This teaching workshop is aimed primarily at high school teachers, but it will also be useful to higher education faculty teaching survey courses. We will use a practice-based approach to share our historiography-based curricular model with teachers. We will provide a sample document set and work through it with teachers, modeling teaching strategies that encourage robust discussion about historians’ arguments and evidence.

This workshop is based on our research collaboration, in which we brought together our expertise in history and history education to find out whether and how historiography can be translated into high school curriculum. We designed curricular materials and a think-aloud study to explore the potential advantages and challenges of introducing historiography into the secondary classroom. We found that students’ work with primary sources did not fully prepare them to grapple with secondary historical texts. But we also found that historiography-based documents, paired with dialogic instructional scaffolds, helped students engage in intellectually rich and nuanced analysis of historical arguments and evidence. Our article based on this study will appear in Cognition and Instruction in 2022.

After the hands-on exploration of the curriculum, the debrief will invite teachers’ feedback and suggestions for how we can improve our model. It will also include a discussion of the principles we developed to create historiography-based document sets. Teachers will have an opportunity to reflect on the different strategies needed to engage high school students in primary source analysis and in analyzing historians’ debates. Finally, we will examine how introducing historians’ debates into high school classrooms can support students in learning that history is constructed, and that it is an evolving body of knowledge, advanced by a community of scholars who follow shared rules of argumentation and evidence.