Making Historical Thinking Visible

Historical thinking is often hidden by the products of historical inquiry. When we read history, we usually encounter an author’s conclusions rather than all of the decisions and reasoning that led to them.

The thinking itself is rarely as neat as the finished product suggests. Historical reasoning involves fits and starts, tentative judgments, reconsideration, and uncertainty. A historian may begin with one interpretation, encounter evidence that complicates it, return to an earlier source with new questions, and revise the explanation.

One piece of evidence may raise a question that leads to another source, which in turn changes how the first source is understood. The process is not always linear.

The same problem arises when we receive student work. We see the response to a prompt or question, but not the thinking that produced it.

A student’s answer is the result of a process that may have involved assumptions, observations, connections, misconceptions, insights, and revisions that are not fully visible in the final product. A student may demonstrate sophisticated reasoning in one part of a response while revealing a significant misunderstanding in another.

They may arrive at a reasonable conclusion for reasons that are quite different from those we intended them to use. Or they may have the beginnings of a productive line of reasoning but lack the historical knowledge or language to express it clearly.