Historical thinking skills in the classroom, Part 2: Tips and resources for getting started

I’m throwing an audible here. I was originally going to move forward with my article on the gathering sources and sourcing competencies, but due to the repeated requests for more information and resources after publishing Part 1 (which you should read before this one), I thought it prudent to do this article first.

But before I begin, I would like to address a point that I’ve heard from numerous people. Since we educators were all taught Bloom’s Taxonomy, we believe that background content knowledge is prerequisite for all higher order thinking. The number one concern I’ve heard over the last day is that educators would love to move towards a historical thinking skills model but they are afraid their students don’t know enough history content to do so. On the contrary, however, Sam Wineburg has argued that when it comes to historical thinking, Bloom’s Taxonomy is pointed in the wrong direction (below). Historical content knowledge – foreground/fist-order knowledge, facts, narratives, arguments about the past, etc. – is the end result of a long process of historians using their specialized skills to piece together the past. In Bruce VanSledright’s model of historical thinking that I explained in my previous article, this represents the cognitive interaction between strategic practices and background concepts – the “scientific method” of Social Studies if you will – at the heart of the creation of historical knowledge. This is not to say that students don’t need some background contextual knowledge in order to conduct an inquiry; they do. But students don’t need to be experts. They don’t need to spend a full year or semester learning tons of background information about a time period in order to conduct inquiry. Instead, students can be taught all the prerequisite information in a few class periods or the week prior to conducting an inquiry.

I’ve heard this argument particularly aimed at students in younger grades, and how they don’t have enough content knowledge to develop such higher order skills. This is countered by the fact that many of the research studies conducted by Wineburg and others were in elementary classrooms, and VanSledright himself taught fifth grade for a number of years. Furthermore, the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) framework is a fully-integrated, inquiry-based, set of Social Studies standards meant for all grades. I would argue that it is even more important for students to learn at a young age that doing history is akin being a detective of the past, piecing together “crime scenes” using evidence left over from times long ago. Don’t they do scientific experiments in elementary school, which involve them in the process of scientific discovery? Yet in their Social Studies classes, they are taught that history is a game of memorizing facts out of a book. If that is allowed to take hold at a young age, they already may have erroneous views of the past from flawed textbooks.

One last point here: the skills that will be discussed in this series apply to all historical study and are not content dependent. Thus, there is not a specific set or amount of content needed in order to develop these skills. Of course, that depends on the end goal of your course. If you must adhere to strict district or state content-based standards or standardized tests, it becomes much trickier to implement. But if you’re as lucky enough as me and are able to make the development of these skills the ultimate end goal of the course, the content is just the device used as the backdrop for developing and honing these skills.

Choosing your classroom competencies

Before you begin the year, you should name and describe which historical thinking skills you’re going to teach and assess. Going into the year with a general approach of “teaching historical thinking skills” like I did two years ago is likely not good enough. Be specific. Here are the four “core competencies” I assess from beginning to end in my classroom:

• Gathering sources – Students will be able to find a variety of primary and secondary sources relevant to answering a historical inquiry question. These sources include, but are not limited to accounts, photographs, videos, soundbites, speeches, diaries, and various works of art.
• Sourcing – Students will be able to determine how the author, date produced, purpose, and perspective of a historical source impact the reliability and usability of that source for answering an inquiry question.
• Taking evidence – Students will be able to take information from a and make inferences about a variety of written and visual sources, both primary and secondary, and use sourcing and context to determine if and how this information provides evidence for answering a historical inquiry question.
• Argumentation and defense – Students will be able to synthesize evidence into an argument, narrative, or interpretation of the past, and defend their conclusions and use of evidence.

If these look familiar, it’s because they are essentially the “strategic practices” from VanSledright’s historical thinking model. To me, they are the most important because they are the most inter-disciplinary and universally applicable of the skills. Regardless of what someone does in their life, they are going to come across problems that they will need to figure out the answer to. These skills align closely with a universal method of problem-solving, learning, and knowledge creation.

