History Teaching: Moving Beyond Boring Facts to Inquiry Skills - Essay Sample

Introduction

History is always regarded as a boring subject among students. However, when the teaching and learning process of history is enforced in the actual historical context, the topic of history as a boring subject will no longer be there. This is because history teaching and learning concentrates on the mere presentation of facts and entails the inquiry skills regarding history-thinking skills. In the present high-stakes, the accountability-oriented curriculum, the notion of teaching discipline-specific practices in social studies and history is one of the best ways to contribute to historical thinking in K-8 classrooms. History teaching and learning processes concentrate on historical thinking skills. Competence in historical thinking skills allows the students to think critically, to grasp the criteria of history, to observe historical events emphatically, to assess the sophisticated and abstract ideas, and to address ways in which the historians construct the previous events using proof to launch historical significance.

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Historical Thinking and Skills Required To Think Critically

Teachers are the main stakeholders that change how history is practised in academic institutions. To assist the students in learning how to think historically, the teachers should be knowledgeable of the structure of the discipline and know-how to translate discipline and know to translate the disciplinary understandings into instructional practices. The teachers require acting as agents of change in promoting the modes of inquiry and the process of performing history. Currently, the accountability pressures and standardized curriculum do not essentially advocate for reform-minded practices. This has substantial implication for the role of teacher education in preparing new students. VanSledright (2002) asserted that historical thinking necessitates structural knowledge to answer 'what' questions ad procedural knowledge to answer 'how' quizzes in historical education (VanSledright, 2002).

Historical thinking is the reading, analysis, and writing that is crucial to understand the past. Many skills form a basis for thinking critically. First, chronological thinking is vital for reasoning historically. Students should be capable of recognizing how the events occur over a while. The students must use chronology when writing their histories. They should have no problem interpreted data presented in timelines. The students should be capable of analyzing the patterns of historical duration and of acknowledging the change in history. Second, research skills allow historians to think critically. The most appropriate way for students to learn about history is to write the history themselves. The students should be competent in formulating history questions, obtain history data, evaluate the data, contextualize it, and present the history meaningfully.

Third, analysis and decision-making skills enable the history students to think critically. The students should be able to acknowledge issues in the past and analyze the interests, opinions, values, and standpoints of the parties involved. The students should be able to assess the past events and decipher what contributed to them. In addition, the students should be able to analyze the approaches that would have been embraced to resolve issues and lessons that be derived about how individuals made decisions to carry the actions they did. To answer these questions, the history students should be capable of implementing a decision by assessing its interests, by approximating the position, and priorities of every actor involved. Wineburg offers a suggestion, and that is the digital toolbox. In his article, he suggests two questions for students to think when assessing and evaluating an online source "Who owns a site? Who links to it?" because individuals teach students the best way to evaluate sources by inquiring about the author and the context, and by asking questions regarding the supporting proof (Wineburg, 2016). Fourth, students need to possess historical comprehension skills to think historically. The historians should grasp the historical context in which events are unveiled. Avoiding the contemporary day thinking and understanding the pretext of an event entails many higher-order thinking skills. The students should be capable of recognizing the parties engaging in the action, what occurred, the venue, and the events that resulted in the action, and the repercussions. The other historical comprehension skills entail being capable of recognizing the main quizzes in historical thinking and coming with conclusions regarding the motive or standpoint whereby they have been constructed.

Good and Bad Practices of K-8 Educators

One of the good practices of K-8 educators is scaffold instruction. Good practice necessitates the teachers to support the students with instructional assistance when necessary, enabling every person to encounter success during learning. Scaffolding entails personalized coaching, mini-lessons, prompts, and open-ended quizzes. The students proceed with the appropriate amount of scaffolding preceded by the release of responsibilities. In this practice, the teacher is accountable for a chosen task, shares accountability for the task with the students, act responsible for the task with the support of the teacher, and presume responsibility for applying the task to new circumstances.

Self-directed learning is another good practice of K-8 educators. The teachers use the best practice to become self-directed. The teachers can show the history students to solve problems using modelling and illustration. The guided practice allows the teachers to assist the student in learning to choose the suitable problem-solving approach for an appropriate event. When students can self-regulate the norms, they are capable of continuing to learn and progress.

Failing to diversify learning is a bad practice for K-8 educators. Variety is important in the K-8 classroom. It is justified to improve learning and memory and that it is engaging. Diversifying the teaching implies diversifying the learning of the history students.

Understanding History, Past, and the Definition of Historical Evidence Among School Children

The school children understand history, past and definition of historical evidence. They understand that the access to the past is determined by the artefacts and residue that is left behind by individuals who lived it. They entail public records, newspapers, journals, paintings, chronicles, and historians' interpretations of past events. The children understand the historical evidence is divided into primary and secondary sources. The primary sources are diaries and personal journals, while the secondary sources are narratives and historical textbooks. This evidence provides interpretations of past events (Bain, 2009).

Strategies That Will Contribute to the Successful Implementation of Historical Thinking in the K-8 Classroom

A significant strategy in assisting the students in thinking historically is to expect their conceptions of history and challenge their presumptions regarding a historical student. The student is more probable to develop an epistemological shift on how they perceive history when they are thinking up for vital examination and inquiring what they know and how they know. To allow learning and disciplinary among the students, it is recommended that the teachers organize the curriculum revolving big ideas and translate the goals into historical problems to be resolved. The understanding of the students is explored when a conceptual framework is applied to organize their knowledge (Bain, 2009). Once the students have a framework to organize their thinking and tools for assessment, they are better endowed to approach history as an exercise in question.

The extent at which the students learn to think historically relies on the instructional scaffolds. When the teachers approach instruction as a facilitator of learning and acquiring knowledge instead of a knowledge transmitter, the students are bound to develop deeper and more sophisticated understandings. For instance, even though some students can evaluate the many perspectives when exploring history, they enhance when teachers offer many opportunities to practice and apply disciplinary knowledge. Although students cannot alter their heritage perceptions of history in a short period when offered with enough support, they are capable of critiquing one another on the use of proof when constructing historical arguments. Equivalently, when provided with writing scaffolds such as thesis workshops and conferencing, the students will tend to improve their capability to lay claims using evidence and include the historical context in their writing.

Teachers are instrumental in offering students with instructional supports that assist develop in-depth and more complex disciplinary knowledge. The suitable scaffolds will improve the level of writing and reading and learning to reason among the students according to their discipline. When the reform efforts are thriving in closing the gap between the earlier student history and discipline-oriented practices, the teachers require disciplinary content knowledge to support the students in learning an inquiry-oriented strategy (Lee, 2005).

Conclusion

As expounded, even though some students perceive history as a boring subject, the instilling of the skills to think history will turn it to be a more engaging one. The chronological, analysis and decision-making, as well as historical comprehension skills, allow the history students to think critically. Teaching historical thinking in K-8 classroom is challenging, and proper strategies require leading to the successful implementation of historical thinking. K-8 educators offer good education practices through scaffold instruction and self-directed learning. Failing to diversity learning is a bad practice among K-8 educators.

References

Bain, R. B. (2009). Into the breach: Using research and theory to shape history instruction. Journal of education, 189(1-2), 159-167.

Lee, P. (2005). Putting principles into practice: Understanding history. How students learn: History in the classroom, 31-77.

VanSledright, B. (2002). In search of America's past: Learning to read history in elementary school. Teachers College Press.

Wineburg, S. (2010). Historical thinking and other unnatural acts. Phi delta kappan, 92(4), 81-94.

Wineburg, S. (2016). Why historical thinking is not about history. History News, 71(2), 13-16.