While the field of history education elucidates a clear and ambitious vision of high-quality history instruction, a current challenge for history educators (including teacher educators, curriculum specialists, and school-based history and social science supervisors) becomes how to illuminate and capture this when observing classrooms to research history instruction or to provide useful discipline-specific feedback to preservice (and inservice) history teachers. This paper introduces the structure of the "Protocol for Assessing the Teaching of History" (PATH), an instrument that provides one lens through which to observe secondary history teaching in order to provide a means for structured and focused observation of history teaching and learning with the goal of improving instruction. The authors make no claims that PATH is "the" way of teaching and learning history; rather, PATH initiates the conversation about how to capture and explore the specific teaching behaviors that the research and practitioner literature has shown to contribute to high-quality history instruction. PATH is an attempt to, as Grossman terms it, engage in the difficult work of ""decomposition" of practice--breaking down complex practice into its constituent parts for the purposes of teaching and learning." (Contains 1 figure and 23 notes.)