Presenting Historical Content: The Inquiry Connections of a Neglected Practice

Abstract In the last three decades, history education has focused overwhelmingly on inquiry. In teacher education, the recent turn to “Core Practices” or “High-Leverage Practices” (HLPs) has been applied to history education. Despite the attractiveness of inquiry-oriented instruction, it is still absent from far too many history classrooms. One major obstacle to implementation is the disregard for Presenting Historical Content as a core practice. Rather than dismissing “direct practice” as a self-evident practice, we should give it the same careful analysis accorded other HLPs. Used thoughtfully, Presenting Historical Content serves an essential pedagogical purpose in inquiry instruction: framing student investigation and providing the context necessary for high-level student work. The article begins by exploring the centrality of background knowledge for meaningful inquiry and then explores what happens when such knowledge is absent from secondary classroom instruction. The second section considers reasons for the absence of pedagogical attention to acquiring background knowledge. The section then proceeds to identify key features of background knowledge through backwards design. The final section proposes a model of Presenting Historical Content through a detailed decomposition model, applies the model to a specific lesson example, and ends with reflections on the implications of this model of instruction.