Research School Network: Disciplinary literacy in the History classroom ‘How do students think about history?’ vs ​‘How do we want them to think about history?’ asks Deanna Ridley-Hammond

Students often think History is all about facts.

In Y7, I often ask pupils to share what they think History is, and they’re often keen to tell me everything they ​‘know’ about History. However, our role is to move students towards thinking about History as being more about a number of opinions about the past, formed by studying and interpreting sources and what they might tell us about an event, topic or period. Ultimately, we need to teach students how to think historically.

To do this, we will have to specifically give pupils the vocabulary to speculate about the past and tools to analyse sources beyond believing that because they see it, it is true.

At Greenshaw High School, our practice is informed by the work of Shanahan, Shanahan & Misischia. They discuss a three-part model for reading like a historian:

• Step 1– Sourcing. Identifying who made the text and using this to interrogate the content.
• Step 2– Contextualisation. In what context was the text created and how might this impact its content.
• Step 3 – Corroboration. Using a wide range of information and other pieces of text to interrogate the text even further.

Trying to support students to actually do these things is tricky and might seem overwhelming, particularly for our Y7 historians. However, building these skills across schemes of work and providing ample practice will allow students to eventually think about sources in this way for themselves. This is especially important, not just in an exam context but in the wider world when reading the news or scrolling through AI-ridden content on social media.

How have we implemented this at Greenshaw so far?

In the past year, as a department we’ve developed a vision for how we hope students will be able to read sources like a historian.

At Y7, this remains limited to the ​‘corroboration’ stage from the model above after making supported inferences. At Y8, we further hone in on this stage, while introducing sourcing and contextualisation, both heavily scaffolded.

The biggest challenge we’ve found is finding time within the curriculum to do this well, especially when being intentional about it but also equipping students with sufficient knowledge to be able to read the sources in the way that we want them to.

What has worked well?

In year 8, in trying to balance all elements of Shanahan et al.‘s model, we’ve tried to incorporate evidence-based schemes of work and standalone lessons on sources at the end of units.

At this point, students have enough contextual knowledge to corroborate inferences from sources and provide opportunity to explore provenance to some degree. This may involve explicitly telling the students who wrote it and a leading question to consider.

We’ve also tried to carefully word the question we use with the sources. This is to help students make predictions ahead of reading the source so they’re able to access the content of the source without us altering the language of it. This has worked particularly well at Y7.

This is an example of how we have tried to introduce sourcing in Y8 in the second unit of the year.

What hasn’t worked?

One area that has not always worked as intended has been the selection and framing of sources. 

In some units, the sources we chose proved too complex for students to engage with meaningfully, particularly because they required a level of contextual knowledge that students had not yet developed.

Despite providing substantial scaffolding and support, some teachers found we were doing much of the heavy lifting for students. While this helped students access the material in the short term, it’s not sustainable if the long-term aim is to develop students’ independence when working with historical sources.

In other schemes of work, the difficulty was less about the complexity of the source itself and more about the enquiry question that accompanied it.

When the question was poorly matched to the source, students struggled to see what they were looking for, which made the process of reading and interpreting the source unnecessarily difficult.

This has highlighted the importance of thinking not only about whether a source is accessible, but also about whether the question provides students with a clear and purposeful reason for engaging with it.

Learn more

Our journey to develop a vision for helping students to be able to read sources like a historian is ever-evolving. If you want to learn more, join our free webinar on Disciplinary literacy in the History classroom where we will share more content and discussion. We look forward to seeing you there.