In addition, as the year progresses, I increasingly have students work with some of the skills that fall under “background/organizing concepts” in VanSledright’s model, which are also the historical thinking concepts in Seixas’s model. I have debated with myself about whether these actually constitute “skills” from a competency-based standpoint or just methods of solving the problem so-to-speak. Certainly, they are far less universal and interdisciplinary, but I have found that they have some important implications outside of the classroom. I have described them in skills-based language as follows:

• Corroboration – Students will be able to use multiple sources of evidence and perspectives about the same topic to strengthen the plausibility of a historical argument, while effectively analyzing when sources conflict and taking the proper course of action.
• Contextualization – Students will be able to place a document, person, event, or idea in the temporal space in which it existed, using knowledge of relevant events and the social, political, cultural, and economic factors of the time period to expand historical understanding of a topic or inquiry.
• Historical perspective and empathy – Students will be able to use evidence about the life of a historical actor and the context of the time period they lived in order to infer their thoughts, feelings, and motives, and understand why they acted certain ways or made certain decisions in situations.
• Causation and consequence – Students will be able to determine the extent to which historical factors, events, people, ideas, and forces influenced the future.
• Significance – Students will be able to use evidence to determine which people, events, and ideas from the past are important to a narrative, argument, or our contemporary world.
• Continuity and change over time – Students will be able to use evidence to determine what factors remain constant over periods of times and what changes, and determine how history should be broken up into time periods.

When we see the skills described and organized in this matter, we can get a clearer picture of how VanSledright’s model works. In the course of doing the universal research skills (my “core competencies”), they will be using the history-specific skills in the second section to make more meaningful interpretations of the past. This also helps us to explain why some journalists make good historians and others don’t. Journalists all have the general research skills, but many do not have the history-specific skills. Those who don’t will often use presentism in their historical research, take information from historical sources at face value, and make shallow interpretations of the past.

On a final note, it may be prudent to have “conducting inquiry” as its own standalone skill, even though the skills above are steps in that process. This is because, as I’ve found out this year, a student’s proficiency in the skills alone does not necessarily mean they can put it together and conduct a full inquiry on their own. There is a particular self-direction needed that’s not automatically acquired from learning the skills piecemeal. So I have described the competency as such:

• Conducting inquiry – Students will be able to conduct the inquiry process independently by generating a central question and using research and disciplinary practices to formulate an evidence-based argument.

Introducing students to historical thinking

It is important to take some time in the beginning of the year to introduce students to the idea of historical thinking and what it is they’re actually learning. If you teach in the upper grades as I do, students will likely come into your class with a preconceived notion of history as a discipline of memorizing and regurgitating large amounts of information about the past. They will be preconditioned to self-assess “learning” by the amount of such information they have been exposed to and can memorize. However, since the learning that takes place in a competency-based, historical thinking skills focused classroom is much more intangible – ie. “I can do this skill” versus “I can tell you information I didn’t know before” – students may reach a point where they don’t think they’re learning anything. I witnessed this in my own classroom about half-way through the year, even though I could see clear evidence on their research projects that the skill proficiency levels had been increasing. And the feedback at the end of the year was clear: they almost universally declared that they had gotten better in sourcing, use of evidence, and argumentation. Goal accomplished. As previously stated, the lesson I learned from this was to ensure the students have a detailed understanding of what historical thinking skills are, what it means to think historically, and the different models of historical thinking so they know exactly what it is they will be learning throughout the year (this would obviously have to be significantly modified for the younger grades). Next year, I plan to have students keep a portfolio of skills so they can track all of the skills they’ve learned and the assessments in which they’ve shown evidence of their proficiency.

Next, it would be helpful to drive the point home with an activity that introduces historical thought to the students. There are many out there, but one of my favorites is Lunchroom Fight from Stanford History Education Group. In this activity, students are tasked with determining who started a fight in the cafeteria by reading and evaluating different witness testimonies. You can have them do this activity on their own, in groups, or together as a class modeling your thoughts. I typically have them do it on their own then show them the way I went about it so they can see my thinking against theirs. If you do choose to model this for them instead of having them do it on their own, it would be a good idea to have them try a similar activity afterwards. Activities such as these drive home what it means to do history. 

