Are you familiar with Gabriel Prosser or Benjamin Gitlow? According to The Nation’s Report Card (National Assessment of Educational Progress), a test designed to measure the history that is essential to all Americans, you should. History classes have often become bogged down with the memorization of facts rather than the understanding of history. The goal of this class is to introduce and develop the skills of the historian so they may appreciate and evaluate history. Students will still need to know facts about history but those facts will be used to explain their understanding and reinforce their ideas.
We refer to these skills as the Historical Habits of Mind. These are sourcing, multiple perspectives, contextualization, corroboration, and close reading. Developing these skills will not only help students to analyze and understand history in a meaningful way. It requires effort but the students will be expected to approach each class period as detectives and scholars of history.
Sourcing– Asking questions about the who, what, where, when and why of the creation of a document before actually beginning to read it.
Contextualization– Placing the document in the place and time of its creation.
Corroboration– Comparing different accounts to determine which information is most valid.
Multiple Perspectives– Looking at information from the various groups involved in the historical moment to create a complete picture of what happened.
Close Reading– Applying reading strategies to decode a document and reading between the lines to discover motives, agenda, tone, and other subtleties of the author’s claims.
Sources used for this page: 1. Wineburg, Sam. Reading Like a Historian. 2. Bower and Caruso. Applying the Skills of Historical Thinking.
