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Cunning Plan 158: teaching about the history of the UK Parliament
Teaching History feature
2015 is something of a year of anniversaries. It is 50 years since Churchill's death, 200 years since Waterloo, 300 since the Jacobite ‘Fifteen', 600 since Agincourt, 800 since Magna Carta. Clearly every year brings around its own crop of anniversaries; this year just seems to have quite a few...
Cunning Plan 158: teaching about the history of the UK Parliament
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Teaching History 198: Out now
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Read Teaching History 198: Curriculum Journeys
Reflections on the process of curriculum design in history have prompted many colourful metaphors. While some point to the opportunities for creativity inherent in the task, others leave little doubt about the mental exertion required for effective planning on different scales. Michael Riley offered...
Teaching History 198: Out now
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Cunning Plan 105: Crusades enquiry
Teaching History feature
Jamie Byrom’s article ‘Using a concluding enquiry to reinforce and assess earlier learning’ (TH 99) offered a practical solution both to weak knowledge acquisition in Year 7 and to effective, worthwhile assessment. This enquiry follows the same model. The assumption is that pupils would be carrying out this enquiry at...
Cunning Plan 105: Crusades enquiry
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Writing Letchworth's war: developing a sense of the local within historical fiction through primary sources
Teaching History article
Writing Letchworth's war: developing a sense of the local within historical fiction through primary sources
Local history, historical fiction, and one of the most significant events of the twentieth century come together in this article as Jon Grant and Dan Townsend suggest a way to enable students to produce better...
Writing Letchworth's war: developing a sense of the local within historical fiction through primary sources
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Teaching History 184: Out now
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Read Teaching History 184: Different lenses
For millennia, human beings have used lenses as tools: to help them see further, to magnify or to correct defects of vision. Yet lenses can distort as well as illuminate the unseen.
Robert Hooke, the seventeenth-century scientist who helped popularise the microscope through his...
Teaching History 184: Out now
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How visual evidence reflects change and continuity in attitudes to the police in the 19th and early 20th centuries
Teaching History article
While history teachers (and examiners) regularly invite students to consider what cartoons or paintings reveal about contemporary attitudes to particular social or political developments, such sources are often difficult to interpret and to use appropriately. Drawing on a wealth of detailed research and a passion to support teachers and students with...
How visual evidence reflects change and continuity in attitudes to the police in the 19th and early 20th centuries
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Using ancient texts to improve pupils' critical thinking
Teaching History article
Did Alexander really ask, ‘Do I appear to you to be a bastard?' Using ancient texts to improve pupils' critical thinking
Beth Baker and Steven Mastin make the case for teaching ancient history in the post-14 curriculum. Pointing out the damaging messages that could be conveyed by assuming that ancient...
Using ancient texts to improve pupils' critical thinking
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Teaching History 128: Beyond the Exam
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
04 Teaching Year 9 about historical theories and methods – Kate Hammond (Read article)
11 Getting Year 7 to set their own questions about the Islamic Empire, 600-1600 – Sally Burnham (Read article)
18 Does scaffolding make them fall? Reflecting on strategies for developing causal argument in Years 8 and...
Teaching History 128: Beyond the Exam
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Triumphs Show 141: using family photos to bring the diversity of Jewish lives to life
Teaching History feature
Headteachers, Hungarians and hats: using family photos to bring the diversity of Jewish lives to life
It is 9.35am on a wet Tuesday. As the rain falls outside, fingers twitch in a Y ear 9 history classroom. The instruction is given and 28 pairs of hands spring into action, rifling...
Triumphs Show 141: using family photos to bring the diversity of Jewish lives to life
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Happy 200th birthday Florence Nightingale!
Primary History article
2020 is undoubtedly going to be an important year in the nursing world and is a significant historical anniversary. The World Health Organisation has declared it the ‘Year of the Nurse and Midwife’ in part because Florence Nightingale, the famous ‘Lady with the Lamp’, will be celebrating her 200th birthday...
Happy 200th birthday Florence Nightingale!
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'Now listen to Source A' : Music and History
Teaching History article
In Steve Mastin’s classroom, pupils do not just read, look at and observe their historical sources. They listen to them. Steve’s classroom is already full of music. He uses it variously - to focus, settle or simply to expand the cultural curiosity of his pupils. Pupils expect to walk in...
'Now listen to Source A' : Music and History
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Meeting the historian through the text
Teaching History article
Edna Shoham and Neomi Shiloah describe a process by which they taught their 15-year-old students to read historians’ accounts for sub-text, meaning and assumptions. In its emphasis on ‘meeting the historian’, their work overlaps with much of the thinking about teaching pupils about historical ‘interpretations’ as specifically required by the...
