Be the Best Teacher of Sources Reliability in History

Every history teacher knows that students complain about source questions. It's no wonder. No practicing historian would ever try to work with tiny extracts from scattered sources, taken out of context. It's a fake exercise and students sense its pointlessness. However, examiners love these exercises, so we've got to do the best we can. We can also use this exercise to get students to think creatively as historians.

Many teachers use general approaches to history sources. Analyze its content and analyze its context. Or ask a list of W's: who, why, when, where and so on. These are not bad, though in my experience they produce woolly answers and, much worse, woolly thinking. Because they are generalized, they also leave students with a sense of uncertainty. We want our history students to be precise practitioners and to enjoy history because they are confident.

I suggest we need to teach something much more precise, a system that feels more like a scientific method. The first point is that examiners question reliability separately from utility. It's a nonsense. The real question is 'what is this source reliable for?' Once you've cracked that, it is of course exactly the same as what it's useful for. Now our historians can ask a series of questions in a logical order.

Let's start with provenance. After each question add 'and what does that tell us about what it's reliable for?'

• Who wrote it?
• Who did they write it for?
• When did they write it and what was going on at that time?
• Why did they write it?
• Ask the questions in this order and you have most of the information you need.

You have also got your students to think as historians about the relationship of the source and the time period to those who wrote it. Note that 'why?' comes last. You can only answer this question when you have thought about the others.

We can ask further questions about content. Again add the reliability question to each.

• What tone does the writer use (e.g reasoned, overwritten)?
• Does he/she say what you'd expect or not?
• Does what this source says match other the evidence we have? (Often the most revealing question of all.)

These can also lead to deep discussion about the ideas that individuals used in the past. What does their use of language show? What would we expect to be in their minds?

Now you have all the information you need about what the source is reliable for. Notice that you can apply these questions both to so-called 'primary' and so-called 'secondary' sources. Surely it hardly needs saying that the two need to be treated with equal caution. They are reliable and unreliable for different things, that's all. Note also that you can't always answer all the questions. Lazy examiners often use extracts from modern history textbooks. Obviously you have to assume that any modern historian is truthful and has good research. In this case, usually only question 7 applies.

I create a diagram from these questions and make my students learn it. They use it not to answer questions (which need to be answered according to the format dictated by the examination board) but to get all the information they need before constructing their answer. The questions are a sources health check. You can create an additional, shorter one, for utility questions. We have created a method that will serve for examinations but also prompts healthy historical thinking in our students.

Once you know it, the routine only takes seconds and makes sure you don't miss any clues. It won't deliver perfect answers, but it takes the fear out of sources because you have a checklist to work through and know you won't miss anything.