KS3 planning (general)

There are many different issues, both practical and pedagogical, subject specific, school-wide and national that must be considered in any teachers’ planning. In this section you will find research, articles, guides and resources that will support you to develop your planning as it relates to teaching history and helping pupils to make progress.

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  • New approaches to teaching the History of Appeasement in the classroom

    Multipage Article

    This project has been created on the initiative of Professor Julie. V. Gottlieb, Dept. of History, University of Sheffield. British political history, political conflict, appeasement and the Munich Crisis (1938) itself is the focus of her research and publications. Rather than approach these topics from ‘traditional’, elite and history from...

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  • No more ‘doing’ diversity

    Article

    Catherine Priggs and her history department colleagues were increasingly concerned that their curriculum was too narrow. They feared that major areas of history were being left out and that many of their own pupils were not seeing themselves, in their various ethnic, cultural and world identities, in the past. Priggs...

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  • Nutshell 129: Arguing the case for keeping history at Key Stage 3

    Article

    Nutshell, HELP. My head wants to abandon separate subjects at Key Stage 3 and do projects linked only by content, such as ‘India', ‘Industry' or ‘Indigo' instead. SMT already stop 50% of pupils from choosing history at 13 as apparently they can't ‘achieve' in it (or can't achieve a C),...

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  • Planning a more diverse and coherent Year 7 curriculum

    Article

    In this article, Jacob Olivey describes his department’s efforts to both diversify their Key Stage 3 curriculum and secure greater curricular coherence. Building on a large body of research and practice, Olivey sought new forms of curricular coherence through the selection and sequencing of substantive content across the curriculum. He...

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  • Planning increasingly complex causal models at Key Stage 3

    Article

    While weighing up the relative merits of the competing narratives of the Battle of Hastings that his department might present to Year 7, Matthew Stanford began to consider how the causal models that teachers introduce influence the causal arguments that students later go on to write. In this article, Stanford...

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  • Polychronicon 142: 'instructive reversals' - (re)interpreting the 1857 events in Northern India

    Article

    The dramatic, chaotic and violent events that took place in Northern India in 1857/8 have been interpreted in many ways, as, for example, the ‘Indian Mutiny', the ‘Sepoy War' and the ‘First Indian War of Independence'. The tales that have been told about these events have been profoundly shaped, however,...

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  • Polychronicon 170: The Becket Dispute

    Article

    ‘The Becket Dispute’ (or ‘Controversy’) refers to the quarrel between Henry II and Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, which dominated English ecclesiastical politics in the 1160s. It was a conflict with multiple dimensions: a clash of Church and State; a prolonged struggle between two prominent individuals; a close friendship turned...

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  • Professional wrestling in the history department: a case study in planning the teaching of the British Empire at Key Stage 3

    Article

    Three years ago ( TH 99, Curriculum Planning Edition), Michael Riley illustrated ways in which history departments could exploit the increased flexibility of the revised National Curriculum.1 He showed that precisely-worded enquiry questions, positioned thoughtfully across the Key Stage, help to ensure progression, challenge and coherence. His picturesque image for...

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  • Pupil-led historical enquiry: what might this actually be?

    Article

    The current National Curriculum for history requires pupils to ‘identify and investigate specific historical questions, making and testing hypotheses for themselves'. While Kate Hammond relished the encouragement that this gave to her pupils to engage in the process of historical enquiry, she was keen to develop a much clearer sense...

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  • Putting Catlin in his place?

    Article

    Jess Landy’s desire to introduce her pupils to a more complex narrative of the American West led her to the life story and work of a remarkable individual, George Catlin.  In this article she shows how she used this unusual micro-narrative in order to challenge pupils’ ideas not just about the bigger narrative of which it is a part, but about the...

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  • Raising the bar: developing meaningful historical consciousness at Key Stage 3

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. How can we help pupils make sense of the history that they learn so that the whole adds up to more than the sum of its parts? How can we help pupils develop and sophisticate...

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  • Remembering Agincourt: Bilingual Enquiry

    Multipage Article

    Do they learn about Agincourt in France? 2015 was a year of anniversaries. As part of our funded commemoration projects surrounding the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt, we have commissioned an enquiry looking at the battle and how it has been remembered, particularly aimed at pupils in years...

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  • Seeing the historical world

    Article

    In this article, Lindsay Cassedy, Catherine Flaherty and Michael Fordham draw upon their empirical research to assess what understandings their students had of historical interpretations at the end of their compulsory education in history. They found that most students operated with an underlying epistemological model that did not reflect the...

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  • Taking control of assessment

    Article

    Ian Luff recognised that in a post-levels world efforts to devise new assessment systems risked replicating old problems or creating new ones. Drawing on his many years’ experience of teaching and school leadership Luff argues that for assessment in history to be truly useful to teachers and pupils it needs...

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  • Teaching History 147: Curriculum Architecture

    Article

    02 Editorial  03 HA Secondary News  04 HA Update  08 Beth Baker and Steven Mastin - Did Alexander really ask, ‘Do I appear to you to be a bastard?' Using ancient texts to improve pupils' critical thinking (Read article) 14 Cunning Plan: Getting students to use classical texts - Beth Baker...

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  • Teaching Year 8 pupils to take seriously the ideas of ordinary people from the past

    Article

    Jacob Olivey wanted Year 8 to know that ordinary people in the nineteenth century constructed their own identities. In this reflection on how his practice developed in his training year, Olivey illustrates the importance of using historical scholarship in choosing foundational knowledge to teach. He shows how he used that...

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  • Teaching Year 9 to take on the challenge of structure in narrative

    Article

    Reflecting on challenges that had surfaced in their own and others’ efforts to get pupils to write historical narratives, Rachel Foster and Kath Goudie went back to the drawing board to consider the disciplinary purposes of narrative. They used both historical scholarship and theoretical works by historians on narrative construction....

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  • Teaching pupils how history works

    Article

    In the last edition of Teaching History Jayne Prior and Peter John presented an approach to extended writing that relied upon pupils’ earlier work.1 Pupil indignation was key. Furious at the blandness of some text presented to them, they used their own knowledge of colour, detail and drama to challenge...

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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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  • Telling tales: Developing students' own thematic and synoptic understandings at Key Stage 3

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. Ed Brooker is as concerned as the other authors within this edition that students should be able to see and make meaning out of ‘big pictures' of the past. He is acutely aware, however, that...

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