In its more simplistic form, historical thinking can be defined as the reading, analysis and writing that is necessary to understand the past. It is a process that is easier to define than it is to demonstrate as students in both k-12 education and higher education struggle to conduct the action of historical thinking. As a result, universities have made moves to close these gaps amongst their students by training their faculty in refined pedagogical approaches. These refined pedagogical approaches aim to teach students concepts such as crossing the historian’s threshold and the evaluation of evidence. In a similar vein, I have my own concerns related to my 8th grade students and their struggles to think like historians. Throughout this course, I hope to find answers to the following questions in order to improve historical thinking amongst my students: 

1. How can I teach my students historical thinking techniques that can compensate for any skills that they may lack? 
2. How can I best plan for collaborative learning opportunities that teach historical thinking?
3. How can I make historical thinking relevant for my students?

Tentative Answer for Question 1: It is possible that I can utilize principles from the theory of pedagogy known as Decoding the Disciplines. Elon University employs a program called Decoding the Disciplines as a model for helping experts and their students locate issues in “crucial operations” that experts and students have in a particular discipline. Indiana University’s Joan Middendorf has explained that Decoding the Disciplines is an evolved theory of pedagogy that allows experts to break down their own automatic complicated thinking/expertise to students who have difficulty comprehending the task the expert has accomplished. Students can have difficulty understanding the actions an expert carries out due to the fact that a student is unfamiliar with a particular discipline. That being said, it is possible for a student to overcome this misunderstanding. According to Elon University’s Dr. Katie King, “disciplines have at their perimeter complex ideas that can be difficult to someone new to the principle but once they are grasped, they can broaden and deepen a student’s understanding of the discipline” therefore crossing the threshold of understanding. I can use Decoding the Disciplines to my advantage as I can use it as means to pause and reflect on the misconceptions students have about a concept that may come easily to me. Modeling, motivation check-ins, and sharing are also important aspects of teaching and learning that my students can benefit from in their understanding of historical thinking. 

Tentative Answer for Question 2: According to the expert in Thinking about Historical Thinking Decoding the Discipline, planning should not be an issue as long as good results are achieved. Although I can understand the idea behind this notion, planning for six different classes with a total of 30 students is exhausting. Admittingly, as stated by  Sam Wineburg, Mark Smith, and Joel Breakstone, “the structure of the school day restricts collaboration to brief meetings taken up by administrative matters, leaving scant time for teachers to articulate goals for student learning.”  However, in spite of my pragmatism, I do understand the value of collaborative learning. As stated, students are more likely to remember concepts from class if they carry out their learning themselves or discuss it with their classmates. Skills associated with historical thinking include contextualization, corroboration, sourcing, and close reading. Since students continue to struggle with these concepts, they can learn from a more proficient classmate who is willing to model a skill in the completion of primary source analysis. 

Tentative Answer for Question 3: Stéphane Lévesque believes “significant events of the late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first century force citizens to rethink their traditional relationships with the past.” From this, it is evident that students themselves must reevaluate their own understandings of the past in order to establish meaning and relevance. Lévesque encourages teachers to use contemporary sources for analysis in order to mimic the same mental activities that are needed to interpret the past. Consequently, students can realize that these same skills used to interpret historical evidence are relevant for understanding contemporary events and activities. As a potential solution, I can begin to use alternative resources like Tiktok videos, YouTube and Snapchat to help students see the relevance of historical thinking.