This Teacher’s Journal: Blog Post 3 | February 8, 2025
The first full week of timetabled teaching for the 2025 school year has been a deep dive into flipped learning, AI-infused pedagogy, and historical inquiry. With a mix of in-flipping, student voice, digital tools, and structured thinking strategies, I’m seeing patterns emerge—not just in how students transition from passive absorption to active engagement, but also in how they use AI as a learning partner.
These observations aren’t happening in isolation. They connect directly to emerging research on historical thinking, agency, and digital pedagogy, including the constructivist approaches that underpin my own research and literature review. Recent scholarship confirms that history education is about more than recalling facts. My journey this week was about how, technology might be employed within pedagogy to empower students to both engage critically with the past and to understand its implications for the present.
Flipping for Agency: AI, Inquiry, and the Evolution of Learning
The Emerging Pattern: “The third-lesson-in Point”
Across multiple year levels, I’m noticing a threshold moment occurring around third-lesson-in of an in-flip process – the point at which students desire to move beyond content acquisition and crave deeper engagement.
This suggests that in-flipping is most effective as a short-term scaffold rather than a long-term instructional model. Initially, students need structured support in how to engage with flipped materials – guidance in how to take notes, scaffolded AI interactions, and teacher oversight in their digital mind mapping. But, at around the third lesson in and certainly by the fourth or fifth lesson, something changes.
- Cognitively, students reach a point where they have enough foundational knowledge to ask their own questions.
- Emotionally, they begin seeking social, interactive engagement – they no longer want to work in isolation.
Pedagogically, this appears to align with Seixas’ idea that historical inquiry requires students to move beyond establishing what happened to questioning why it happened, how it’s remembered, and why it matters today.
This ‘third-lesson-in‘ transition point for in-flipping raises an interesting research question: is this pattern a universal cognitive threshold, or does it vary by context, age group, and prior experience with flipped learning?
Listening First: Student Voice – “Your History with History”
Before diving into content, I wanted to start the year by listening. Every student in my classes completed a Microsoft Flip assignment in Teams titled “Your History with History” – a simple but powerful exercise designed to foreground student voice, agency, and connection.
In a three-minute unscripted, one-take video response, students reflected on:
- What was going well in their learning journey.
- What wasn’t working as well or where they felt challenged.
- What we could work on together to support their learning.
This wasn’t just a procedural check-in – it was an intentional act of co-constructing the learning space. Research into student agency and historical thinking highlights that meaningful learning happens when students see themselves not just as learners of history, but as participants in shaping their educational experience.
Common themes emerged:
- Many students – especially those who I had taught in previous years – valued flipped learning as a teaching/learning approach, noting that video-based content delivery helped them work at their own pace and revisit concepts as needed.
- Many students – again especially those who I had taught in previous years saw value in carefully constructed digital concept mapping in OneNote, especially when using styluses for interactive note-taking.
- Several students – especially those new to flipped learning – expressed uncertainty about managing self-directed study, raising important questions about scaffolding independence in learning. Many of these students expressed a fear of group assessments, a desire to type bullet point notes, and on the achievement of grades as a marker of success in learning. A number of these responses raised in my mind questions as to the students’ perceptions of the meaning of learning and success. Some of these students seems ‘risk adverse’ and may be perhaps under equipped to succeed tasks that required them to grapple with challenging, less-defined and complex issues. Many such problems emerge within the study of history.
- Many students were at pains to emphasise the value to them of timely, specific and actionable feedback.
These insights reinforced the importance of explicit metacognitive support – helping students reflect on their learning processes, adjust strategies, and build confidence in their ability to engage with historical inquiry on their own terms.
All students received individual and specific responses to their videos – usually with ‘personal’ tone of communication – via the Teams platform. This response emphasised the importance of high-quality teacher and student discourse throughout the learning process.
By positioning students as co-creators of their learning experience, this Flip assignment became more than a reflection – it became a foundation for the trust, collaboration, and intellectual engagement that will define our work together this year.
With these insights in mind, we moved into the next phase: using flipped learning to empower deeper historical thinking.
Flipping With Purpose: From Content to Critical Thinking and Agency
Year 9: The French Revolution, Human Rights, and Purpose
One of the most powerful moments this week came from my Year 9s, who moved beyond simply learning about the French Revolution to questioning its significance.
Their task was twofold:
- Engage intergenerational perspectives – asking an older family member why they think the French Revolution still matters today.
- Interrogate AI-generated responses – using ChatGPT to explore historical and philosophical perspectives on revolution and human rights.
They then synthesized their findings in a simultaneous Teams discussion, comparing:
- Their family member’s perspective (grounded in personal and generational experience).
- Their AI-generated response (often more global and analytical).
- Their own reflections on what history teaches us about human rights, democracy, and change over time.
Many students articulated a growing awareness of history’s civic purpose—echoing Wineburg’s views that historical thinking is essential for democratic citizenship.
Their responses reflected:
- Continuity and change – How revolutionary ideals echo in today’s world.
- Historical agency – Who drives change, and how ordinary people shape history.
- The fragility of democracy – Parallels between revolutionary struggles and modern movements for human rights.
This activity was not just about historical understanding—it was about meaning-making. Seixas calls this “historical significance”—the process of recognising which past events matter and why.
Year 9 History Cycle: The Frontier Wars and Reparative Justice
For students in the Year 9 Cycle course, the transition from in-flipping to critical thinking happened as they explored Australia’s contested history of frontier violence.
