As educators, we know the importance of thinking critically about what we are reading. When reading any text, we must consider who the author is and why they wrote it. We must consistently challenge our students to study the source of historical evidence and to consider how the context, audience, purpose, and period influenced individuals and societies through time.
At Success Academy, we practice these skills every day in our history classrooms. A key component of our history curriculum is teaching students how to think, not what to think. When we empower students to think like historians, they learn to notice the source of any text and evaluate its reliability accordingly.
We use a framework for teaching our students to think critically about history called the 5 Habits of Great Historians. We believe that these habits push students to parse through information from the past and present, then develop their own critical ideas grounded in evidence. Check out the habits below, then take a look at our compelling history curriculum here.
- Habit 1: Great historians always build background knowledge to understand the essential facts about a topic.
- Habit 2: Great historians always notice the source of a historical document and evaluate its reliability by considering the audience, purpose, language, and point of view.
- Habit 3: Great historians always consider the historical context and how time and place impact individuals and their perspectives.
- Habit 4: Great historians always identify big ideas in history and the evidence used to support them.
- Habit 5: Great historians always examine historical evidence to find similarities and differences between accounts and to determine what most likely happened and why.
Want to see an example of these five habits in action? Watch below to see how our educators use these five habits as a critical lens to teach the Gettysburg Address.
Want to learn more about how to teach kids to think like historians? We look forward to sharing more tips on how to study scholar work to plan a strong history lesson. Keep reading and tune in to our channels in the coming weeks for more information!
