In our fast-paced lives, we make sense of thousands of images in just a short glance. 

Crop-It was designed to slow the sense-making process down and gives students time to think. The tool helps learners build strategies to seek evidence, multiple viewpoints, and a deeper, more detailed, understanding before determining the meaning of a visual source. It also aims to help teachers develop skills in posing questions that nurture deeper thinking.

The tool was designed around the Crop-It teaching routine that invites helps learners look carefully at a primary source to focus on details and visual information and then use these observations to generate and support ideas. Students use evidence from their “crops” to build an interpretation or make a claim. Crop-It can be completed as part of a lesson, and can be used with different kinds of visual sources (for example cropping a work of art, a poem, or a page from a textbook).

The digital Crop-It tool was designed to streamline and digitize this routine and provides easy access to collections of Library of Congress primary sources curated for teachers and students.