Historical Thinking and Teacher Discourse in Secondary Education: An Exploratory Observational Study

With the aim of analyzing the teaching discourse in history classes and its relationship with the development of historical thinking skills, an observational study was carried out in 28 social science classes taught by 14 trainee teachers with master’s degrees in teacher training secondary education students between 15 and 18 years of age. Lag sequential analysis and polar coordinate analysis techniques were used to identify patterns in the teaching discourse and its relationship with teaching strategies and student activity. The results show a predominance of historical contextualization discourse to the detriment of activities that promote critical historical thinking. The sequential lag analysis revealed significant relationships between interpretive discourse and the use of case studies, as well as between historical contextualization and the use of the press as a resource. Polar coordinate analysis showed a mutually inhibiting relationship between the exploration of prior knowledge and the development of historical thinking skills and a mutually activating relationship between interpretation and historical thinking, especially as it relates to the evaluation of sources. The implications of these findings for teacher education and the improvement of secondary history teaching are discussed.