This document discusses teaching history as a discipline that encourages students to think like historians by analyzing evidence and forming their own interpretations. It emphasizes engaging students with primary and secondary sources to develop discernment and the ability to evaluate conflicting accounts. Teachers are creating a foundation to connect students' curiosity about history through a common language focusing on questions, evidence, and drawing supported conclusions. Students need practice assessing the validity of sources and using multiple accounts to understand complexity and draw conclusions, as required for document-based questions.

1. Thinking Like
A Historian
at D.C.Everest

2. WOW!

3. Examine testing at various levels:
8th
grade WKCE
10th
grade WKCE
AP Tests DBQ’s

4. [Teachers] creating a foundation that can
connect and develop students’ curiosity
about and understanding of history
through the use of a common language.
Thinking Like a
Historian

5. What Is History?
• History is a discipline: a way of thinking that
encourages students to analyze historical
evidence, evaluate it, and then demonstrate
their understanding of that evidence.
• The “best” history courses engage students in
the study of historical artifacts and documents –
which are often contradictory and muddled –
from which they draw their own interpretations or
conclusions.

6. • Middle School, Junior High , and even H.S.
students accept sources as “gospel” as the
truth.
• Students need the power of discernment
more than ever!
“In a rapidly changing world in which
historical ignorance seems to be the rule
rather than the exception, there is no more
important discipline for our students to
practice , than history.”

7. Questions
• All history starts with questions?????
• Take on the persona of a detective to
examine the evidence.
• The evidence comes in two forms: primary
and secondary sources.

8. How do Historians Use Historical
Sources?
• There is a fundamental difference
between looking for answers in the
sources and constructing answers from
the sources.
• Constructing answers is the final stage of
“Doing History”
• Building an interpretation based on
evidence is the defining characteristic of
history.

9. Drawing Conclusions; Making
Interpretations
• Historical conclusions must be
supportable by the historical record AND
take into consideration sometimes
conflicting perspectives and experiences
in that record.

10. Historical Categories of Inquiry
• These are patterns that help us organize
both the questions we ask of the past and
the answers we construct.
• These categories of inquiry and analysis
provide the patterns that help us make
sense of the past.
• It also gives us a common language.

11. Evaluating Sources
• Not all historical sources are equal
• Consider ways to assess the validity of the
sources
• Use AAPARTS ( to be explained later by JEFF)
• Multiple sources are needed in order to fully
understand the complexity and importance of
any historical event , era, person or group.
• DBQ’s provide multiple sources for students to
use to draw conclusions and make
interpretations.

12. Thinking Like A Historian:
Rethinking History Instruction
was written by Bobbie Malone
and Nikki Mandell.

17. Cause-Effect Graphic Organizers