Time to Think Webinar #4: Using Thinking Routines to Strengthen Historical Inquiry

(Historical Thinking Concepts: Historical Significance and Cause & Consequence)

This webinar focuses on the role of thinking routines in supporting historical inquiry and questioning, key skills for meaningful engagement with the past. Drawing on concepts like historical significance and cause and consequence, the session explores how students can learn to ask deeper questions about historical events, processes, and interpretations.

Thinking routines can help structure inquiry by encouraging students to generate questions, reflect on possible explanations, and connect different pieces of information. Through these routines, students are guided to consider why certain events or actors are considered historically significant and how different causes and consequences shape historical developments.

The webinar will present classroom strategies that use thinking routines to promote curiosity, structured inquiry, and critical reflection. Although historical thinking concepts provide an important analytical framework, the main emphasis of the session is on developing students’ skills in questioning, investigating, and constructing informed historical explanations.