Teach the thinking, not the checklist.
Historical thinking is easy to teach as a checklist and hard to teach as a way of making sense of evidence. This page looks at what it takes to teach the second kind — through the tasks we design and the way we model our own thinking in front of students. For a closer look at how we assess that thinking once it’s visible, explore the assessment triangle.
Making Historical Thinking Visible
At the outset of their chapter on evidence in The Big Six Historical Thinking Concepts, Peter Seixas and Tom Morton follow Keith Thor Carlson, author of The Power of Place, the Problem of Time, as he investigates a deceptively simple question.
Who are the Stó:lō?
Do they constitute a single Indigenous nation, or are their identities more closely connected to particular local communities? The question matters not only for understanding Stó:lō history but also for understanding political power, since it has implications for who could legitimately represent Stó:lō communities in negotiations with the Canadian government.
Our witnessing of Carlson’s investigation begins with a small documentary trace. In an 1879 report, Joint Indian Reserve Commissioner Gilbert Malcolm Sproat recorded that the Indigenous communities along the Fraser River wanted to organize themselves into a single government, but cautioned that they “must not be in too much a hurry.”
On its own, the statement tells us remarkably little. Sproat was recording a request and his response to it; he was not attempting to explain the history of Stó:lō political organization. As Seixas and Morton point out, this is characteristic of many primary sources: they are traces left behind by the past, often the accidental residue of everyday activity, rather than accounts deliberately constructed to answer the questions historians later ask of them.
Carlson therefore begins questioning the trace. Why did the Stó:lō want to be represented by a single government? Why was Sproat reluctant to support their request? These questions begin to animate the source, potentially turning it into evidence, or directing Carlson to further investigation.
In this case, the answers cannot be found directly in the document, so Carlson goes looking for another source. He discovers a parallel encounter between Sproat and the Nlaka’pamux farther up the Fraser River. In that case, Sproat supported the Indigenous community’s request to be treated as a single political entity. The contrast puzzles Carlson: why would Sproat support political unity in one case while resisting the Stó:lō’s efforts to achieve something similar?
At this point, the sources themselves are not enough. Carlson turns to context. Geography and demography reveal that the Stó:lō occupied a region in which several communities of newcomers were developing, while the Stó:lō population remained substantial. This matters because the newcomers were not encountering a small or politically insignificant population that could simply be absorbed into an expanding settler society — the Stó:lō constituted a substantial presence in a region that colonial society increasingly sought to control.
More importantly, Carlson considers the colonial worldview within which Sproat and other officials operated. Colonial society commonly viewed relatively large and potentially unified Indigenous populations as a threat.
Placing Sproat’s words within this broader context allows Carlson to move beyond what the document literally says and propose an interpretation: colonial society was not prepared to allow that much concentrated political power to emerge in the hands of Indigenous people.
But Carlson does not simply accept this interpretation because it seems plausible. He goes looking for corroborating evidence. He finds a contemporary editorial in the Victoria Daily Standard warning that Indigenous communities would be more difficult to control if they were bound together politically or socially. He finds further documentation showing that officials in the Department of Indian Affairs held similar views.
These additional sources strengthen the interpretation suggested by the original trace. The apparently minor statement by Sproat has thus become evidence for a larger historical argument.
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 makes visible 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.
- Now do questioning.
- Now do sourcing.
- Now do contextualization.
- Now do corroboration.
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. Resources such as the KS3 Hachette materials take a similar approach, giving students accounts of historians working through historical problems. We suggest that this is a strong move, providing students unusually clear windows into the processes by which historical knowledge is constructed. But the larger implication is not that we need to assemble a collection of historian stories for students to read. Seixas and Morton’s description of Carlson’s work and these resources are particularly clear manifestations of a much 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.
Making Thinking Visible in the Classroom
For the purposes of this section, let’s assume you have already provided students with a masterful introduction to the foundational concepts of the Big Six, and even, as a particularly astute teacher, carefully articulated the key Evidence guideposts of questioning, sourcing, contextualization, inferential reading and corroboration. Now what?
Give students problems worth thinking about.
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 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.
Our classrooms need actual intellectual problems, not merely a historical topic paired with documents. The historical problem gives the heuristics their purpose.
