-
Interpretations of History: Issues for Teachers in the Development of Pupils' Understanding
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
This article is based on collaborative work between staff at a University department of educational studies and a comprehensive school. Ian Davies and Rob Williams reviews the status and meaning of interpretations in history education...
Interpretations of History: Issues for Teachers in the Development of Pupils' Understanding
-
Year 9 face up to historical difference
Teaching History article
How many people does it take to make an Essex man? Year 9 face up to historical difference
Teaching her Key Stage 3 students in Essex, Catherine McCrory was struck by the stark contrast between their enthusiasm for studying diverse histories of Africa and the Americas and their reluctance to...
Year 9 face up to historical difference
-
Cooperative Learning: the place of pupil involvement in a history textbook
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Pupil involvement is at the heart of every good history lesson. Its planning ensures that pupils are given the opportunity to think for themselves, share ideas, discuss evidence and debate points. The history education community...
Cooperative Learning: the place of pupil involvement in a history textbook
-
Are we creating a generation of 'historical tourists'?
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
A trip to the battlefields of the First World War throws into stark relief the challenges presented by work on interpretations related to historical sites. Andrew Wrenn first drew attention to the difficulties of promoting...
Are we creating a generation of 'historical tourists'?
-
Why go on a pilgrimage? Using a concluding enquiry to reinforce and assess earlier learning
Teaching History article
Jamie Byrom describes the learning activities within a final enquiry for a National Curriculum area of study - Britain 1066-1500. The strong message in this article is that the learning in each enquiry is only as good as the planning and teaching of the enquiries that precede it. Byrom's model...
Why go on a pilgrimage? Using a concluding enquiry to reinforce and assess earlier learning
-
How can I improve my use of ICT? Put history first!
Teaching History article
What is the difference between using lots of ICT and using it well? Dave Atkin draws upon work in his own department and with other Gloucestershire teachers in order to identify criteria for effective ICT use. These boil down to ‘putting history first' and getting maximum value out of the...
How can I improve my use of ICT? Put history first!
-
The Holy Grail? GCSE History that actually enhances historical understanding!
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Teaching History 109, Examining History Edition, launched a range of debates about the role and value of our public examinations in history, debates which have continued in these pages and in history teacher conferences (such...
The Holy Grail? GCSE History that actually enhances historical understanding!
-
New alchemy or fatal attraction? History and citizenship
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
The citizenship curriculum at both Key Stages 3 and 4 is currently being redefined and much has been said recently about the contribution that history could or should make to citizenship agendas and to the...
New alchemy or fatal attraction? History and citizenship
-
Substantial sculptures or sad little plaques? Making 'interpretations' matter to Year 9
Teaching History article
Andrew Wrenn builds upon current, popular and practical work on ‘interpretations of history' analysed in recent editions. Using the public's responses to the temporary exhibition on the slave trade housed at Bristol City Museum, he offers a range of fascinating practical activities for Year 9 pupils. Many of these could...
Substantial sculptures or sad little plaques? Making 'interpretations' matter to Year 9
-
Minimalist cause boxes for maximal learning: one approach to the Civil War in Year 8
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated
Ian Gibson and Susan McLelland describe their work using cause boxes. They identity the type of historical learning that they felt was taking place and the range of factors which they judged to be critical...
Minimalist cause boxes for maximal learning: one approach to the Civil War in Year 8
-
Exploring change and continuity with Year 7
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
A great deal has been written about causation in the pages of Teaching History. From camels to linguistics, this is a second-order concept that teachers and pupils frequently deliberate.
Departments balance the need for substantive knowledge with explicit...
Exploring change and continuity with Year 7
-
Cunning Plan 102.1: teaching decolonisation and the end of apartheid
Article
Cunning Plan for teaching decolonisation and the end of apartheid to 13 and 14 year-olds. The rationale behind this teaching unit is manifold: first, it takes away the idea in the children’s minds that all that happened in the twentieth century is world war. Second, it is designed to appeal...
Cunning Plan 102.1: teaching decolonisation and the end of apartheid
-
Slaying dragons and sorcerers in Year 12: in search of historical argument
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Reflecting on his GCSE and post-16 students' essays, Michael Fordham began to wonder if there were something missing in the way he taught students to write. Work on structure that was designed to strengthen argument...