They engaged with three major databases:
- FrontierConflict.org (Burke & Wallis)
- University of Newcastle Massacre Database (Ryan)
- Harry Gentle SEQ Massacre Maps (Kerkhove)
These were not just sources of information – they were sites of contested memory. Students saw firsthand how historical narratives have been erased, recovered, and challenged.
A key discussion is emerging that centres around the following themes:
What does it mean to acknowledge our shared ‘hard histories’?
What responsibilities do we have to address past injustices?
This connects directly to Cutrara’s argument that history education should be reparative, not just informative. By engaging with First Nations voices in the song “Shadows” (Briggs & Troy Cassar-Daley), students explored:
- Empathy in history – understanding lived experiences of colonial violence.
- Reparative justice – history as a tool for truth-telling.
- Historical place consciousness – recognizing the deep connections between past and present.
This shift – from content to historical consciousness – was a significant moment in the week.
Year 10: Pompeii, Digital Immersion, and Stoicism
For Year 10, the transition beyond in-flipping took the form of digital immersion—moving students from content acquisition into active exploration and historical sense-making.
A key goal in this unit has been to encourage students to think like archaeologists and historians, to interrogate sources, analyze spatial contexts, and construct historical narratives from evidence rather than passively consuming textbook interpretations. The shift in engagement this week made that goal tangible.
We explored Pompeii and Herculaneum through a three-part digital experience:
- Google Earth & Street View – Students navigated the ruins in real-time, observing scale, structure, and geography in a way that static images or maps simply cannot replicate.
- Pliny the Younger as a primary source – Students worked through excerpts of Pliny’s letters describing the eruption of Vesuvius, mapping locations and connecting his eyewitness account to modern understandings of historical disasters.
- 3D artifacts on Sketchfab – Students explored interactive scans of statues, mosaics, and everyday objects, discussing what these objects reveal about Roman daily life, class structures, and cultural priorities.
This led to an unexpected but profoundly valuable discussion about ancient Roman connections to Christianity and the symbolism and reality of the crucifixion. We also had a short discussion of Stoicism – which I had linked to a 2024 TikTok trend regarding how often to men think about Ancient Rome. The philosophy, which was widespread in Roman society, provided an entry point into discussions of resilience, civic responsibility, and personal well-being – themes that resonate strongly with modern students and that linked to my own experiences as a teacher.
This discussion took on an interdisciplinary nature, linking history with philosophy, psychology, and even Catholic teachings on sacrifice and the common good.
As a final provocation, I posed the Monty Pythonesque question, “What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?”. We will return to that next week in the hope that it will further sense making, connection and deeper understandings of Roman contributions to governance, engineering, and public infrastructure, and how these historical legacies shape the world we live in today.
This was flipped learning at its best—students weren’t just recalling facts; they were making connections, challenging ideas, and using history to think about the present and future.
Looking Ahead: AI, Ethical Research, and Student Voice
One of the most exciting pedagogical shifts this year is the integration of AI into student research and historiography. This week, we introduced a structured approach to AI use in historical inquiry, moving beyond simple fact-finding to critical engagement with AI-generated responses.
A key focus is on ensuring that students learn not just how to use AI, but how to interrogate it—how to assess its biases, limitations, and historical assumptions.
This is being embedded directly into the Year 9 History assessment, which will require students to:
- Demonstrate ethical and critical use of AI in their research and source selection.
- Use Microsoft Search Coach to evaluate historical sources and verify AI-generated claims.
- Engage in ongoing teacher conferencing and reflective checkpoints, documenting how AI has influenced their research process.
This ties into emerging discussions in the field of digital pedagogy and history teaching. We are positioning AI not as a substitute for thinking, but as a tool to enhance it. It is anticipated that student use of AI will not only shape their assessment responses but will also push them toward a more historiographically aware mindset – understanding that history is not static, but constructed through ongoing debate, interpretation, and evidence-based inquiry.
This also reinforces the importance of student voice. As students document their AI interactions, assess sources, and make historiographical decisions, they are taking ownership of their learning process and developing the self-regulated learning skills necessary for higher-order historical thinking.
Final Thoughts
This first full week of teaching in 2025 has reinforced a key insight:
Flipped learning, digital tools, and AI can enhance historical thinking—but they can’t replace it. What matters most is not the technology itself, but how we use it to foster deep, critical, and ethical engagement with the past.
In many ways, the evolution of my flipped classroom mirrors the evolution of history pedagogy itself:
- From content absorption to historical inquiry.
- From passive learning to active questioning.
- From information consumption to meaning-making.
This is where the work of scholars like Cutrara (2018) becomes particularly relevant. She argues that history education must be transformative—not just informing students about the past, but empowering them to use history to understand and shape the present. I am seeing this transformation in real-time.
The best evidence that flipped learning is working isn’t found in student test scores or neat, completed notes. It’s found in the moments where students push back, ask difficult questions, and demand more from their learning.
- It’s the student who asks, “How can I play a part in building a world where human rights are more fully respected?”
- It’s the student who wonders, “If historical events have created and shaped current injustices, what part can I play a part in building a better tomorrow?”
These moments of intellectual discomfort and curiosity are the real markers of success.
Flipped learning and the use of new technologies such as AI have given students the tools to explore history on their own terms – but it is human dialogue, ethical reflection, and desire to take action that bring it to life.
As we move forward, I remain committed to ensuring that technology remains a means, not an end. The flipped classroom is not just about digital efficiency – it’s about reimagining how we teach, learn, and engage with history in a world increasingly shaped by AI and digital interconnectivity.
The future of history education isn’t just digital. It’s deeply, necessarily human.
Disrupted History 