Since the early 2000s, the use of the term presentism has rapidly increased in both the historical discipline and public discussions of history. Most recently, presentism has been widely discussed and debated in articles about the pulling down and defacement of statues in countries around the world inspired by the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.…

In this article, the authors trace their writing instruction through the 2016-2018 school years. They begin by describing how they framed the foundations of historical work and the importance of this framing for the later production of historical narratives. Then, the authors discuss how they integrated traditional literacy instruction with…

Inspired by the work of the social and cultural historian Tim Cole, Stuart Farley decided to look again at the way he teaches the Holocaust. He wanted to focus on the geographical concept of place as a way of enabling his Year 9 students to build far more diverse narratives, which took full account of the chronological diversity of people's…

In the current culture of regulation in higher education and, in turn, the history discipline, it is timely to problematize discipline standards in relation to student agency and creativity. This article argues that through the inclusion of a critical orientation and engaged pedagogy, historians have the opportunity to bring a more agentic…

Teaching student to construct causal argument is a staple of history teaching and, in this year, questions about the causes of the First World War are particularly pertinent and once again the public eye. Claire Holliss, however, became dissatisfied with existing approaches to teaching students about the causes of the First World War. In…

Finding ways to characterise the nature of change and continuity is an important part of the historian's task, yet students find it particularly challenging to do. Building on her previous work on change, Rachel Foster sought to experiment with new approaches for helping her students to find analytical ways of describing change and continuity…

Students sometimes resist the history lessons their teachers try to impart; challenging the purpose and relevance of the information being shared. However, reading "The Giver" can help to bridge the gap between students accepting and rejecting the lessons of history while learning to value the skills such as citizenship and awareness associated…

For years, educators have been trying to free history instruction from the mire of memorization and propel it with the kinds of inquiry that drive historians themselves. The common core standards may offer more impetus for districts and schools to adopt that brand of instruction. A study of one such approach suggests that it can yield a triple…

This article provides a review of effective and reform-based approaches to instruction that focus on teaching and learning of history for students with LD. Historical thinking goals, such as learning to think like a historian, to develop contextualized understandings, and to apply domain-specific approaches when reading and writing with primary…

"Thinking Like a Historian" (TLH) is a tool for framing the past to teach students the elements of historical thinking while, at the same time, grounding students' knowledge of the past through inquiry and evidentiary support. The framework's design allows for a separation of the ways historians study the past from the ways historians organize…

In this article, the author describes a syllabus which he designed in his United States history survey courses to help his students learn to think like historians. It contains important information about the way historians work and think, along with descriptions of the reading materials the student will use to further their practice of history.…

This article details a heuristic history teachers can use in assigning and evaluating multimedia projects in history. To use this heuristic successfully, requires more than simply following the steps in the list or stages in a recipe: in many ways, it requires a reorientation in what it means to think like an historian. This article, as much as…

Most students in most schools today study subject matter. They and their teachers conceive of the educational task as committing to memory large numbers of facts, formulas, and figures. A far more sophisticated perspective emphasizes teaching disciplines and disciplinary thinking. The goal of this approach is to instill in students the disposition…

Historians explore historical accounts, memoirs, diaries, letters, newspaper articles, speeches, historical documents, relevant legislation, maps, ship manifests, genealogical records, official certificates, photographs, and paintings. In short, historians examine any official or unofficial document that might provide relevant information about…

Research studies aimed at exploring how secondary school students engage in doing history, develop historical reasoning and understanding often times neglected the theoretical frameworks that historians of different orientations use to study the past. As a result of this oversight, some historical concepts are sometimes weakly defined, ambiguously…