Instructional practices and assessment

Another important thing to keep in mind is that since the goal of a competency-based, historical thinking skills focused course is skills instead of content memorization, a different set of pedagogical tools will be necessary. Ultimately, it is the job of the teacher to make their thought processes visible by modeling the skills for them while thinking out loud and explaining what they’re doing and why. Do not invite any student input during the first run, even though you may be tempted. Instead, you can have the students write down things they notice about what you do or simply sit back and observe. Next, invite student participation in the process. You will still be taking the lead but students will now be doing it with you. Finally, on the third run, allow students a chance to practice for themselves. This process is sometimes referred to as the “cognitive apprenticeship” approach, since the students will be learning by watching you think.

When it comes to assessment, do not lose sight of backwards design. Thus, you should design your assessments first or at least have a good idea of what they will look like. If the ultimate goal is to teach historical thinking skills, your assessments should assess the students’ proficiency levels in performing the skills being taught. For example, if you are developing the students’ skills in sourcing primary documents – that is, determining whether a document provides reliable evidence for a historical inquiry based on author, date, purpose, source type, etc. – then your assessment should exclusively measure their ability to source primary documents, either solely or separately from any content knowledge being assessed. This is not to say that you can’t also assess such content knowledge, but when the two are intertwined in assessment, it becomes unclear where the strengths and deficiencies are. So in this example, the sourcing section of a test should contain all information (eg. context, background, etc) necessary to show a student’s ability to source the document.

Resources: Books on historical thinking

Of course, the ability of an educator to teach students how to think historically depends on the prerequisite that they themselves know how to do the skills being taught. This section contains a series of resources to help teachers get started with historical thinking theory and acquire a baseline of historical thinking skills. Even then, it is highly advisable that teachers practice these skills on their own or in PLCs to hone them. For me personally, it wasn’t until I wrote my article on Columbus that I really felt comfortable with historical research, and even then, I was missing many of the “organizing concepts.” While there may not necessarily be a best order to go through these, nor do you need to read all of these books, they will provide a fuller understanding of historical thinking. I would recommend reading at least the top four or five books in the order provided.

