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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 116: Place
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
This edition deals with how the purpose of history relates to the purpose of geography or how geography's shaping concepts fit into those of history. How do the two subjects strengthen each other?
06 Sense, Relationship, and Power: Uncommon Views of Place - Liz Taylor (Read article)
14 Cunning Plan: Geography...
Teaching History 116: Place
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Year 7 challenge stereotypes about the Mexica
Teaching History article
After discussing a new book about the Mexica (Aztecs) during a routine meeting with a trainee teacher, Niamh Jennings decided to construct a sequence of lessons around the history of the Mexica Empire. Struck by the vivid storytelling of historian Camilla Townsend in her book Fifth Sun, and fascinated by...
Year 7 challenge stereotypes about the Mexica
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What’s the wisdom on… enquiry questions
Teaching History feature
One way of explaining what is meant by an enquiry question is to start with what it is not.
What's the Wisdom On... is a short guide providing new history teachers with an overview of the ‘story so far’ of practice-based professional thinking about a particular aspect of history teaching. It...
What’s the wisdom on… enquiry questions
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Teaching History 102: Inspiration and Motivation
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Learning to love history: preparation of non-specialist primary school teachers to teach history, Finding voices in the past: exploring identity through the biography of a house, Getting pupils to track their own thinking and much more...
Why Gerry now likes evidential work - Phil Smith (Read article)
Teaching pupils how...
Teaching History 102: Inspiration and Motivation
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Time's arrows? Using a dartboard scaffold to understand historical action
Teaching History article
Arthur Chapman presents a task-specific scaffold - a ‘dart' board - designed to teach students how to interrogate sources of information so that these become sources of evidence for particular claims about past actions, beliefs and aims. Chapman also uses his ‘dart' board to foster students' reflection on the degrees of...
Time's arrows? Using a dartboard scaffold to understand historical action
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Move Me On 194: dealing with students’ current concerns when teaching the history of climate change
Teaching History feature
Move Me On is designed to build critical, informed debate about the character of teacher training, teacher education and professional development. It is also designed to offer practical help to all involved in training new history teachers. Each issue presents a situation in initial teacher education/training with an emphasis upon...
Move Me On 194: dealing with students’ current concerns when teaching the history of climate change
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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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Counterfactual Reasoning: Comparing British and French History
Teaching History article
Year 8 use counterfactual reasoning to explore place and social upheaval in eighteenth-century France and Britain
Two linked motivations inspired Ellen Buxton's research study: she wanted pupils to make connections between British and French history and she wanted to explore the potential of counter-factual reasoning within a causation enquiry. It...
Counterfactual Reasoning: Comparing British and French History
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Helping Year 9s explore multiple narratives through the history of a house
Teaching History article
A host of histories: helping Year 9s explore multiple narratives through the history of a house
Described by the author Monica Ali as a building that ‘sparks the imagination and sparks conversations', 19 Princelet Street, now a Museum of Diversity and Immigration, captivated the imagination of teacher David Waters. He...
Helping Year 9s explore multiple narratives through the history of a house
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Teaching History 132: Historians in the Classroom
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
02 Editorial
03 Obituary: Martin Hunt 1936-2007
04 HA Secondary News
05 Cultivating curiosity about complexity: what happens when Year 12 start to read Orlando Figes’ The Whisperers? – Laura Bellinger (Read article)
16 ‘Billy plays the drums but Lizzie cannot play.’ Will music-making help them both anyway? Year...
Teaching History 132: Historians in the Classroom
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Move Me On 182: thinks that substantive knowledge is all that matters
Teaching History feature
Lina Power has interpreted an emphasis on knowledge organisers and factual knowledge tests to mean that substantive knowledge is all that matters.
Move Me On is designed to build critical, informed debate about the character of teacher training, teacher education and professional development. It is also designed to offer practical...
Move Me On 182: thinks that substantive knowledge is all that matters
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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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Putting black into the Union Jack: weaving Black history into the Year 7 to 9 curriculum
Teaching History article
Making a passionate case for teaching Black British history in the secondary school curriculum, Hannah shares here the personal journey she has travelled in planning for Black British history in her curriculum. She cites her inspirations and offers striking examples to illustrate her rationale and approach to teaching this history....
Putting black into the Union Jack: weaving Black history into the Year 7 to 9 curriculum
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Teaching History 103: Puzzling History
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
This edition looks at two types of puzzles: first, those we tackle as historians, puzzles about the past and, second, those puzzles that occured for people living in the past, puzzles form their perspectives - dilemmas, decisions and judgements that require us to imagine ourselves into their situation in a...
Teaching History 103: Puzzling History
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Teaching History 70
The HA's journal for history teachers
9 Change and Continuity: Some Reflections on the First Year's Implementation of Key Stage 3 History in the National Curriculum - Robert Phillips
13 Implementing the National Curriculum, Term 1 - Ruth Watts
17 History Tasks at Key Stage 3: A Survey from Five Schools - Peter D. John
20...
Teaching History 70
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Maps, ICT and History: A revolution in learning
Article
Lez Smart outlines exciting new developments in digitalisation of maps which could transform pupils' work on continuity and change, on diversity of society, on local history and much more. Above all, he shows how easy to use (and how cheap!) this new resource will be. Lez Smart explains the opportunities...
Maps, ICT and History: A revolution in learning
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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 164: The End of the Cold War
Teaching History feature
A quarter-century on from 1989-91, with a large amount of archive and media material available, these epic years are ripe for historical analysis. Yet their proximity to our time also throws up challenging questions about the practice of ‘contemporary history’, and the complexity of events raises larger issues about how...
Polychronicon 164: The End of the Cold War
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Helping Year 8 to understand historians’ narrative decision-making
Teaching History article
While previous work on historical interpretations has focused students’ attention on the particular questions that historians have been asking or the context in which they have been posing those questions, less attention has been paid to the process of historical narration itself – the decisions that are made in telling...
Helping Year 8 to understand historians’ narrative decision-making
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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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Designing an enquiry in a challenging setting
Teaching History article
The Association for Historical Dialogue and Research (AHDR) is a Cyprus-based organization that works to foster dialogue among history teachers and other educators across the divide in Cyprus. In one of their UN-funded projects, ADHR members worked with UK colleagues to shape a lesson sequence and resources on the Ottoman period...
Designing an enquiry in a challenging setting
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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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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... the consequences of the industrial revolution
Teaching History feature
The British industrial revolution stands out as a pivotal moment in human history. Its timing, causes and consequences have all been major topics of historical enquiry for well over one hundred years. Many of the great Victorian commentators – Engels, Dickens, Blake to name a few – who lived through...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... the consequences of the industrial revolution
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Riots, railways and a Hampshire hill fort: Exploiting local history for rigorous evidential enquiry
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Rigorous historical enquiry is integral to effective history teaching. The 2008 National Curriculum has recognised its importance by giving it a broader definition as a key process to include not only the use of historical...
Riots, railways and a Hampshire hill fort: Exploiting local history for rigorous evidential enquiry