Meeting the historian through the text
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'What's that stuff you're listening to Sir?' Rock and pop music as a rich source for historical enquiry
Teaching History article
Building on the wonderful articles by Mastin and Sweerts & Grice in TH 108, Simon Butler urges us here to make greater use of rock and pop music in history classrooms. His reasons are persuasive. First, it provides a rich vein of initial stimulus material to tap, helping us to...
'What's that stuff you're listening to Sir?' Rock and pop music as a rich source for historical enquiry
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The Jill Grey collection and Hitchin British schools
Primary History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum.
Jill Grey lived in Hitchin and over a period of 25 years, collected over 35,000 items. A11 of the material relates to the history of education and social history of childhood. I am still in the process of cataloguing the collection and...
The Jill Grey collection and Hitchin British schools
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Teaching History 111: Reading History
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
06 ‘Really weird and freaky’: using a Thomas Hardy short story as a source of evidence in the Year 8 classroom - Mary Woolley (Read article)
13 Reading and enquiring in Years 12 and 13: a case study on women in the Third Reich - Alison Kitson (Read article)
20...
Teaching History 111: Reading History
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Seeing a different picture: exploring migration through the lens of history
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Rosie Sheldrake and Dale Banham here share the results of their desire to use the curriculum changes which are upon us to do something which they had intended for some time. Their modern world study...
Seeing a different picture: exploring migration through the lens of history
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Thinking from the inside: je suis le roi
Teaching History 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...
Thinking from the inside: je suis le roi
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Primary History 55: Doing Local History
The primary education journal of the Historical Association
Editorial
05 In my view: 'Be bloody, bold and resolute'. Two possible interpretations of 'Local History' - Colin Richards (Read article)
06 In my view: Doing local history - John Fines (Read article)
08 In my view: Local history for children: Through the eyes of a B. Ed. Student -...
Primary History 55: Doing Local History
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Driver Ben Cobey 8th Royal Field Artillery
Historian article
Alf Wilkinson asks why three men were awarded the Victoria Cross during the retreat from Mons in August 1914 and the fourth involved in the action wasn’t. What does that tell us about Britain during the arly days of the Great War?
In August 1914, when war broke out, the...
Driver Ben Cobey 8th Royal Field Artillery
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Getting Year 7 to set their own questions about the Islamic Empire, 600-1600
Teaching History article
Sometimes particular problems can lead to unexpected solutions. In this case, Sally Burnham decided to solve a problem that she had identified among her Year 12 students by changing the way in which she teaches Year 7. Her Year 12s were finding it difficult to set appropriate questions for their...
Getting Year 7 to set their own questions about the Islamic Empire, 600-1600
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Illuminating the shadow: making progress happen in casual thinking through speaking and listening
Teaching History article
Here is another breath of fresh air from the Thomas Tallis history department. In TH 103, Head of Department Tony Hier showed how he developed a rigorous framework for implementing government initiatives and improving departmental professional discourse at the same time. This time, from history teacher Vaughan Clark, we get...
Illuminating the shadow: making progress happen in casual thinking through speaking and listening
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Triumphs Show: A head, a hook and international theft: getting year 9 to debate the intricacies of the impact of empire
Teaching History feature
The draft of the revised Key Stage 3 programme of study for history brings a new prominence to the study of the British Empire. Here one department describes their triumph in enabling students to engage with a topic which could seem very distant from their own lives.
Triumphs Show: A head, a hook and international theft: getting year 9 to debate the intricacies of the impact of empire
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Minority rights and wrongs in Eastern Europe in the 20th century
Article
Mark Cornwall reflects on past and present attempts by the international community to protect national minorities in Eastern Europe. On 19 March 1995, the Prime Ministers of Hungary and Slovakia met in Paris to sign a ‘Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation’ between their two countries; on 13 June it was...
Minority rights and wrongs in Eastern Europe in the 20th century
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50th anniversary of the UK’s first official Pride march: 1 July 2022
Primary History article
2022 is a special year as it marks the 50th anniversary of the first official UK Pride march which was held in London on 1 July 1972. The Pride movement, and events like the London in Pride march, were inspired and influenced by the Stonewall riots. These were protests that took place...
50th anniversary of the UK’s first official Pride march: 1 July 2022
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Exploring the history of space
Primary History article
Children have long been captivated by the idea of space exploration and this year marks the anniversary of several significant events, including the 50th anniversary of the European Space Agency and the 10th anniversary of Tim Peake’s launch to the International Space Station. In this article, Kate Rigby explores how...
Exploring the history of space
