"Assessing Historical Thinking with One Crucial Question"

"How do we know what we know?" is a great organizing question for the year.  This session is led by a Humanities teacher,  ; how do we know we can trust her guidance?  Well, her presentation is well-grounded and supported by many tools that we use in the OER Project.  The "four-corner" exercise mirrors well the work with do with "Claims Testing," in which our four corners are Logic, Evidence, Authority, Intuition.  The charge to "avoid blinding accepting so-called facts" is a great reminder to engage continually in the historical inquiry process.  Her connection to earlier historical periods, in which we formulate the question "How do professionals know what they know?" is a great pivot to analyze sources and evidence held up by others to shape our understanding.  One important feature of this session is the power of constructivism; students learn to construct meaning through questioning, exploration, and analysis.