• The Challenge of Rethinking History Education, by Bruce VanSledright – I’m not sure whether I would recommend reading this or Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts first, as both books do a great job of helping to shift an educator’s mindset away from the traditional approach. In this book, VanSledright explains his model of historical thinking in detail and also provides some practical pedagogical methods and lessons. To do so, he creates a fictitious teacher named Thomas Becker, who is in the trial-and-error phase of redoing his classroom approach to focus on historical thinking skills. While made-up, many of the anecdotes about his classroom, his students, and in his battle with the bell are highly relatable and helpful.
• Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, by Sam Wineburg – This book is one of Wineburg’s culminating works, with in-depth descriptions of his many research studies with historians over the decades. While this book was not meant to contain much readily-usable, practical classroom pedagogy, it is indispensable in helping teachers shift their mindset towards what it means to do historical thinking. Furthermore, one of the single most helpful things for developing my own historical thinking skills was to read about how the historians in Wineburg’s studies approached the inquiry questions at hand by sifting through the documents. Wineburg is comprehensive in his descriptions of how the historians sourced and contextualized the documents, interrogated the sources, corroborated information, and developed evidence-based arguments. This book is available in audiobook format on Audible.
• The Big Six: Historical Thinking Concepts, by Peter Seixas and Tom Morton – Not only does Seixas view historical thinking in a slightly different way than do Wineburg and VanSledright, this book covers a lot of concepts that fall under “background/procedural concepts” in VanSledright’s model, and which are largely not covered in the two books above. In Seixas’s view of historical thinking, the six concepts – significance, evidence, cause and effect, continuity and change over time, perspective, and the ethical dimension – are framed as problems or tensions that historians must grapple with in the creation of narratives and arguments about the past. The way historians navigate these problems and tensions – based on their own life perspective coupled with the distance between past and present – determine the final product. The book itself is well-organized with lots of practical classroom ideas. Each chapter starts with using a different historian’s book about a seemingly random topic as an exemplar for how to navigate the concept. Seixas then provides lesson ideas for introducing each concept, as well as “Guideposts” and accompanying activities to progress students towards mastery of the concept. Finding a print copy of this book is difficult and/or expensive, but it can be found online at Archive.org or downloaded in PDF format.
• Examining the Evidence: Seven Strategies for Teaching with Primary Sources, by Hilary Mac Austin and Kathleen Thompson – Don’t let the fact that this book is written for K-8 deter you from reading if you teach high school. There are lots of gems in this book that can both help you improve your own primary source evaluation and historical thinking skills and provide you with practical pedagogy. For example, I never thought to consider agency in photographs when evaluating them as sources. That is, did the person know the photograph was being taken? If so, did they know they were going to be taking that photograph that day, thus being able to choose which clothes they wanted? What is the bias of the photograph? Since it is recommended to start heavily with visual literacy, this book is indispensable in that domain while also providing food for thought about written sources.
• Reading, Thinking, and Writing About History, by Chauncey Monte-Sano, Susan De La Paz, and Mark Felton – I would argue that this book may also be a must-read. It does a great job of describing practical pedagogical methods for modeling historical thinking skills and scaffolding the argumentative writing process for students. For modeling skills, the book suggests thinking out loud and annotating important points of sourcing and text from documents and even gives example annotative comments teachers can use (the “cognitive apprenticeship” approach). And instead of the traditional five-paragraph essay of introduction, three supporting body paragraphs, and a conclusion, their essay format includes a rebuttal paragraph (what does the other side say and why are they wrong?) in place of the third supporting paragraph. 
• Inquiry Design Model: Building Inquiries in Social Studies, by Kathy Swan and S.G. Grant – Many of you may be familiar with the C3 Social Studies Framework – which Swan and Grant played a significant role in designing – and have worked with it before. I will admit I thought I understood it pretty well until I read this book. There is far more than what meets the eye just by looking over the standards, and this book gets into the minutia of how to build inquiries with different goals, different structures, and even different “question logics.” This will give the reader a tried and true way to structure large inquiries over multiple class periods in an engaging, document-based approach, and provide food for thought on taking civic action.
• Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone), by Sam Wineburg – Shorter than Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, this book is more a collection of essays than a cohesive book. Nevertheless, there is still lots of good information in here. The chapter on standardized test design is rather revealing, as Wineburg argues that since standardized history tests are strategically designed to fit a certain bell curve, there will always be people unhappy with the results. Other chapters include one criticizing Howard Zinn’s methods used to write A People’s History of the United States and another on the importance of digital literacy – teaching students how to determine which information online is credible. Available in audiobook for free on Hoopla App.
• Reading Like a Historian, by Sam Wineburg, Daisy Martin, and Chauncey Monte-Sano – This book has many of the document sets that Wineburg originally used in his studies with historians adapted as ready-for-classroom lessons, with multiple suggested formats for each. For those who have read Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, a lot of the stuff will sound familiar. However, it is still well worth the read for both increasing your own historical thinking skill proficiency and acquiring lessons to use in the classroom.
• Assessing Historical Thinking and Understanding, by Bruce VanSledright – The sequel to The Challenge of Rethinking History Education, this book focuses solely on assessment strategies. One notable and interesting method of assessment is the weighted multiple-choice test, specifically designed for assessing historical thinking. In this format, there is only one incorrect answer for each question, with the others being varying degrees of correct. VanSledright argues that this is a good way to assess proficiency on skills. Also contained in this book are rubrics for writing essays and other ways of compelling students to show their historical thinking on assessments.
• Thinking Historically: Educating Students for the 21st Century, by Stéphane Lévesque – If you have read all the other books listed, I’m not sure this book provides much extra in the way of stuff that’s not covered elsewhere. It was published prior to VanSledright’s books, and you can see a lot of the thought and theory he based his model of historical thinking on. There are definitely some useful bits of information, especially as it relates to not deriving direct lessons from the past. I have heard lots of people who feel very strongly about this book which is why I read it and subsequently included it on this list. It certainly won’t hurt to read it.
• “Why Won’t You Just Tell Us The Answer?”, by Bruce A. Lesh – This book, along with the two below, are the first books I’ve read in the realm of historical thinking skills. I would not recommend starting here, but there is a lot of good, practical pedagogy and food for thought in this book. It lines up well with Seixas and Levesque in terms of the concepts and skills highlighted.
• Teaching U.S. History Beyond the Textbook, by Yohuru Rasheid Williams – Similar to the Lesh book, but a slightly different format for conducting historical inquiry. I would highly recommend this for elementary teachers because his “CSI” and “Haunted History” approach is very cutesy and would work well with younger students. It’s important to note that Williams is a very well-known educator and historian who has appeared on multiple History Channel documentaries.
• Teaching What Really Happened, by James Loewen – The first book I read in the realm of historical thinking skills, written by the author of Lies My Teacher Told Me. Loewen does a good job of talking about how students can be involved in analyzing, critiquing, and finding the faults with established textbook narratives and myths, providing one of the cornerstones of historical thought. He also provides lists of resources and books at the end of each chapter that teachers can use.

