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Helping Year 7 put some flesh on Roman bones
Teaching History article
Like many other history departments nationally, Ed Podesta and his colleagues face a daunting practical challenge: redesigning three years' historical learning so that it can fit into a compressed two-year Key Stage 3, whilst enhancing, rather than compromising, the quality of students' historical learning.
Podesta's article reports the beginning of...
Helping Year 7 put some flesh on Roman bones
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'How our area used to be back then': An oral history project in an east London school
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
How can oral history enquiries engage students with the study of history and help them connect their learning about the past to their present lives? How can oral history engage and develop students' understanding of...
'How our area used to be back then': An oral history project in an east London school
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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
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Have we got the question right? Engaging future citizens in local history enquiry
Teaching History article
Gary Clemitshaw describes a five-lesson sequence integrating history, citizenship and ICT. He examines the varied rationales and problems underlying a citizenship-history link and then argues for the role of the local dimension in securing a connection that preserves the integrity of the discipline of history. He focuses upon causation as...
Have we got the question right? Engaging future citizens in local history enquiry
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The how of history: using old and new textbooks in the classroom to develop disciplinary knowledge
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
What are textbooks for and how do we think of them? As inevitably partial views of the past that reflect their purpose and moment of construction and their authors' location in physical and ideological time...
The how of history: using old and new textbooks in the classroom to develop disciplinary knowledge
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No more ‘doing’ diversity
Teaching History feature
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...
No more ‘doing’ diversity
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‘Man, people in the past were indeed stupid’
Teaching History journal article
In this article, which is based on Huijgen’s PhD dissertation Balancing between the past and the present, Tim Huijgen and Paul Holthuis present the results of an experimental method of teaching 14–16-year-old students to contextualise their historical studies in a different way. In the four lessons described, students’ initial reactions...
‘Man, people in the past were indeed stupid’
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Teaching History 189: Collaboration
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
02 Editorial (Read article)
03 HA Secondary News
04 HA Update
08 Adding up marginal gains: using Lesson Study to make microimprovements in teaching Year 8 how to use sources – Tony McConnell, Davinia Daley, Rebecca Levy, Lisa Waddell and Richard Waddington (Read article)
23 Triumphs Show: ‘The Strands of Memory’: how a...
Teaching History 189: Collaboration
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Triumphs Show 180: From ‘most able’ to ‘mini’ historians
Teaching History feature
Finding ways to stretch and challenge the highest-attaining students has been a long-standing concern of many history teachers, and strategies for doing so have developed far beyond merely bolting on additional tasks. One way in which I have sought to challenge my own high-attaining students has been by setting them...
Triumphs Show 180: From ‘most able’ to ‘mini’ historians
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Cunning Plan 151: When and for whom has 1688 been 'Glorious'?
Teaching History feature
This enquiry is about how interpretations are formed and why they change. It aims to show Year 9, right at the end of their study of British history, the ways in which meanings of 1688 have shifted over time. It will test students' knowledge and strengthen their chronology of 300...
Cunning Plan 151: When and for whom has 1688 been 'Glorious'?
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Debates: Narratives - what matters most in school history education?
Teaching History article
In England, a curriculum review is imminent. Following a recent ‘call for evidence' by the government, further consultation on the future shape of history in schools will follow. The HA is currently consulting its membership and will be publishing discussion papers in January 2012. At such a time, everyone in...
Debates: Narratives - what matters most in school history education?
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Teaching History 153: The Holocaust & Other Genocides
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
02 Editorial
03 HA Secondary News
04 Tamsin Leyman and Richard Harris - Connecting the dots: helping Year 9 to debate the purposes of Holocaust and genocide education (Read article)
11 Darius Jackson - ‘But I still don't get why the Jews': using cause and change to answer pupils' demand for an...
Teaching History 153: The Holocaust & Other Genocides
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Conducting the orchestra to allow our students to hear the symphony
Teaching History article
Alex Ford and Richard Kennett both welcome the renewed emphasis on knowledge within recent curriculum reforms in England, but are concerned about some of the ways in which the principle of a ‘knowledge-rich’ curriculum has been interpreted and transformed into particular pedagogical prescriptions. In this article they explain their reasons...