Historical thinking becomes visible when students encounter evidence that resists easy resolution — when it is ambiguous, incomplete, difficult to interpret, or in tension with other evidence. Not every historical activity creates the same opportunity for students to think historically.
Consider the difference between giving students a single account and giving them two accounts that disagree. With a single source, a student can often answer the question What does this source tell us? But when two sources offer different accounts, a new set of problems emerges: Why do they differ? Which account should we find more convincing? What does each source allow us to see that the other doesn’t? What additional evidence might help resolve the disagreement? This is one reason conflicting accounts are so valuable in historical thinking instruction: they create a genuine need for corroboration. Students can’t simply extract information from each source and move on — they have to consider the relationship between the accounts and make judgments about what the differences mean.
We can create this same tension even with a single source — for example, by giving students two competing interpretations of it and asking them to evaluate which is better supported by the evidence. The tension doesn’t come from the number of documents; it comes from requiring students to return to the evidence and adjudicate between competing claims.
This does not mean abandoning these frameworks such as Read Around the Document or OPVL. It means developing tasks and activities in which the thinking actually matters. Explore the ToThePast assessments that aim to help students realize why sourcing, contextualization, inferential reading and corroboration matter →
Show students what thinking looks like.
Once we have ensured that our classrooms feature genuine intellectual problems, modelling becomes increasingly important.
A well-designed activity creates the conditions for historical thinking, but it does not guarantee that students know what that thinking looks like in practice. Many students, faced with a genuine intellectual problem, will default to what they already know how to do: summarize, describe, or state a conclusion without showing how they arrived at it. This is not a failure of effort so much as a reflex. As Wineburg has argued, historical thinking is in some sense an unnatural act — it runs against the grain of how we ordinarily read and reason. Our instinct is to take a source at face value, extract its information, and move on. Reading a document skeptically, situating it in a world we do not inhabit, and holding two conflicting accounts in tension rather than resolving them — none of that comes naturally. It has to be learned, and it has to be seen before it can be done. The task can demand reasoning, but students still need to see reasoning demonstrated before they can produce it themselves.
This is where modelling does work that task design alone cannot. If a DBQ asks students to flagpost each step of their thinking, they need to have seen what that looks like — not just been told to do it. If a discussion asks students to respond to competing interpretations rather than simply state their own, they need to have seen someone actually weigh one interpretation against another out loud, hesitate, reconsider, and land somewhere provisional. Modelling makes the invisible parts of historical thinking — the uncertainty, the weighing, the revision — visible in real time, in a way that a task prompt by itself cannot.
A teacher can explain what historians do without showing students what it looks like to actually do it.
“When contextualizing a source, historians consider what was happening at the time.” Students now know something about contextualization.
“This government document describes the removal of Japanese Canadians as a necessary security measure. My first reaction is to see this as a discriminatory policy. But I’m hesitant to draw conclusions about why the government made this decision without considering the circumstances in which it was written. This was 1942, shortly after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, when fear of invasion was widespread. That context doesn’t make the policy justified, but it might help explain why the government presented it this way. I want to know whether this was simply the government’s justification or whether those concerns were more widely shared at the time. So I’m going to look for another source that might help me understand how Canadians were responding to the removal.”
Something quite different has happened in that second column. The teacher has made the process of thinking visible. Students can see an experienced reader encounter a problem, draw on contextual knowledge, recognize uncertainty, pursue a question, and decide what to do next.
Here, we serve as the Carlson of our classrooms. Historians did not move smoothly from source to context to corroboration — they hit a wall, felt the pull of a contradiction, and looked for further evidence. When a teacher does the same thing out loud, in front of students, over a source they are all looking at together, the teacher is not just teaching about historical thinking. The teacher is doing it — and letting students watch.
The purpose is not to model perfect historical analysis. It is to model what an experienced reader does when the answer is not immediately apparent — when the unnatural act of reading historically has to be performed deliberately, because it will not happen on its own.
This means modelling is not “Watch me do this correctly.” It is “Watch how I try to figure this out.” The teacher can wonder aloud, identify uncertainty, pursue a question, reconsider an initial interpretation, and recognize when additional evidence is needed. The teacher will sometimes model a move with confidence. Other times, the most useful thing to model is uncertainty:
- “I don’t think this source is enough to answer the question. What else would I need to know? What other sources might provide further or stronger support?”
