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When considering your planning there are several questions you will need to consider: Read more

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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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  • Here ends the lesson: shaping lesson conclusions

    Article

    Reflecting on her efforts to improve her trainee’s lesson conclusions, Paula Worth decided to brush up her own. A journey of self-evaluation led her to revisit the Cambridge Conclusions Project. Through its lens, she judged her own lesson conclusions wanting. Worth examines the way in which the final episode of...

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  • Move Me On 166: getting the right pitch for GCSE teaching

    Article

    This feature is designed to build critical, informed debate about the character of teacher training, teacher education and professional development. This issue’s problem: Bob Williams is struggling to get the pitch right in teaching topics at GCSE that the school previously taught to Year 7. Bob Williams, now half way through his training year, is feeling very out...

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  • History GCSE Specification Comparison Tool

    Article

    This short guidance is designed to help you compare the 9-1 GCSE specifications. The first examinations of these new linear GCSEs was in the summer of 2018.

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  • GCSE topics mapped against our resources

    Article

    At the HA, we know it’s hard enough trying to grapple with new GCSE units of study, assessment and content without also having to research where you can find interesting or supportive resources, either for your own, or your students subject knowledge. Our secondary committee have pooled resources and helped...

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  • Beyond tokenism: diverse history post-14

    Article

    Nick Dennis shows how a ‘multidirectional memory’ approach to teaching history can move history teachers beyond seeing black history as separate or distracting from the history that must be aught at examination level. He gives examples of ways in which a diverse history can be built into examination courses, strengthening...

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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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  • Shaping the debate: why historians matter more than ever at GCSE

    Article

    The question of how to prepare students to succeed in the examination while also ensuring that they are taught rigorous history remains as relevant as ever. Faced with preparing students to answer a question that seemingly precluded argument, Rachel Foster and Kath Goudie demonstrate how they used historical scholarship both to...

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  • A guide to Assessment Reform at Key Stage 4

    Article

    Big changes in assessment at Key Stage 4 took place the last time specifications were reformed. If you want to compare the assessment approaches taken by different examination Boards, then this handy briefing guide will provide you with the introductory information you need to be able to make sense of...

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  • Fundamental British Values and history teaching

    Article

    In this article, Michael Maddison provides an overview of what schools must do in relation to promoting British values, as well as preventing extremism and radicalisation, and why it is so important that opportunities are taken in history to deal with these two pressing issues. It is an updated version...

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  • Cunning Plan 162: Transferring knowledge from Key Stage 3 to 4

    Article

    Planning to deliver the new GCSE specifications presents a challenge and an opportunity to any history department, whatever their previous specification. The sweep of history that students will now study at GCSE is much broader than ‘Modern World’ departments are used to; including a medieval or early modern depth study...

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  • New Saxon, Viking and Medieval GCSE Content

    Article

    As you will no doubt be aware, GCSEs are changing. New specifications (subject to accreditation) will require students to learn history from a range of different time periods. Different specifications will specify different content, but whichever specification you end up teaching, you are very likely to be teaching some medieval...

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  • Cunning Plan 152.1: visual sources

    Article

    The principles outlined here were developed in response to three key concerns. The first was consideration of the needs of students learning English as an additional language who face particular challenges with reading and writing. Images could perhaps offer them more direct, less abstract, ways into an understanding of challenging...

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  • Why we would miss controlled assessments in history

    Article

    A place for individual enquiry? Why we would miss controlled assessments in history Most history teachers will, at some point, recognise the tension between teaching an engaging history course while at the same time meeting the requirements of an exam specification. Mark Fowle and Ben Egelnick reflect here on how...

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  • Developing awareness of the need to select evidence

    Article

    Let's play Supermarket ‘Evidential' Sweep: developing students' awareness of the need to select evidence Despite having built a sustained focus on historical thinking into their planning for progression across Years 7 to 13, Rachel Foster and Sarah Gadd remained frustrated with stubborn weaknesses in the evidential thinking of students in...

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  • Planning and teaching linear GCSE

    Article

    Planning and teaching linear GCSE: inspiring interest, maximising memory and practising productively As proposed changes to the National Curriculum are furiously debated, and details of future changes to GCSE are anxiously awaited, history teachers in England are already wrestling with the implications of one change to the public examination system:...

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  • An attempt to make Year 9 Masters of Learning

    Article

    ‘Much to learn you still have!' An attempt to make Year 9 Masters of Learning How can history teachers structure learning pathways through historical content in ways that engage and challenge all pupils, that enable them to work at an appropriate pace and that also encourage pupils to self-assess and...

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  • Move Me On 149: how to provide appropriate support for particular students

    Article

    This issue's problem: Helen Troy is uncertain how to provide appropriate support for certain students without restricting what they can achieve. Helen showed considerable determination in securing her teacher training place. Her own education had been within a highly selective school system and her first application was unsuccessful because of...

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  • Designing an enquiry in a challenging setting

    Article

    The Association for Historical Dialogue and Research (AHDR) is a Cyprus-based organization that works to foster dialogue among history teachers and other educators across the divide in Cyprus. In one of their UN-funded projects, ADHR members worked with UK colleagues to shape a lesson sequence and resources on the Ottoman period...

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  • Competition and counterfactuals without confusion

    Article

    Paula Worth was searching not only for a rigorous question, capable of engendering genuine debate, but also for an engaging and enjoyable activity that would secure GCSE students' substantive knowledge. The answer - or rather the question - lay in counterfactual thinking: a carefully crafted game that she devised, based...

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