Evelyn Vermeulen argues that in order for teachers to identify outcomes for the learning of history, they must think clearly about the different attributes of the discipline - its ideas, structures and processes - and the relationship between them. Here, she takes us on her own professional thinking journey. She integrates her own classroom experience with a wide range of professional and research literature in order to build a complex but workable definition of progression. She emphasises the importance of observing and listening to our pupils in the classroom in order to establish and define their thinking and understanding. Only thus can the next stage be planned with sufficient focus. Yet, interestingly, she does not see progression as a ‘given' - something to be found in the progressive stages of pupils' natural thinking, but rather as something to be initiated and secured through deliberate, active interventions of the history teacher to move pupils on. Her goal for pupils is that of informed, historical ‘judgement': teachers must draw together and deploy a complex range of strategies if they are really to help all pupils to comprehend, form and test such judgements.