Andrew Anthony (Academy of Singapore Teachers (Singapore))
Lloyd Yeo (Academy of Singapore Teachers (Singapore))
Suhaimi Afandi (National Institute of Education, Singapore)

Keywords
History
Junior College
Secondary School
Approaches to teaching history

Abstract
This small-scale study explores professional development (PD) designs for history teachers in Singapore and proposes a PD model that uses a job-embedded collaborative approach. Drawing from research on effective PD and data gathered from questionnaires and interviews conducted with participants involved in a PD workshop, this paper considers the value of collaborative PD approaches aimed at promoting and encouraging historical thinking. The authors conclude that PD history workshops that are carefully designed to support the development of teachers’ professional knowledge bases, and ones that offer opportunities for teachers to actively translate conceptual ideas into concrete teaching strategies, are critical in transforming beliefs and practices that can work towards more robust historical thinking and discourse in the classroom.

Introduction
The teaching and learning of History as a disciplinary field of study in schools is a complex and sophisticated endeavor. The assumption that acquiring historical knowledge may be achieved simply by committing historical narratives (including factual details such as events, names and dates) to memory no longer holds. Preparing students for education in the 21^st century involves expanding their knowledge base beyond content mastery or information accumulation, to include deeper understanding about the nature of a specific discipline and the development of relevant thinking and reasoning skills that can allow students to engage with the subject matter. Over the past few decades, research on history education has shown that learning history, for the purpose of deeper understanding, involves not only the study of historical narratives but also the acquisition of discipline-specific cognitive strategies that students can use to better learn and understand the past. To be able to better understand the nature of history, students must be equipped not only with the relevant historical content but also with the necessary tools that can enable them to think historically about the past.

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