Teach Primary Sources With Greater Confidence.
Waypoints helps you teach essential historic documents without asking you to start from scratch.
You want your readers to encounter the great documents directly—but you also know that primary sources can be difficult to teach without serious preparation. Waypoints helps teachers deepen their own content knowledge and bring essential primary sources into the classroom with greater confidence.
Teacher Tutorial Video
Video Tutorial
Bring serious documents into class without losing clarity, time, or confidence.
The Waypoints Library includes beautifully published historic documents, accompanied by written and video tutorials designed to help teachers understand what each document is, why it matters, and how it can be taught.
Study Essential Documents
Explore primary sources in American history, civics, political philosophy, economics, and related subjects.
Prepare with Tutorials
Use written and video tutorials to prepare for classroom instruction with stronger content mastery.
Let Readers Read the Authors
Help readers encounter primary sources in their own words, rather than merely reading textbook summaries.
Connect Big Ideas
Connect documents to liberty, equality, justice, rights, citizenship, constitutional self-government, and human nature itself.
Follow one document from the Library to the classroom.
Choose a primary source you already teach—or one you have always wanted to teach—and see how Waypoints helps you move from the original text to deeper understanding, serious preparation, and classroom use.
1
Read the Primary Source
Read the original document in a carefully prepared, accessible format.
2
Study the Written Tutorial
Explore historical context, arguments, key passages, major themes, and connections to other documents and ideas.
3
Watch the Video Tutorial
Work through difficult arguments and passages with additional explanation and interpretation.
4
Bring it into the Classroom
Use as much or as little of the tutorial material as you find helpful in preparing your class.
Put Waypoints to the test. Start with one document.
Start your Free Trial and explore the Waypoints materials for a primary source you already teach. Spend a few minutes with the document and related tutorials, then ask yourself one question: Would I feel better prepared to teach it tomorrow?
A guided primary-source supplement for serious civic education.
Waypoints is not a pile of worksheets. It provides serious, graduate-level preparation for teachers who want to teach primary sources well.
Think of Waypoints as a trusted preparation companion: it helps you understand the document before you place it in front of readers.
Not merely activities or trivia
Waypoints helps teachers move beyond superficial civics activities, isolated facts, and memorization.
Serious teacher preparation
Each tutorial helps you understand historical context, major ideas, key passages, and larger significance.
Flexible classroom integration
Use individual documents and tutorials where they fit best in your existing American history, government, civics, economics, humanities, or political philosophy course.
Built for the primary-source work AP® courses demand.
Waypoints provides a carefully curated library of foundational documents and other primary sources, paired with serious tutorials that help teachers prepare readers for close textual reading, argument analysis, historical context, and connections across American history.
AP® U.S. GOVERNMENT + AP® U.S. HISTORY
Teach the documents. Build the skills.
AP® U.S. Government and Politics
Waypoints includes required foundational documents, accompanied by tutorials that help teachers unpack arguments, historical context, constitutional principles, and enduring questions of self-government.
AP® U.S. History
The Waypoints Library offers a rich collection of primary sources for developing the habits of historical thinking APUSH requires: close reading, sourcing, contextualization, analyzing claims and evidence, making connections, and developing historical arguments.
Explore AP® Resources in Your Free Trial.
Two weeks. No credit card. Nothing to cancel.
13 of 13 AP® Foundational Documents
Waypoints includes all foundational documents required for AP® U.S. Government and Politics.
AP® U.S. History Primary Sources
Draw from the Early and Later American History collections to bring consequential primary sources into the periods and themes you already teach.
Historical Document Analysis
Help readers analyze original texts by identifying arguments, examining evidence, understanding historical context, and making connections among documents and ideas.
Serious Teacher Preparation
Use graduate-level written and video tutorials to prepare before asking readers to wrestle with difficult documents and ideas.
Use Waypoints personally—or bring it to your school.
If you want to explore Waypoints for your own teaching, begin with the Free Trial. If you are interested in access for multiple teachers or readers, explore an Academy Plan or Custom Plan for your school or district.
Questions teachers ask before starting.
Waypoints is designed to strengthen your content preparation and fit alongside the curriculum you already use.
How can Waypoints help with AP® U.S. Government or AP® U.S. History?
Waypoints is particularly useful for courses that require serious engagement with primary sources.
For AP® U.S. Government and Politics, the Waypoints Library includes 13 of the 13 required foundational documents, many accompanied by written and video tutorials that help teachers unpack arguments, historical context, constitutional principles, and larger questions of self-government.
For AP® U.S. History, the Early and Later American History collections provide a substantial range of diverse primary sources that can help readers practice close reading, historical context, document analysis, and evidence-based argument.
What should I try first during my Free Trial?
Start with one document you already teach.
Open the Waypoints published version, spend a few minutes with the written tutorial, and—where available—watch part of the related video tutorial. Look at the key passages, discussion questions, writing assignments, or suggested lesson.
Then ask yourself a simple question:Would I feel better prepared to teach this document tomorrow?
The Free Trial lasts two weeks, requires no credit card, and gives you time to explore additional materials after that first experience.
Can Waypoints still help me if I have taught these documents for years?
Absolutely. Familiarity with a document does not mean there is nothing more to discover in it.
Waypoints tutorials often examine historical context, arguments, passages, and connections that may not appear in standard textbooks or classroom resources. Experienced teachers may find new ways of interpreting a familiar text, new connections to other documents, or new questions worth bringing into the classroom.
The goal is not merely to help teachers encountering a document for the first time. It is to encourage deeper study of texts that often reward repeated reading.
What if I try Waypoints and think my department or school should use it?
We would be glad to talk with you.
If Waypoints proves useful in your own teaching and you think other teachers or readers could benefit, contact us about an Academy Plan. We can demonstrate the platform, answer questions about educator and reader access, and discuss how Waypoints might fit within your department, school, or district.
You do not need to work out the details before contacting us. Tell us what you have in mind, and we can explore possibilities together.
Designed to answer real teacher anxieties.
Teachers and educators describe how Waypoints has helped them prepare more deeply, teach with greater confidence, and bring serious primary sources into the classroom.
“Teachers using Waypoints will be delighted at the scale of the instructor resource material available for each document, often including background video lectures on the historical context.”
Robert R.
“The tutorial materials accompanying the primary source documents are top-notch. They provide useful context and a variety of resources for teachers to present and interpret the documents effectively.”
Ben D.
“Waypoints is very helpful in preparing to teach AP U.S. Government. They have all the required documents in the Waypoints Library, and the tutorials are perfect prep materials, especially for new teachers.”
Judd B.
“The tutorials have made me a better teacher. They give me the kind of intellectual preparation I rarely find in ordinary teaching resources—helping me understand not only what these historic documents say, but the ideas and arguments behind them. I walk into the classroom better prepared, more confident, and ready to help my readers think seriously about difficult questions.”
Jill C.