Craft complex historical narratives that answer a question or solve a problem using sophisticated understandings of causation, continuity, and change over time.
Emerging practice: Historical narratives written by beginning students of history are often simple, sequential accounts that tell readers "what happened" without indicating why the narrative matters. To beginners, one way of telling the story is as good as any other. It is difficult to tell why certain topics or things are included and others are not; obviously relevant issues are ignored, while tangential issues are included. Attempts to tie events together as cause and effect, or as evidence of change or continuity, are weak, simplistic, logically fallacious, or non-existent.
As you begin to develop competence, you will begin to write narratives that are oriented towards solving a problem or answering a question, though the stakes of the problem or question may be unclear and the answer attempted by the narrative may not yet be fully convincing. You'll begin to incorporate a wide range of relevant topics and events, but your criteria about what to include or exclude may still be poor or unevenly applied. Implicit or explicit claims about causation, change, and continuity will begin to appear, but they may be oversimplified (monocausal, linear, disproportionally focused on change or continuity, all about progress or all about declension). Narratives may have an air of inevitability about them, instead of an awareness of possibility that things could have happened differently under slightly different circumstances. After specific feedback or coaching, you may demonstrate signs of mastery, but you may have difficulty assessing the quality of other authors' historical narratives by these same standards.
Achieving mastery means demonstrating the ability to write and to recognize narratives that persuasively address a problem or question whose significance is made clear. The stakes of the question and the difficulty of answering it are made as clear as the answer itself. The range of topics covered will simultaneously indicate discernment (only those things that are most relevant are included) and thoroughness (while clearly defined, your standard of relevance is capacious enough to bring a remarkably wide range of issues into the narrative). Claims about causation, change, and continuity are fully warranted and sophisticated. You present causality as a dense web in which multiple overlapping factors played a role, instead of only one or two; elements of change and continuity are treated as contingent, coexistent, and related, with neither wholly displacing the other. You consistently probe or avoid simplistic narratives of unbroken progress or total decline.
First, I am taking copious notes for when I return to my syllabi in a month or two. My only comment might be that you reconsider the use of beginner and beginning in the emerging practice description. Those students who have had multiple history classes might assume they could not fall into this category, as they do not see themselves as beginners. That said, I don't have a good substitute to offer, so it may have to stand. Overall, I think your students will be able to see clear differences in the narratives, which is key.