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New, Novice or Nervous? 149: Getting pupils to argue about causes
Teaching History feature
Every problem you're wrestling with in the history classroom, other history teachers have wrestled with too. This page is for all those new to the published writings of history teachers in Teaching History. It shows how to make a start in understanding how others have explored and discussed common and...
New, Novice or Nervous? 149: Getting pupils to argue about causes
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Competition and counterfactuals without confusion
Teaching History 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...
Competition and counterfactuals without confusion
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Move Me On 100: Deciding on lesson objectives
Teaching History feature
This Issue's Problem: Hugh Horsea, PGCE student, is having difficulty deciding on his lesson objectives
Problem:
Hugh is a few weeks into his first placement. He is enthusiastic and hard working and was successful in the first teaching tasks that he undertook. However, now that he has moved beyond directed...
Move Me On 100: Deciding on lesson objectives
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Museums: Entries to Learning
Primary History article
Editorial comment: Mick Waters raises the crucial point of awe and wonder - the visceral, affective impact ‘the real thing' can have on pupils and adults. One rider is the need to give the onlooker a clear, full explanation of the objects so they can come to life in their...
Museums: Entries to Learning
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Cunning Plan 139: Victorian debates about progress
Teaching History feature
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...
Cunning Plan 139: Victorian debates about progress
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Writing: demonstration and modelling
Primary History article
Pupils' historical writing can take thousands of different forms, for example, an advert, comic, magazine article, love letter, short story, exam essay, poster or account of a castle visit. For pupils to compose in any genre they must understand and assimilate the genre's skeletal framework, its mode, tenor, field - pp....
Writing: demonstration and modelling
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Polychronicon 118: interpretations of Henry VII
Teaching History feature
Polychronicon was a fourteenth-century chronicle that brought together much of the knowledge of its own age. Our Polychronicon in Teaching History is a regular feature helping school history teachers to update their subject knowledge, with special emphasis on recent historiography and changing interpretation. This edition of 'Polychronicon' explores the historical...
Polychronicon 118: interpretations of Henry VII
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Move Me On 147: Making Analogies Meaningful
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem: Emma Norman finds the analogies that she's using to make historical ideas meaningful end up distracting or confusing the students.
Emma has come into history teaching after a number of years at home looking after children. Her previous work was as a fundraiser for an environmental campaign group,...
Move Me On 147: Making Analogies Meaningful
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Polychronicon 117: interpretations of Douglas Haig
Teaching History feature
Polychronicon was a fourteenth-century chronicle that brought together much of the knowledge of its own age. Our Polychronicon in Teaching History is a regular feature helping school history teachers to update their subject knowledge, with special emphasis on recent historiography and changing interpretation. This edition of 'Polychronicon' considers the historical...
Polychronicon 117: interpretations of Douglas Haig
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Move Me On 146: Knowing enough to be able to start planning
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem: Jim Boswell is constantly anxious about whether he knows enough to be able to start planning.
Jim Boswell is an articulate, enthusiastic student teacher, with previous voluntary work experience teaching English to young asylum-seekers and refugees. Other previous roles in sports coaching and refereeing have clearly paid dividends...
Move Me On 146: Knowing enough to be able to start planning
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Roman Britain
Classic Pamphlet
This classic pamphlet provides an introduction to Roman Britain, examines the political history, the institutions of Roman Britain, the economic background and the end of Roman Britain. IntroductionThe Roman conquest and occupation of Britain has long been taken as the conventional starting point of English History, and there is a conventional...
Roman Britain
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An Introduction to our Pamphlets
Information
Over the last 100 years the Historical Association has published pamphlets on every historical topic, theme, period and subject you can think of. Over the last 15 years we have begun the process of making these pamphlets available as digital downloads.
Access our classic pamphlets series here
If there is...
An Introduction to our Pamphlets
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'Spy Fever' in Britain, 1900 to 1914
Historian article
The decade and a half prior to the First World War saw Britain experience a virulent, some might say sordid phenomenon that has been referred to as ‘spy fever.’ This article traces the roots of spy fever, and examines its nature, before assessing its effects on Britain between 1900 and...
