Over the last several decades, undergraduate history instruction has increasingly emphasized efforts to engage students in hands-on historical research. Texts that present students with sets of primary sources for analysis are now widely available. These texts strive to build students' research and analytical skills, and engage them in the evaluation of evidence, aiming to model for them what historians do and encouraging them to "think more like a historian." While such texts are a useful tool, particularly in survey courses, additional strategies are needed to develop students' understanding of the discipline and the role of the historian. The author's efforts in this area tend to fall into two rather broad categories: first, having students learn to read and analyze a wide variety of primary sources--and ultimately to locate and select those sources independently--and second, showing students that historical writing does not emerge solely from a single historian's encounter with sources, but from participation in "conversation" among scholars through journal articles, conference sessions, lectures, and monographs. In class, the author requires students to engage in both categories of activity through sequenced assignments that guide them through the processes of framing research questions, seeking sources, analyzing them, responding to alternative interpretations in the secondary literature, and engaging with one another's research in class. In addition, she makes her own activities as a scholar--so often invisible to undergraduates--visible: she talks about conferences she attends, she discusses her research projects, and occasionally she assigns materials she has written or primary sources that she uses. In spring 2003, however, the special nature of the course she was teaching and a rather unique research problem that had come her way, came together to allow her to share not only her findings, but also her frustrations, challenges and attempts at problem solving with her students. This article shows not only how she was able to use her own research to engage students in discussions about the research process, but how these discussions became directly applicable to and enriched their own research projects. (Contains 5 notes.)