Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.

Pupil involvement is at the heart of every good history lesson. Its planning ensures that pupils are given the opportunity to think for themselves, share ideas, discuss evidence and debate points. The history education community has already generated a range of strategies to encourage effective use of group work. Yet different teachers and different contexts yield very different language with which to characterise and describe such strategies. In Edition 119 of Teaching History, Jacques Haenen and Hanneke Tuithof described Year 7 working as a team to design a historical game about a medieval peasant. More recently they have worked on a Dutch textbook to make cooperative learning an explicit part of the textbook experience. In this article they discuss some of the strategies that they have used and the way in which Dutch teachers have responded to the new course. This piece may refresh your ideas for pupil involvement in your own classroom or perhaps cause you to consider to what extent you share the aims of cooperative learning with your own pupils...