TEACHING FOR HISTORICAL THINKING

In the historical knowledge and understanding strand of the Australian Curriculum: history we are given the key concepts of how history works. These concepts give teachers a way of knowing how students are intellectually progressing in history from Reception to Year 10. Interestingly, if you look at history curriculums in many other western countries you will find these same concepts or ways of thinking historically.

1. Evidence - sources, primary & secondary, on which to base our accounts and beliefs about the past
2. Continuity and change - understanding how things have changed and how they’ve stayed the same
3. Cause and effect - how much influence can one individual, group or event have
4. Significance - deciding what is worth studying and what is worth remembering
5. Perspectives - because of the huge differences across time including ways of thinking, how do we think like a person in another century to get their perspective of events, people, places from their time
6. Empathy - is the moral dimension of history - remembrance, recognition, reparations and implications today for the actions in the past
7. Contestability - closely related to perspectives, inquiry and debate about the past.

To have any hope of relating the past to us in the present, as teachers we need to ask difficult, but essential historical questions and use critical thinking ourselves. Like... what things about the past should we believe and what evidence will will use to decide this? What are the significant events, people, movements, developments about the past that we decide to pass on to next generations? Are things getting better or worse? 

A final thought.......as teachers of history, how do we know what we know? Historical thinking is only possible with historical knowledge.