In this article the author discusses some issues with conducting historical research, rooted in her own experiences. She focuses on four main points: minimising one's own biases, choosing a suitable research question, evaluating the quality of the sources and providing a balanced interpretation of events. She argues that using a historical approach to understand an educational phenomenon is both a fact-finding process and an opportunity to revisit one's own values, and is an important way to confirm or reinterpret what we know about current educational practices.