This Issue's Problem: Melville Miles, student history teacher, is in Term 3 of his PGCE year. Melville has taught a number of excellent lessons in which he enabled pupils to reach high levels of historical understanding. His diagnostic assessment of pupils' work is unusually sophisticated for a PGCE student. Melville's two placements have been in contrasting schools where he has taught pupils, aged 11 to 18, across the full ability range. However, Melville is frustrated because he feels that the practice that he has seen in both schools reduces causal understanding to something simplistic and unchallenging.