Extended Writing

Although many historians now use the medium of television to advance their arguments and interpretations of history, the construction of written accounts remains fundamental to their craft. It also lies at the heart of current assessment systems, which means that young people similarly need to be able to create effective historical accounts of different kinds. The quality of students’ writing depends on the processes of selection and organisation as well as on effective communication within the appropriate genre, and the materials in this section deal with all three dimensions.  Read more

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  • History as a foreign language

    Article

    Disappointed that the use of the ‘PEEL’ writing scaffold had led her Year 11 students to write some rather dreary essays, Claire Simmonds reflected that a lack of specific training on historical writing might be to blame. Drawing on genre theory and the work of the history teaching community, Simmonds attempted...

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  • Improving Year 12's extended writing

    Article

    From Muddleton Manor to Clarity Cathedral: improving Year 12's extended writing through an enhanced sense of the reader Mary Brown recognised that her A-level students were finding extended writing difficult, particularly in terms of guiding the reader through the argument with appropriate ‘signposting'. To help her students manage this, Brown...

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  • Move Me On 159: Writing Frames

    Article

    This issue's problem: Hannah Mitchell would like to wean pupils off the use of writing frames. Hannah Mitchell has embarked on her PGCE training after a year spent working as a Teaching Assistant. Her varied experiences in that role - sometimes working one-to-one with young people, within a targeted intervention programme,...

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  • New, Novice or Nervous? 159: Writing history essays

    Article

    Until the 1990s, it was unusual for the majority of England's secondary school students to write history essays. The traditional essay was a staple of the old History O Level examinations, but fewer than 20% of pupils did these history exams. In the 1980s, various history teachers became increasingly concerned...

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  • New, Novice or Nervous? 164: Constructing narrative

    Article

    Narrative is shedding its status as the ‘underrated skill’, re-emerging as a requirement of the new GCSE in England. As Counsell has argued, constructing a narrative is ‘no easy option’, however, and asking students to ‘Write an account…’ lacks the comfortable familiarity of ‘Explain why…’ or ‘How far…’. Fortunately, many...

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  • Pipes's punctuation and making complex historical claims

    Article

    Long, unreadable sentences in her students' essays led Rachel Foster to improve her post-16 students' punctuation. Her journey resulted, however, in more than improved punctuation. It led her to theorise what historians are really doing in their ‘signpost sentences'. She found herself showing students how an academic historian anticipates a chunk of argument in a single, well-turned, opening sentence. Foster created an intervention in which students...

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  • Teaching the iGeneration

    Article

    Teaching the iGeneration: what possibilities exist in and beyond the history classroom? The development of communications technology in recent years has not only changed the ways in which students can access their world: it also changes the way they think about it. Sheldrake and Watkin draw here upon work that...

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  • The mechanics of history: interpretations and claim construction processes

    Article

    Holly Hiscox was concerned that many of her A-level students – asked to evaluate three different historical interpretations for their non-examined assessment task – still tended to hold unhelpful misconceptions about the nature of interpretations. In this article she explains how she created an introductory scheme of work to help them understand...

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  • The use of sources in school history 1910-1998: a critical perspective

    Article

    The arrival of sources of evidence into secondary school history classrooms amounted to a small revolution. What began as a radical development is now establishment orthodoxy, with both GCSE and now National Curriculum in England and Wales enshrining its principles. Tony McAleavy pays tribute to some of the thinkers and...

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  • Thematic or sequential analysis in causal explanations

    Article

    Struck by what he saw as the complexity, artistry and cognitive achievement of historians' narrative accounts, Robin Kemp decided to explore ways of teaching his pupils to write narrative and to analyse the role of such writing in developing various kinds of historical thinking. Working with Year 8 and Year...

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  • Thinking from the inside: je suis le roi

    Article

    Dale Banham and Ian Dawson show how active learning deepens students’ understanding of attitudes and reactions to the Norman Conquest. At the same time they build a bold argument for active learning, including a direct strike at the two most common objections to it. Many teachers still see it as...

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  • Training for the marathon: history at Michaela

    Article

    Michael Taylor begins his piece by reminding us that writing great history essays is hard. He compares the process to running a marathon, and his central thesis is that, just as the best training for running a marathon is not running marathons, so the way to encourage students to produce...

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  • Triumphs Show 144: Active learning to engage ‘challenging students'

    Article

    Active learning to engage and challenge ‘challenging students' Historical significance may have been the ‘forgotten element' in 2002 when Rob Phillips first offered us the acronym ‘GREAT', but it has been seized upon with enthusiasm by the history education community. Christine Counsell's now famous five ‘R's (remarkable, remembered, resonant, resulting...

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  • Triumphs Show 159: teaching paragraph construction

    Article

    My adventures in dancing in the classroom started back in the autumn term. I was working with a group of Year 8 students looking at interpretations of King John and we were selecting and analysing quotations from historians as part of the enquiry question ‘Was King John really so bad?' My students were struggling with...

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  • Triumphs Show: Making their historical writing explode

    Article

    ‘Who hates PEE paragraphs?’ A collective groan resounds around my classroom. ‘Today, Year 10 we are going to master PEE  paragraphs, and make our written historical explanations explode.’ I always remember one deflated Year 10 student who said, ‘Miss, I just don’t get PEE paragraphs. I couldn’t do them in Year 7, and I still...

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  • Using Google Docs to develop Year 9 pupils’ essay-writing skills

    Article

    Lucy Moonen set out to explore whether collaborative writing in small groups, facilitated by the use of Google Docs, would help to sustain students’ focus on essay writing as the development of an historical argument. She explains how she set up an essay on the League of Nationals as a...

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  • Using family history to provoke rigorous enquiry

    Article

    The idea of using ‘little stories' to illuminate the ‘big pictures' of the past was creatively explored in Teaching History 107, which offered teachers a wealth of detailed vignettes with which to kindle young people's interest and illuminate major historical events. Paul Barrett builds on the ideas explored in that...

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  • Using nominalisation to develop written causal arguments

    Article

    How nominalisation might develop students’ written causal arguments Frustrated that previously taught writing frames seemed to impede his A-level students’ historical arguments, James Edward Carroll theorised that the inadequacies he identified in their writing were as much disciplinary as stylistic. Drawing on two discourses that are often largely isolated from...

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  • What made your essay successful? I ‘T.A.C.K.L.E.D' the essay question!

    Article

    Teaching in Singapore, Tze Kwang Teo cannot conceive of a history teacher unfamiliar with the mnemonic ‘PEE' (or ‘PEEL') used to structure students' essays. Its ubiquity is testimony to its power, reminding students both to explain and to substantiate their claims. Yet, as Foster and Gadd have argued, its neat formulation can restrict and distort historical thinking. Building on their critique, Teo argues that the focus of PEE/L...

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  • What’s The Wisdom On... Extended writing

    Article

    Writing history is hard! But the things that make it challenging are the things that make it worth doing. They are also the key to enabling all students to write, to embrace the challenge and to enjoy its rewards enough to keep going. A big mistake is to kid ourselves...

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