Conducting the orchestra to allow our students to hear the symphony
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Teaching History 183: Race
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
02 Editorial (Read article for free)
03 HA Secondary News
04 HA Update: History For All – a wider view – Gabrielle Reddington (Read article)
08 Inventing race? Year 8 use early modern primary sources to investigate the complex origins of racial thinking in the past – Kerry Apps (Read...
Teaching History 183: Race
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New, Novice or Nervous? 164: Constructing narrative
Teaching History feature: the quick guide to the no-quick-fix
Narrative is shedding its status as the ‘underrated skill’, re-emerging as a requirement of the new GCSE in England. As Counsell has argued, constructing a narrative is ‘no easy option’, however, and asking students to ‘Write an account…’ lacks the comfortable familiarity of ‘Explain why…’ or ‘How far…’. Fortunately, many...
New, Novice or Nervous? 164: Constructing narrative
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What’s The Wisdom On... history assessment?
Teaching History feature
Between 1991 and 1995, secondary history teachers in England and Wales had something of a collective awakening about assessment. It followed a huge policy shift in history education: history’s first National Curriculum, rolled out in 1991.
What's the Wisdom On... is a short guide providing new history teachers with an overview...
What’s The Wisdom On... history assessment?
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Building local history into the curriculum
Teaching History article
Neil Bates and Robert Bowry have chosen to tackle the issue of curriculum coherence by including local history, both as starting point for new students joining the school in Year 7 and as a golden thread running throughout their Key Stage 3 curriculum. In this article they explain the rationale...
Building local history into the curriculum
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... Stalin’s final years
Teaching History feature
Stalinism overshadows Soviet history. Few historical subjects are more controversial. Historians have read the years before 1928 as Stalin’s long rise to power, those after 1953 as an extended reckoning with the Stalinist dictatorship. Definitions of Stalinism fix the features, policies, and practices that constituted Stalin’s personal dictatorship between 1928...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... Stalin’s final years
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Cunning Plan 185… for building difference into GCSE curriculum design
Teaching History feature
Many history teachers have been busy making space in their curriculum plans for different sorts of histories. This process, as Priyamavda Gopal has argued (in response to claims that moves to decolonise the curriculum constitute an attempt to censor history by editing out those bits viewed as ‘stains’ on the nation’s...
Cunning Plan 185… for building difference into GCSE curriculum design
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Developing independent learning with Year 7
Teaching History article
Jaya Carrier’s decision to focus on developing a more independent approach to learning in history at Key Stage 3 was prompted by concerns about her A-level students. In seeking to establish secure foundations for students’ own historical research, Carrier first examined the assumptions of her colleagues and her students. She...
Developing independent learning with Year 7
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Teaching History 171: Knowledge
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
This edition is free to download via the link at the bottom of the page (individual articles are also free to access).
For a subscription to the journal (published quarterly), plus access to our library of high-quality secondary history materials along with free or discounted CPD and membership of a thriving community...
Teaching History 171: Knowledge
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"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
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Shaping the debate: why historians matter more than ever at GCSE
Teaching History 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...
Shaping the debate: why historians matter more than ever at GCSE
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Triumphs Show: Recovering the queer history of Weimar Germany in GCSE history
Teaching History feature
Berlin staged its first Christopher Street Day celebration in 1979. This queer pride event commemorated the Stonewall riots that took place a decade earlier in New York City, and it has continued to be a popular annual event in Germany. Its celebration of a landmark moment in American history, however,...
Triumphs Show: Recovering the queer history of Weimar Germany in GCSE history
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Why essay-writing remains central to learning history at AS level
Teaching History article
Richard Harris challenges those who play down the essay in their teaching of the new AS Level. He argues that essay-writing embodies historical thinking and that it is therefore an essential tool for developing students’ understanding of history as an opinion-forming, judgement making process. Students need to practise developed, evidential...
Why essay-writing remains central to learning history at AS level