Slaying dragons and sorcerers in Year 12: in search of historical argument
-
Polychronicon 134: The Great War and Cultural History
Teaching History feature
Over the past two decades the historiography of the Great War has witnessed something of a revolution. Although historical revisionism is, of course, nothing out of the ordinary, the speed with which long-held assumptions about the First World War and its impact have been swept away has been quite astonishing....
Polychronicon 134: The Great War and Cultural History
-
Polychronicon 131: At your leisure
Teaching History feature
Leisure time - like time itself - is fluid, and keeps changing its social meanings. From a ‘serious' high political perspective there is no history of leisure and leisure is trivial. Such perspectives have long lost their grip on the historical imagination, of course, and we have had histories of...
Polychronicon 131: At your leisure
-
Looking through a Josephine-Butler shaped window: focusing pupils' thinking on historical significance
Teaching History article
Christine Counsell draws upon her recent work in developing definitions and practice concerning pupils' thinking about historical significance. Here she tries out those ideas in relation to the 19th century campaigner against the Contagious Diseases Acts, Josephine Butler. Counsell explains why she developed her own set of criteria for structuring...
Looking through a Josephine-Butler shaped window: focusing pupils' thinking on historical significance
-
Triumphs Show: Diversifying the curriculum at A-level
Teaching History feature
There is a wealth of literature arguing for the importance of accommodating a wide range of perspectives and experiences in school history curricula. Many have contended that it is crucial to include the stories of those traditionally omitted from historical records in order to teach history well. Others have emphasised...
Triumphs Show: Diversifying the curriculum at A-level
-
The potential of secondary history to respond to the current ecological and climate crisis
Teaching History article
In this article Michael Riley and Alison Kitson seek to unlock the potential of the secondary history curriculum to educate young people about the current ecological and climate crisis in ways that might also inform their thinking about how to create a more sustainable future. The article (which mirrors a parallel...
The potential of secondary history to respond to the current ecological and climate crisis
-
Teaching Year 9 about historical theories and methods
Teaching History article
Kate Hammond sets out a rationale for linking the National Curriculum requirement to study interpretations of history with her pupils’ own evidence handling skills. She makes connections with history-teacher-led debates and innovations in both areas, but particularly the work of Howells (2005). She describes and evaluates a learning sequence that...
Teaching Year 9 about historical theories and methods
-
Fifties Britain through the senses: ‘never had it so good’?
Teaching History article
Maya Stiasny was faced with difficulties familiar to many of us. Her new Year 12 students were struggling to get to grips with a new period of history. They were not interrogating primary sources with sufficient vigour. Her solution, detailed here, was novel. Working on the rich social history of post-war...
Fifties Britain through the senses: ‘never had it so good’?
-
Thinking across time: planning and teaching the story of power and democracy at Key Stage 3
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Ian Dawson's seminal work on developing chronological understanding - in Teaching History 117, on the website thinkinghistory.co.uk and elsewhere - will be familiar to readers. In this article Dawson considers the question, very much on...
Thinking across time: planning and teaching the story of power and democracy at Key Stage 3
-
Move Me On 130: How to generate class discussion
Teaching History feature
This Issue's Problem: Dot Bradford would love to generate much more productive small group talk and worthwhile class discussion but can't work out how to manage it.
Dot came to the PGCE straight from a history degree and was originally inspired by approaches quite different from her own school experience....
Move Me On 130: How to generate class discussion
-
"Is it the Tuarts and then the Studors or the other way round?" The importance of developing a usable big picture of the past
Teaching History article
What should pupils know and understand as a result of their historical studies? This question is much in the news currently and too often quickly posed and glibly answered. In this article, Jonathan Howson poses this problem in the light of an ongoing research tradition that has sought complex answers...
"Is it the Tuarts and then the Studors or the other way round?" The importance of developing a usable big picture of the past
-
Teaching History 178: Out now
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Read Teaching History 178
Constructing Accounts
Teachers of history have long recognised the tensions inherent in our role. We must deal with the existence of notions of a core narrative (or narratives) of areas of the past, communicating what those notions are while enabling our students to engage critically with...
Teaching History 178: Out now
-
Teaching History 50
Journal
Editorial - Towards 100 2
News 6
Articles:
History Teachers for the 1990s and Beyond - Helen Patrick 10
Survival or Training? - Martin Booth, Gwenifer Shawyer and Richard Brown 16
Jorvik: some School Children's Reactions - Jeffrey Watkin 21
Research Work in the Primary School - D. Joan Jones...
Teaching History 50
