I am continuously surprised by the lack of “historical” thinking that comes out in class, even though I know I only have the ability from my Master’s program. It just comes so easily to me that I have a hard time remembering that it takes explicit training to think that way. The assessment based on the painting made me really think about how I might teach my students to think like historians.
I think I would like to find several of these assessments and have them be morning work one day a week for the first part of the year, or longer depending on whether the students are finding this helpful or not. I would put this assessment and other similar ones up on the board for students to reflect on in their Social Studies notebooks before coming to the rug and discussing their ideas as a class. I wouldn’t grade this, but the students written reflections paired with the class discussions would both be good tools for me to gauge student progress in historical thinking. It would be a good way to teach them to look for critical points of information as well as a being a good way to teach them to think critically in writing and discussions.