Exploring History Teachers’ Understanding of the Goals of History Teaching and Historical Thinking Skills in Secondary Schools

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The purpose of this study was to explore history teachers’ inclination toward the goals of teaching disciplinary history, active teaching methods, and their experiences with historical thinking skills during their college education and their classroom practices. The qualitative thematic analysis explores how secondary school history teachers’ beliefs and background knowledge about their subject matter influence classroom practices. It focuses on their conceptions of history and historical thinking, teaching goals, teaching methods, and instructional materials. The results revealed that teachers’ educational training and history courses significantly influence their disciplinary knowledge and teaching practices. In the quantitative phase, the findings reveal that the status of teacher experiences and efficacy with all the historical thinking skills indicators, namely, sourcing, contextualization, corroboration and explicit instruction, varies as revealed in the result section. To address this issue, the researchers suggested the need for teachers to update their professional development and incorporate historical thinking skills into classroom activities, fostering engagement and agency, and intensive training for in-service history teachers. In this preliminary phase, we use these exploratory findings and research on teachers’ conceptions of their discipline and practices of historical thinking skills to propose an interventional framework for teaching history.