Resources: Professional development, webinar, articles, and more

• Stanford History Education Group Professional Development – I’ve been to a number of these and they are great. I would recommend doing any and all that you can, especially if your school will foot the bill.
• OER Project Skills Clinics – Go to session recordings and see what’s there. Lots of stuff on how to scaffold reading, writing, and other basic historical literacy skills.
• From Inquiry Arc to Instructional Practice: The Potential of the C3 Framework, by S.G. Grant (article)
• What Is Learned in College History Classes? By Sam Wineburg, Mark Smith, and Joel Breakstone (article)
• Teaching historical inquiry with objects, Smithsonian Institute (edX course) – I took this course about six years ago before I got into historical thinking skills. I would recommend familiarizing yourself with inquiry and historical thinking before doing this course, but it provides a lot of great pedagogical ideas and methods.
• IDM Summer Institute – Held every year with the intention of giving educators a crash course on theory and design of C3 inquiries.
• C3 Social Studies Webinar recordings:
  • Introduction to C3 framework for educators
  • What every methods teacher should know about the C3 framework
  • Dimension 1: Developing questions and planning inquiries
  • Dimension 2: Applying disciplinary concepts and tools
  • Dimension 3: Evaluating sources and evidence
  • Dimension 4: Communicating conclusions and taking informed action

Resources: Lesson plans

This section has websites and books that have ready-made lesson plans and resources.

• Inquiry-based Lessons in World History AND US History by Jana Kirchner and Andrew McMichael – I have the one for World History and I find it very useful for either grabbing a ready-made lesson or generating ideas for others. All of the lessons are inquiry-based, C3 aligned.
• Teaching World History AND US History Thematically by Rosalie Metro – Another book I have for World History. Even if you don’t plan to teach your course thematically (which I would highly recommend doing so for World History), the lessons in here are well-designed and ready to be used.
• Stanford History Education Group: Reading Like a Historian Curriculum – ready-made, primary-source based historical thinking skills lessons
• Stanford History Education Group: Beyond the Bubble Assessments – even though these are meant to be assessments, they make great activities for lesson and formative practice as well. You can also string a few of these together into a longer test or assessment for the students.
• OER Project (World History) – while not necessarily all historical thinking skills lessons, there are a lot of skills-based activities on this site, along with articles that can be modified for reading level using the dropbox in the upper lefthand corner.
• C3Teachers.org – Over 100 fully-made, ready-to-be-used C3 inquiries on various subjects and topics
• New Visions Social Studies – the lessons here are great if you need something quasi-inquiry based that you can use on a moment’s notice. I wouldn’t necessarily say that the lessons here fully line up with the historical thinking skills approach, but they can be easily modified to do so.
• World History for us All – lots of ready-made, inquiry-based units for World History
• Historical Thinking Project – founded by Peter Seixas, this website has lots of resources, graphic organizers, and lessons for teachers to use in the classroom. Note that most of these lessons are focused on Canada.

Up next

Next article will be Part 3: Gathering sources and sourcing competencies. It may be a while before I get to that, though!

Historical thinking skills in the classroom series

1. Part 1: Shifting Your Mindset
2. Part 2: Tips and Resources for Getting Started
3. Part 3: Sourcing

Main image credit: Heritage History

If you enjoyed this article, please follow me on X – @historyinfocus_net. I enjoy corresponding with other educators and those interested in history and economics. Also, you can reach me via the contact page. Please let me know what you thought of this article and how you heard about my website! Thank you!