As you know, document analysis is essential to the work of a historian. However, summarizing the gist of historical documents is one of the main difficulties students encounter in social science courses. This key skill is particularly important in Secondary IV, where the curriculum is based on students’ ability to make sense of document files.
After examining this issue in depth, two educational consultants from the Centre de services scolaire des Découvreurs came up with an innovative learning strategy: the historical sentence (phrase histoire).
As the name suggests, the historical sentence is a technique that enables students to formulate the most important aspects of a historical document in a single sentence.
A historical sentence answers the following five questions:
- Who is talking? (speaker)
- What is their intention? (intention)
- What are they talking about? (subject)
- When did it happen? (time)
- Where did it happen? (space)
Once we have all of this information, we can organize it as follows:
The (speaker) is (intention) about (subject) on (date) at/in (place).
In social science courses, students are expected to master the concept of historical thinking. This skill is developed by imitating the way historians work. The History of Quebec and Canada program defines historical thinking as “a set of intellectual skills that involve distancing [oneself] from the past and using a method of critical analysis—the historical method” (MEES, 2017, p. 1). One of the purposes of the program is to teach students how to do historical research, which includes knowing how to interpret documents. The historical sentence is an excellent technique for learning to exercise historical thinking.
Of course, the need to interpret source material (written or otherwise) isn’t exclusive to history class! It’s also important in many other disciplines, including French and mathematics (written problems, learning and evaluation situations, etc.). Because coming up with a historical sentence helps with reading comprehension, this strategy can be useful in many contexts.
In addition, the historical sentence can help students learn to organize their thoughts. When a document contains a lot of details, it can be hard for students to know what they need to remember or how to summarize the main points. This is especially true with document files where they have to figure out how the different elements fit together. Boiling each document down to a historical sentence can help students think more clearly, make them feel less intimidated by the scope of the task, and even boost their confidence.
Lastly, the historical sentence can help students practise problem-based learning and come up with hypotheses.
The six videos below (available in French only) break down the elements of the historical sentence and can be found on Alloprof’s website:
For more information, you can also visit the website (French only) created by Daniel Deschênes and Sylvain Bilodeau, the two Centre de services scolaires des Découvreurs educational consultants who invented the historical sentence.
Writing : Alloprof Teacher's team