and finish this article! 

Communicate with Actual Human Beings

I have saved the best for last. If I was reading this article, I would be yelling at my screen, “I can get almost all of this from Wikipedia, or United Streaming, or Discovery Education, or Google, or my textbook’s online resources!” And the truth is that I do use all of those things. But I’ll tell you why I keep coming back to the National Portrait Gallery: I can actually talk to educators there. And every time I do, I get a response usually in the same day—always in less than twenty-four hours. The people I have talked to have always been patient with me and are WAY more knowledgeable than I am! They have found obscure images of obscure people for me that even Wikipedia has never even heard of. I invite you to get in touch with an educator at the National Portrait Gallery. I know they’ll be happy to help you with your next lesson! E-mail them at NPGEducation@si.edu.