Historical Thinking Strategy Modelling Guide

What This Skill Does

Generates a teacher think-aloud script that models one or more historical thinking strategies (sourcing, close reading, contextualisation, corroboration) with a specific document. The output includes the complete script with pauses and self-talk, annotations identifying each cognitive move, common pitfalls to avoid, and guidance on transitioning from the modelled example to student practice.

The central insight from Wineburg's research is that expert historical reading is invisible. When a historian reads a document, the cognitive work — pausing at the source note, generating hypotheses from bibliographic information, noticing loaded language, connecting the document to its historical moment — happens internally. Students see the historian read and then produce an interpretation, but the process between reading and interpretation is a black box. The purpose of a think-aloud is to open that box: to externalise the internal reasoning so students can see, hear, and eventually replicate it.

This skill is distinct from the four individual skill builders (sourcing, close reading, contextualisation, corroboration), which design a complete instructional sequence. This skill generates only the modelling component — the "I DO" phase — but does so in greater depth and with greater specificity than any single skill builder can. It produces a document-specific script that a teacher can rehearse and deliver, with annotations explaining what each move demonstrates and why it matters.

Reisman (2012) found that explicit strategy instruction — modelling, guided practice, independent practice — was the pedagogical structure through which historical thinking skills were taught in the Reading Like a Historian curriculum. However, Reisman also found that teacher fidelity to modelling was low: most teachers scored below baseline on the fidelity rubric, and whole-class discussion (where modelling is most visible) was extremely rare. This skill exists to make modelling more accessible by providing a concrete, rehearsable script rather than leaving teachers to improvise expert-level historical reasoning on the spot.

Evidence Foundation

Wineburg (2007) demonstrated what expert modelling reveals through the Harrison Proclamation example. A doctoral student's think-aloud showed a cascade of cognitive moves: reading the date, immediately activating contextual knowledge about the 1890s, connecting that context to the document's language, and arriving at a hypothesis about its political purpose — all in under a minute. This think-aloud made visible what Wineburg called the "specification of ignorance": the expert practice of using a document to articulate what one does not know and needs to find out, rather than rushing to judgement.

Wineburg (1991, 1998) established through think-aloud studies that historians engage in qualitatively different cognitive processes when reading documents. These processes — sourcing before reading, attending to language as evidence of perspective, connecting documents to their historical moment, comparing accounts across sources — are the target behaviours for modelling. The think-aloud methodology used to study experts became, in the Reading Like a Historian curriculum, the pedagogical method used to teach novices.

Gottlieb and Wineburg (2012) showed that the quality of expert reading is in the depth of reasoning, not the frequency of strategy use. A scientist and a historian might both note an author's name, but the historian mines that information for inferences about the text's likely stance. Modelling must therefore demonstrate not just the action (look at the source note) but the reasoning (what the source information tells you before you read a word).