Teach the thinking, not the checklist.

Why this story belongs in the classroom

When I first encountered this narration of Carlson’s research process, I had a simple reaction: I need to share this with my students.

It serves as a narrative hook in The Big Six — but it is also an overlooked pedagogical tool in its own right, one that demonstrates the halting, tentative nature of historical inquiry.

We do not watch Carlson move smoothly from source to context to corroboration, as though historical thinking were a predictable sequence of steps. Instead, we watch him encounter evidence that does not immediately answer his question, recognize a contradiction, pursue a new line of inquiry, develop a tentative interpretation, and then seek additional evidence to see whether it holds up. Its strength moves beyond making disciplinary heuristics like sourcing, contextualizing, and corroboration visible — we also see why those practices become necessary in the first place.

That distinction matters. Jay (2021) found that students exposed to resources such as Reading Like a Historian did source and contextualize more often than students in the past, but often applied these moves mechanistically, with little effect on their actual historical reasoning or epistemology. A student can learn to write “the author was biased” under a sourcing heading without considering how that should affect their interpretation. A student can identify what was happening at the time without using that context to change or qualify anything. A student can compare two documents simply because the assignment says “corroborate,” without using one source to test what another allows them to conclude. The problem is not that students were taught the heuristics — it is that the heuristics can become detached from the inquiry that gives them their purpose.

Sourcing, contextualization, and corroboration are not a checklist historians mechanically apply to every source. Knowing that contextualization matters does not reveal when a historian recognizes context is needed, what aspects of it are relevant, or how it changes an interpretation. Knowing that historians corroborate does not reveal how they decide when additional evidence is necessary, or how they weigh evidence that conflicts. The challenge is not simply to teach students the moves, but to help them understand the problems that make those moves necessary.

Carlson needs additional evidence because his first source does not answer his question. He needs to contextualize because the evidence’s meaning is not apparent on its own — not because contextualizing is “the next step.” He needs to corroborate because his evidence is not, on its own, sufficient to establish his interpretation. The practices become meaningful because they are responses to problems in the inquiry.

This points to something larger than teaching historical thinking skills. The educational project of historical thinking is, at its heart, an invitation into an epistemology: the past is not the same thing as history, and historical accounts are interpretations constructed from evidence, not the past reproduced on the page. We want students to understand not just the concepts historians use, but how those concepts help historians construct and justify knowledge — to reveal the guiding concepts, demonstrate them in use, and then pass the torch.

So is the solution simply to have students read more accounts of historians doing history? Yes and no. Recent publications, like the KS3 Hachette resources, take a similar approach, telling students stories of historians at work — and these accounts are genuinely valuable, giving students unusually clear windows into how historical knowledge gets constructed. But the larger implication is not that we need to assemble a library of historian stories. Carlson’s story is simply a particularly clear manifestation of a broader instructional principle:

That means looking again at our teaching practices, activities, assignments, and discussions — not simply as opportunities to deliver content or practise skills, but as opportunities to show students what historical thinking looks like when someone is actually trying to figure something out.

Let’s assume you have already given students a masterful introduction to the foundational concepts of the Big Six, and carefully articulated the key Evidence guideposts of questioning, sourcing, contextualization, inferential reading, and corroboration. They understand that approaching a primary source begins with sourcing it — asking questions about when and why the source was created, and by whom (Seixas, 2013, p. 57). They understand the importance of animating the context of a document: its social, political, and economic milieu, and the historical perspectives present at the time of its creation. And they understand the need to corroborate sources, comparing multiple documents to reach plausible conclusions about the past.

Amazing. Maybe you have even shared an example like the Carlson one described above. Typically, we then unleash students to “do the work” of historians. But not all tasks designed to replicate that work are created equal — and not every historical activity creates the same opportunity for students to think historically.

In Canada, many teachers are familiar with the Critical Thinking Consortium’s “Read Around the Document” heuristic. It provides students with a set of questions to consider when approaching a historical source, directing their attention beyond what a document literally says to questions about its creator, context, purpose, audience, and significance. It belongs to a broader family of approaches that teachers will recognize — OPVL, OPVLEGS, and other acronyms and graphic organizers similarly provide students with a structure for approaching historical evidence. These frameworks can be useful. They give students a starting point and, importantly, help make aspects of historical thinking explicit that might otherwise remain invisible.

I remember a particular conversation with a district instructional lead who suggested that Read Around the Document could effectively serve as a universal assessment: take a source related to whatever topic students were studying, give them the organizer, and see what they could do with it. The idea was appealing in its simplicity — the historical content could change while the underlying assessment remained the same. But it raised an important question for me: what, exactly, would we be learning about a student’s historical thinking? If students can apply the same questions to almost any source, we may learn that they can use the organizer. We may learn considerably less about whether they can use historical thinking to make sense of a problem.

That distinction is visible in Carlson’s investigation. He does not turn to context because he has reached the “context” box. He turns to context because the evidence has created a problem he cannot resolve without it. He seeks corroboration because his emerging interpretation needs to be tested. The historical problem gives the heuristic its purpose. This does not mean abandoning these frameworks — it means developing tasks and activities in which the thinking actually matters. See how the ToThePast assessments try to capture this →