Improving Teachers’ Proficiency in Teaching Historical Thinking

In the Netherlands, historical thinking skills have been a substantial component of the history curriculum for quite some time. Textbooks include a variety of historical sources and tasks to develop historical thinking skills. The central examination assesses students’ ability to identify processes of continuity and change, causes and consequences, and to evaluate the trustworthiness and usability of historical sources. Teacher education programs include lessons or even courses about historical thinking. Nevertheless, teaching historical thinking and reasoning appears challenging for teachers. This is even more the case since the Dutch curriculum renewal moved toward more emphasis on broad overview knowledge.

In this contribution, we first describe how historical thinking appears in the Dutch history curriculum, teacher education programs, and the classroom. Second, we discuss three approaches to bridge the gap between theory and practice and support prospective and experienced history teachers in realizing historical thinking in the classroom. The first approach is making historical thinking a core component of the teacher education program. The second approach is engaging prospective teachers in educational design research, and the third approach is a professional development program that starts with the collaborative analysis of how students reason historically.