A good enquiry question should allow pupils to build their knowledge over the course of several lessons to be able to answer the question at the end. Enquiry questions should offer the opportunity for different interpretations of historical facts.
While the curriculum offers guidance on which historical topics we should cover, learning comes through asking how and why these things came to be. And these questions are still subject to historical debate. New evidence is uncovered, new interpretations are put forward, and historians and experts come to new agreements. In the classroom, we can demonstrate how historians answer important questions about the past by using enquiry questions to structure lessons.
Please see the presentation below for more on how to construct and teach effective enquiry questions.
This presentation was written and presented by Dr Joseph Smith and Katie Hunter at all three iterations of the TSS project.
Further reading:
Hartmann, Henrick (2017), How the process of historical enquiry helps to make school history more accessible, Euroclio, 24 October, 2018.
Whitburn, R; Mohamud, A; (2019) Anatomy of Enquiry: deconstructing an approach to history curriculum planning. Teaching History, 177 pp. 28-39.