Recent literature on history education and pedagogical reform is built on the notion of teaching or thinking for understanding. History is viewed as a set of problems with the discipline of history seen as a set of practices to help approach these problems with the teaching of history as the development of students’ competencies in such practices. Historical thinking is at the centre of this notion of history. In the past, history standards in North America have been focused on the topics to be covered and not how to cover them or how to use historical thinking, thus creating a gap between what is being taught and what is being researched. The author focused his chapter on the Oakland Unified School District in California, which is one of the first to build standards around historical thinking. Historical thinking consists of practices that are needed to confront the problem of knowledge on the past. The notion of historical thinking for the standards in Oakland was based on five elements: chronology, evidence, diversity/multiple perspectives, interpretation and significance. The author also discusses how the standards were set by the Oakland Unified School District describing the five aforementioned elements. The chapter concludes with some of the difficulties the Oakland Unified School District faced as well as its decisions and understandings surrounding using historical thinking.