- “This evidence seems to support my interpretation, but I wonder whether there is another explanation.”
These moments matter because they show students that historical thinking is not the performance of a predetermined set of moves. It is an attempt to make sense of evidence when the meaning is not self-evident.
This also makes the apprenticeship metaphor more forgiving. The teacher does not have to be the master historian standing before the apprentice. The teacher is a more experienced participant, inviting students into a practice they themselves have learned to navigate — a practice that, however natural it may look once mastered, is not natural at all. The teacher’s role is not to demonstrate that historical problems have neat solutions, but to let students see how an experienced reader responds when they do not.
The goal is not imitation. It is independence.
Once we have created a problem worth thinking about and shown students what it looks like to work through that problem, we need to turn the cognitive work over to them, and ideally, in a way that would still allow us to “see it.”
Simply asking students for their answers does not necessarily make their thinking visible. If we ask, “What do you think?” and call on five students, we may hear five conclusions without learning much about how students arrived at them. More importantly, students may hear one another’s answers without having to seriously consider or respond to the reasoning behind them.
Instead, we can structure discussion so that students have to respond to, extend, question, or reconsider one another’s thinking. The goal is not simply to get more students talking. It is to make the reasoning that happens between answers visible.
One simple routine that can help is Agree–Build–Challenge (ABC) Feedback. Rather than asking a student simply to respond to a peer’s answer, the teacher gives them a clear cognitive task: agree with the idea, build upon it, or challenge it.
The simplicity is part of the appeal. Students do not need a handout or complicated protocol. They need a clear structure for listening to another student’s thinking and doing something with it. With thoughtful questioning, the teacher can also sequence responses so that one student’s idea becomes the starting point for the next student’s thinking: an initial interpretation can be extended by another student, complicated by a third, and challenged by a fourth.
The discussion becomes a kind of collective think-aloud. Students are not merely offering answers; they are watching interpretations develop, change, and sometimes break down in front of them. They have to listen carefully because their own contribution depends on what someone else has just said. And the teacher can make the cognitive moves explicit as they occur: You’re challenging that interpretation because the context gives us a reason to question it. You’re building on that idea by introducing another piece of evidence. Notice how that new evidence changes the interpretation we started with.
Other routines, several of them associated with Project Zero’s Making Thinking Visible program (Ritchhart, Church, & Morrison, 2011), can serve a similar purpose. Claim–Support–Question asks students to state an interpretation, identify the evidence that supports it, and then raise a question that complicates or tests it. See–Think–Wonder asks students to distinguish what a source literally shows from what they infer and what remains unanswered. I Used to Think… Now I Think… gives students a structure for making revision visible — to treat a change of mind prompted by new evidence as a legitimate outcome of historical inquiry rather than something to hide.
The value of these routines is not the labels themselves. It is that they give students somewhere to put the thinking. They turn historical thinking from something the teacher demonstrates into something students can practise with one another.
And this matters for more than engagement. A classroom in which students regularly respond to one another’s reasoning begins to distribute the cognitive work. The teacher is no longer the only person who asks the next question, identifies a contradiction, introduces a qualification, or pushes an interpretation further. Students begin doing those things for one another.
That is the beginning of independence. The goal is not for students to depend permanently on ABC, Claim–Support–Question, or any other routine. The goal is to make the thinking visible often enough, and give students enough structured opportunities to practise it, that the routines eventually become unnecessary. Students begin to recognize for themselves when an interpretation needs more evidence, when context might change its meaning, when another account complicates what they think they know, or when they need to reconsider a conclusion.
The teacher’s think-aloud is where the process begins. The classroom discussion is where students begin to take it over.
Make it visible
Carlson never set out to model anything. He was simply trying to answer a real question, and the halting, backtracking shape of his research was a byproduct of that honest struggle, not a technique he deliberately chose.
As teachers, however, we can deliberately make that process visible in our classrooms. We are not models because we are perfect historians with all the answers. We are models because we can show students what an experienced thinker does when the answer is not immediately apparent: how we respond to uncertainty, pursue a question, weigh competing evidence, revise an interpretation, and decide what we need to know next.
Our role is to make the thinking visible, to name what is happening as it happens, and then to gradually pass the reins to students as they begin to do the work themselves.