'Spy Fever' in Britain, 1900 to 1914
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Move Me On 145: Uncomfortable with Storytelling
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem: Claudia Jones is very uncomfortable with any kind of sustained story-telling.
Claudia Jones is a quietly spoken and rather nervous trainee. She struggled from the beginning of the PGCE to establish a strong presence in the classroom, and although she has become more assertive about insisting on basic...
Move Me On 145: Uncomfortable with Storytelling
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Establishing a dialogue with Year 9 about why environmental history matters
Teaching History article
The enquiry sequence on which Alex Benger reports in this article was inspired by two specific concerns: a sense that history education must have more to contribute to young people’s understanding of and ability to confront the climate crisis; and a desire to help pupils to engage more broadly with...
Establishing a dialogue with Year 9 about why environmental history matters
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No more mark schemes: manageable and meaningful assessment for Years 7–9
Teaching History article
In seeking to answer the question of how to make valid, reliable, and meaningful judgements about students’ work in history, Elizabeth Carr’s department abandoned criteria-based mark schemes and replaced them with a form of comparative judgement conducted in relation to a series of exemplars. In this article, Carr explains the...
No more mark schemes: manageable and meaningful assessment for Years 7–9
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Integrating heritage education and public history at school
Teaching History article
As a busy teacher of history and part-time doctoral student exploring history, heritage and identity, Joris thought a lot about heritage, students’ understanding of heritage and how such ideas could best be brought into the history classroom. Meanwhile, he discovered that the buildings next to his school were about to...
Integrating heritage education and public history at school
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... Modern British LGBTQ+ history
Teaching History feature
While academic historians began to make important contributions to our understanding of British LGBTQ+ history in the 1970s (and, indeed, this built on historical scholarship from as early as the 1880s), the field of British queer history became properly established within university history departments and mainstream academic scholarship from the...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... Modern British LGBTQ+ history
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Enriching young children's understanding of time
Primary History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
As a primary teacher in the United States, I was sometimes caught off guard by students' ideas about time. Some 10-year-olds, I noticed, still could not read a clock or calculate the time between recess and...
Enriching young children's understanding of time
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Teaching Years 8 and 9 to write analytically about similarity and difference
Teaching History article
Reflecting on the quality of her pupils’ analyses of past diversity and complexity, Molly-Ann Navey was struck by the contrast with their writing geared to other types of disciplinary problem. Navey therefore set out to develop entirely new sequences of lessons which would teach pupils to shape arguments about similarity...
Teaching Years 8 and 9 to write analytically about similarity and difference
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Lenses, mirrors and bridges: one department’s holistic approach to diversifying and decolonising local history
Teaching History article
As was the case for many heads of history, Jack Brown was prompted by the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 to reflect afresh on the content and questions asked within his school’s history curriculum, paying particular attention to local history. In this article he sets out the principles and...
Lenses, mirrors and bridges: one department’s holistic approach to diversifying and decolonising local history
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Polychronicon 114: interpretations of Oliver Cromwell
Teaching History feature
Polychronicon was a fourteenth-century chronicle that brought together much of the knowledge of its own age. Our Polychronicon in Teaching History is a regular feature helping school history teachers to update their subject knowledge, with special emphasis on recent historiography and changing interpretation. This edition of 'Polychronicon' investigates the differing...
Polychronicon 114: interpretations of Oliver Cromwell
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Creativity in history
Primary History article
Ask anyone for a list of creative subjects in schools and it is unlikely that history will be top of that list. However, over the last two-and-a-half years we have been working as part of a Creativity Collaborative of schools that seeks to foster creativity across the whole curriculum, including...
Creativity in history
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Reconciling historical accounts and archaeological remains
Historian article
Paul Wordsworth traces the route ways across the Karakum Desert, Turkmenistan, going in search of the wells and watering places essential to desert travel.
There are many risks when arriving at a well in the middle of the Karakum (black sand) desert in the modern Republic of Turkmenistan, not least...
Reconciling historical accounts and archaeological remains
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About… climate history
Teaching History feature
Although some historians object to ‘presentism’ – studies of the past that are explicitly driven by present-day concerns – climate history as a field would probably not exist otherwise. Expensive technology is required to gather the raw data for research into past climates. Interdisciplinary collaboration is needed to develop robust...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About… climate history
