Cunning Plans

Cunning Plans are one of the regular features in Teaching History. While they all follow the same basic principles, offering a step by step series of instructions for tackling a particular issue, the purpose and scale of each plan varies considerably. They range from detailed suggestions for teaching specific topics or responding to particular challenges, through outline schemes of work for a particular enquiry, to overarching frameworks that map progression in relation to particular concepts or themes.  The vast majority are written by classroom teachers, eager to share their successful ideas in an accessible format. Each one sets out the issue or problem that the plan is intended to address and provides a series of instructions – a kind of recipe – for achieving the core objective(s).

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  • Cunning Plan 149.1: a Year 7 lesson on Gladiators

    Article

    This seemingly straightforward question will prompt correspondingly straightforward answers from your mixed-ability Year 7 class, such as ‘they were slaves who fought with swords until one of the men died for the crowd's entertainment', as one of my pupils answered. Scratch the surface, and almost every word in this response...

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  • Cunning Plan 147: Getting students to use classical texts

    Article

    The following plan provides a more detailed practical example of the approaches discussed in the article on using ancient texts. Having puzzled over what ancient texts actually are - carefully constructed interpretations? testimonies? (but testimonies to what?) myths? - I wanted my Ancient History GCSE class to engage in this...

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  • Cunning Plan 144: promoting independent student enquiry

    Article

    Getting students to generate their own questions can seem like a formidable challenge, even for experienced teachers with extensive subject knowledge developed over years of teaching. Imagine how much more alarming it appeared to a student-teacher being encouraged to take risks by handing more responsibility to the students. Could it...

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  • Cunning Plan 143: enquiries about the British empire

    Article

    I wanted to give my Year 8 students ownership of their work on the British Empire by allowing them to suggest our ‘enquiry question'. In order to introduce the Empire, I brought in sugar, spices, bananas, chilli peppers and cotton. I then showed maps demonstrating the Empire at its height....

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  • Cunning Plan 142: Why do historical interpretations change over time?

    Article

    History teachers have been talking about the need to teach broad narratives, overview and chronology for a long time. They have also recognised how essential it is for students to have an opportunity to study the ways in which the past has been interpreted, and the reasons why these interpretations...

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  • Cunning Plan 140: bringing history to life

    Article

    Whether you are have been inspired to emulate the achievements of the Living History group described in this issue's Triumphs Show, or are simply seeking to create some ‘authentic' props for an intriguing starter, or exploratory role-play, Jonathan Davies here explains how you can find out more about historical re-enactment...

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  • Cunning Plan 139: Victorian debates about progress

    Article

    How can we interest students in the world of ideas? How can we help them to see how important ideas were in shaping and reflecting the world of the Victorians? Working with the overarching enquiry question, ‘Why did some Victorians believe in progress in the nineteenth century and others did not?’ I devised...

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  • Cunning Plan 137: making homework more exciting

    Article

    Ever since I started teaching, homework has been something of a bugbear. Administration alone is a hassle: not only remembering when to set and collect it in, but keeping track of the various students who fail to deliver anything on time (except highly creative excuses) and of the follow-up action...

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  • Cunning Plan 135: challenging generalisations

    Article

    Let's play ‘TOO SIMPLE!' (a.k.a. ‘the generalisation game'). Some years ago, in my own history classroom, in a not-very-inspired moment, I developed a straightforward, low-resource, low-preparation activity which turned out to have more power than I had anticipated in getting pupils to reflect on degree or type of similarity and...

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  • Cunning Plan 129: Why has there been so much interest in Mary I?

    Article

    The obvious answer to this question is that teenagers love stories about fire, and especially role plays about martyrdom at the stake! But it is a serious question and a very good historical one. When focusing pupils' attention on ‘historical interpretations' as required by the National Curriculum (both the current...

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  • Cunning Plan 134: local history at KS3

    Article

    Question: How can we plan to integrate local history into Key Stage 3 schemes of work so that pupils are engaged by the relevance of the subject across different periods of time? Local history can come in all shapes and sizes, from a large-scale oral history project to the perusal...

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  • Cunning Plan 132: Year 7 and the new National Curriculum

    Article

    How can we plan for a coherent Year 7 that makes the most of the new National Curriculum freedom and its almost limitless possible content? Answer: borders, boundaries (and books) Please note: this article was published before the current 2014 National Curriculum.

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  • Cunning Plan 127: Abolitionist icons

    Article

    What makes someone an Icon? A cunning plan to explore the relative significance of individuals involved in abolishing the slave trade.

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  • Cunning Plan 123: planning a school trip

    Article

    School trips are a fantastic opportunity for learning, but they must be planned tightly. Each trip must be carefully justified – what will the students learn which they cannot learn in school? Is this sufficient to justify them (and you) having a day out of the classroom? Does the trip...

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  • Cunning Plan 120: Berlin after 1945

    Article

    Anna Hamilton and Tony McConnell have created a 'Cunning Plan' to tackle to the question, 'Why was Berlin such a significant theatre of conflict after 1945?'.

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  • Cunning Plan 116: how do earthquakes affect a place?

    Article

    Cunning Plan for teaching geography: How do earthquakes affect a place?

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  • Cunning Plan 114: building overview understanding of 19th-century social history

    Article

    This five-lesson sequence gradually builds overview understanding of aspects of 19th century social history through a depth study of the campaigner and reformer, Josephine Butler. Through the sequence, pupils build on earlier work on historical significance, first, by reviewing their understanding of the huge range of reasons why things get...

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  • Cunning Plan 112: Empire

    Article

    ‘Empire’ is an historical concept with a rather imprecise range of meanings. Students need to be able to track their changing understanding of what an empire actually is. Into our workschemes for Years 7 to 13 we have therefore introduced a number of enquiry questions that simultaneously build knowledge about...

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  • Cunning Plan 111: Year 8 lesson on C.V. Wedgwood's writing

    Article

    This edition of 'Cunning Plan' is a Year 8 lesson on C.V. Wedgwood's writing. There is also a supplementary download commenting on the C.V. Wedgwood text used.

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  • Reading C.V. Wedgwood

    Article

    Christine Counsell comments on the C.V. Wedgwood text used for this edition's Cunning Plan.

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