Thinking Like Historians

I used to work at a museum with an active living-history education program. When students came to the museum for a program, their parents would come along as chaperones, as well. Many parents said to me, "I was never interested in history as a student. This gives me a whole different perspective on history." It's a shame that our school system seems to discourage interest in history, as a whole. I suspect this has something to do with the way we teach the subject.

"Students have no inkling about the work of historians," writes Jeffery Nokes. "Their experience in history classrooms doesn't look anything like an hour in the life of a historian." In many classrooms, history lessons are confined to lectures and textbook readings. Students are rarely challenged to think like a historian, analyzing various texts or artifacts to form their own conclusions about what happened.

I recently stumbled upon the Stanford History Education Group. Among the resources on their website is a curriculum series titled "Reading like a Historian." The first part of this series, "Introduction to Historical Thinking," is a fantastic jumping-off point to encourage students to start taking in a wide variety of perspectives and evaluating their reliability. This introductory curriculum takes real-world situations that students may be familiar with, puts them in a position to hear multiple versions of the story, and asks them to figure out what really happened.

This "thinking like a historian" approach reminds me of the inquiry-based science education model. In Inquiry Science, students pose a problem or question, such as "Why does the moon appear to be different shapes at different times?" They then design experiments and conduct research to answer their question or solve the problem. To do this, students must use critical-thinking skills to design the most reliable experiment, weigh the credibility of research materials, and engage with the topic on a more holistic level. In the same way, thinking like a historian allows students to pose questions, such as "what were the causes of the Civil War?" They then conduct research, using primary documents, to determine the answer to their question. Like Inquiry Science, this model encourages students to use critical-thinking skills to determine the most reliable sources, weigh the credibility of different sources, and engage with the topic on a more holistic level.

Inquiry Science has been shown to help students be more engaged in science learning, and has been successful with students from a diverse range of socioeconomic backgrounds. The similarities between these science and history models lead me to believe the same might be true of "thinking like a historian," as well. Perhaps this could the new wave of history teaching, engaging all students and creating a new generation of excited historians.