Change and continuity

Consideration of change and continuity tends to be a feature of period and thematic studies. The latter, in particular, make it possible for students to examine trends and turning points over time, looking at those dimensions which remain stable while others alter, and examining the varying pace, direction and nature of those alterations.  Another aspect of change and continuity – one that can also be explored within shorter depth studies – is the lived experience of change: how particular developments were experienced and understood by those who lived through them.  These materials provide important insights into common student misconceptions and illustrate a range of strategies for planning and teaching (including the choice of worthwhile historical questions) that will support the development of more effective analytical descriptions of change and continuity. Read more

Sort by: Date (Newest first) | Title A-Z
Show: All | Articles | Podcasts | Multipage Articles
  • Inverting the telescope: investigating sources from a different perspective

    Article

    As historians, we are dependent on evidence, which comes in many varieties. Rosalind Stirzaker here introduces a project which she ran two years ago to encourage her students to think about artefacts in a different way. They have examined randomly preserved artefacts such as those of Pompeii, and sets of...

    Click to view
  • Key Concepts at Key Stage 3

    Multipage Article

    Please note: This unit was produced before the 2014 National Curriculum and therefore while much of the advice is still useful, there may be some out of date references or links. For more recent resources on key concepts, see our What's the Wisdom on series. The key concepts can be divided into three...

    Click to view
  • Learning from a pandemic

    Article

    In order to contextualise and make sense of the Covid-19 pandemic, Verity Morgan worked with her school’s long-standing partner school in Ghana to devise an innovative project combining history and science, past and present. In this article, Morgan sets out the rationale for the project, her detailed adaptation of a British Council...

    Click to view
  • Lengthening Year 9’s narrative of the American civil rights movement

    Article

    Inspired by reading the work of Stephen Tuck, Ellie Osborne set out to design a new sequence of lessons that would help her students adopt a longer lens on the American civil rights movement. At the same time, Osborne wanted to put more emphasis on the agency and campaigns of activists,...

    Click to view
  • Move Me On 139: teaching about change and continuity

    Article

    This issue's problem: Debbie Samson is finding it difficult to teach about change and continuity in meaningful ways.

    Click to view
  • New, Novice or Nervous? 150: Getting pupils to see change over time

    Article

    This page is the starting point for all who are new to the published writings of history teachers. Every problem you wrestle with, other history teachers have wrestled with too. Quick fixes don't exist. But if you discover others' writing, you'll soon find - and want to join - something...

    Click to view
  • New, Novice or Nervous? 162: GCSE Thematic Study

    Article

    Thematic studies have been a long-standing feature of the Schools History Project (SHP) GCSE specifications in England and Wales; but for teachers of ‘Modern World’ GCSE specifications, the thematic study in the new GCSE specifications for teaching in England from September 2016 is unfamiliar territory. Perhaps you are entirely new...

    Click to view
  • Out went Caesar and in came the Conqueror: A case study in professional thinking

    Article

    A case study in professional thinking Michael Fordham examines the evolution of his own practice as an example of how history teachers draw upon collective, professional knowledge constructed by other history teachers in journals, books, conferences and seminars. Fordham explains how a  particular Year 7 enquiry examining historical change from the...

    Click to view
  • Past Foward: Continuity and progression

    Article

    I recently had the pleasure of teaching a class about a Victorian “inventor” (although we eventually agreed that ‘innovator” may be a more appropriate term). The man in question was Joseph Lister. I told the class the story of how he came to use carbolic acid as an antiseptic. I...

    Click to view
  • Placing history: territory, story, identity - and historical consciousness

    Article

    How do we relate to the past? Does it tell us who we are? Is it a source of examples to follow and mistakes to avoid? Or can we go beyond that to something genuinely historical? Arthur Chapman and Jane Facey argue that as history teachers we have a responsibility...

    Click to view
  • Teaching History 151: Continuity

    Article

    02 Editorial 03 HA Secondary News 04 HA Update 08 Rachel Foster - The more things change, the more they stay the same: developing students' thinking about change and continuity (Read article) 18 Polychronicon: The Revolution of 1688 - Ted Vallance (Read article) 20 Cunning Plan: The 'Glorious' revolution of 1688...

    Click to view
  • Teaching Year 9 to argue like cultural historians

    Article

    Alex Benger asks whether the mode of enquiry adopted by cultural historians, the construction of webs of past meaning from past perspectives, is underexplored in school history. Benger used a cultural history approach in his building of an enquiry for Year 9 around one man’s experience of the First World...

    Click to view
  • Teaching history's big pictures: including continuity as well as change

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. School history teachers are not the only ones wrestling with the challenges of building ‘big pictures' that do justice to complexity. In this article, social and cultural historian Penelope Corfield puts our interest in long-term...

    Click to view
  • Transatlantic slavery – shaping the question, lengthening the narrative, broadening the meaning

    Article

    Nathanael Davies explains his radical rethink of how to teach transatlantic slavery. He explains how he came to question his earlier approach of focusing on the causation of ‘abolition’ and ‘emancipation’ and, instead, allowed scholarship, sources and his own students’ meaning-making to guide him to a different, and much more...

    Click to view
  • Transforming Year 11's conceptual understanding of change

    Article

    For all that history teachers appreciate the need to build substantive knowledge and conceptual understanding systematically over time, they are also likely to have experienced that sickening moment when they realise that a Year 11 pupil has somehow missed something fundamental. In Anna Fielding's case, her pupil's misconception was related to...

    Click to view
  • Triumphs Show 167: Keeping the 1960s complicated

    Article

    During her PGCE year, it became evident to Rachel Coleman just how much pupils struggled with the complicated nature of history. They were troubled in particular by the lack of definitive answers, by the range of perspectives that might be held at the time of a particular event or development...

    Click to view
  • Understanding 'change and continuity' through colours and timelines

    Article

    The small-scale research that Yosanne Vella reports in this article was driven by concern to help pupils develop ‘big picture' visions of the past and to engage effectively with the idea of change as a process rather than an event. The strategy that she adopts - asking groups of students...

    Click to view
  • Unpacking the suitcase and finding history: doing justice to the teaching of diverse histories in the classroom

    Article

    Unpacking the suitcase and finding history: doing justice to the teaching of diverse histories in the classroom It has become a truism that Britain is a multi-cultural society yet, as Mohamud and Whitburn argue, there is still a great deal of thinking to be done by history teachers in accounting...

    Click to view
  • Using individuals’ stories to help GCSE students to explain change and causation

    Article

    Should we, and how do we, develop in our students a sense of period – or a series of senses of period – in a thematic study spanning a thousand years? This was the problem faced by Matthew Fearns-Davies in preparing for the GCSE ‘Health and the People’ paper. He shows...

    Click to view
  • Using timelines in assessment

    Article

    Bridging a twenty-year gap in their practice, Elizabeth Carr and Christine Counsell bring out the similarities in their use of timelines in their planning, teaching and assessment. What they also have in common is the fact that their experimentation with timelines as a way of strengthening cumulative knowledge emerged in...

    Click to view