Historical Thinking Skills
Lessons developed at Teacher Bistro focus on the following seven historical thinking skills. Many skills are inspired from the Common Core Standards for History and Social Science and the Historical Thinking Project. These standards give students a skill to focus on. Instead of memorizing history, students are engaged with history by making historical judgments, understanding motives, determining the causes of various events, and evaluating historical significance.
Examining Different Historical Perspectives
Students evaluate differing viewpoints on the same historical event or issue by assessing differing claims, reasoning, and evidence.
Establishing Geography Scope
Students examine political and physical boundaries to examine place, and analyze how geography impacts history, society and politics.
Understanding ethical dimensions in history
Students attempt to understand the decisions of the past, and by developing historical perspective, understand the differences between our own ethics and those in history.
analyzing primary source evidence
Students will determine the central ideas of a primary source by examining words, phrases and historical context. Students will evaluate an author's premises, claims and evidence by corroborating or challenging them with other information.
Establishing historical significance
Students will consider what is significant in history by examining chronology, cause and consequence,examining primary source evidence and evaluating scholarly analysis.
Identifying continuity and change over time
Students will make comparisons between different points in history and the present, or between two different points in the past to evaluate change over time.
Analyze cause and consequence
Students will examine historical context to determine the central causes of historical events, and trace the short and long term consequences of those events.
