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The particular and the general
Teaching History article
When your pupils use terms such as ‘king’ and ‘Parliament,’ what image do they have in their head? Do they know what they are talking about at all? Do they have a nuanced, period-specific vision of what these terms mean in the context of their current historical studies, and of...
The particular and the general
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Teaching History 147: Curriculum Architecture
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
02 Editorial
03 HA Secondary News
04 HA Update
08 Beth Baker and Steven Mastin - Did Alexander really ask, ‘Do I appear to you to be a bastard?' Using ancient texts to improve pupils' critical thinking (Read article)
14 Cunning Plan: Getting students to use classical texts - Beth Baker...
Teaching History 147: Curriculum Architecture
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Cunning Plan... for studying medieval Ghana and Aksum
Teaching History feature
This Cunning Plan details an enquiry that I developed in order to achieve two curricular goals: to diversify our historical content and to help students to improve their disciplinary thinking and writing about similarity and difference. The enquiry addresses medieval Africa, specifically the East African kingdom of Aksum (approximately 300...
Cunning Plan... for studying medieval Ghana and Aksum
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Using Google Docs to develop Year 9 pupils’ essay-writing skills
Teaching History article
Lucy Moonen set out to explore whether collaborative writing in small groups, facilitated by the use of Google Docs, would help to sustain students’ focus on essay writing as the development of an historical argument.
She explains how she set up an essay on the League of Nationals as a...
Using Google Docs to develop Year 9 pupils’ essay-writing skills
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Teaching History 146: Teacher Knowledge
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
02 Editorial
03 HA Secondary News
04 Letters
05 HA update
09 Elizabeth Carr: How Victorian were the Victorians? Developing Year 8 students' conceptual thinking about diversity in Victorian society (Read article)
18 Robin Whitburn, Michelle Hussain and Abdullahi Mohamud ‘Doing justice to history': the learning of African history in...
Teaching History 146: Teacher Knowledge
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Polychronicon 147: Witchcraft, history and children
Teaching History feature
Witchcraft is serious history. 1612 marks the 400th anniversary of England's biggest peacetime witch trial, that of the Lancashire witches: 20 witches from the Forest of Pendle were imprisoned, ten were hanged in Lancaster, and another in York. As a result of some imaginative commemorative programmes, a number of schools...
Polychronicon 147: Witchcraft, history and children
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Year 7 use musical language to think about King John
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
As an enthusiastic musician, Alison Meikle is always looking for ways to use music in the history classroom. While Teaching History has seen plenty of articles on using musical sources as evidence (e.g. Mastin in Teaching...
Year 7 use musical language to think about King John
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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
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Look again: teaching about disability in history
Teaching History article
After listening to a talk by historian Phillipa Vincent-Connolly and following this up with reading about disability in history, Alex Fairlamb examined her own department’s teaching to consider how effectively it included narratives of disabled people. This was the beginning of a productive journey. She concluded that much more needed to be...
Look again: teaching about disability in history
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Continuity in the treatment of mental health through time
Teaching History article
Where's the other ‘c'? Year 9 examine continuity in the treatment of mental health through time
Helen Murray, Rachel Burney and Andrew Stacey-Chapman show how they strengthened three goals of their practice - secure knowledge, narrative shapes and conceptual analysis - by securing strong connection between them. The curricular focus...
Continuity in the treatment of mental health through time
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Rethinking citizenship through the history classroom, a global perspective
Teaching History article
Teaching history and politics in an international school in Beijing, Andrew Carey found himself in a position to reflect on the teaching of citizenship in schools, particularly the concepts involved in global citizenship. He describes how global citizenship is integrated into schemes of work for a concept-based humanities course in...
Rethinking citizenship through the history classroom, a global perspective
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'Didn't we do that in Year 7?' Planning for progress in evidential understanding
Teaching History article
Christine Counsell describes a lively activity, ideal for Year 9, in which pupils compare and interrelate a collection of sources. The activity leads pupils into thinking about the sources as a collection, and about the enquiry as an evidential problem. Or at least it can do. The article discusses the...
'Didn't we do that in Year 7?' Planning for progress in evidential understanding
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Making history meaningful: helping students see why history matters
Teaching History article
October 17 saw thousands of people writing a blog of a normal Tuesday as part of the ‘History Matters’ campaign. There was great media interest in the event and the papers were full of the blogs of the famous and not so famous; people were keen to write up their...
Making history meaningful: helping students see why history matters
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Reading and enquiring in Years 12 and 13
Teaching History article
Historical enquiry is blooming at Key Stage 3. Thanks to a rich array of source materials available on the web and in textbooks, superb history-specific training courses and genuinely innovative practice in schools, pupils can increasingly be found wrestling with demanding and often lengthy sources. They do this in order...
Reading and enquiring in Years 12 and 13
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Mushrooms and snake-oil: using film as AS/A level
Teaching History article
In this article, Seán Lang examines the power of film to shape AS/A students’ perception and even understanding of the past. He argues that teachers of Years 12 and 13 underestimate at their peril the impact film can have on how students shape their perception of history. Although, as he...
Mushrooms and snake-oil: using film as AS/A level
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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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Assessment of students' uses of evidence
Teaching History article
Drawing on her research into students' evidential reasoning, Elisabeth Pickles explores the possibilities for how such reasoning might be assessed. Existing exam mark schemes focus too heavily on generic processes involved in the analysis of source material and insufficiently on the historical validity of reasoning and conclusions produced. Approaching the...
Assessment of students' uses of evidence
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Move Me On 199: handling differences between history lead's advice and history teachers' approaches
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 199: handling differences between history lead's advice and history teachers' approaches
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Asses, archers and assumptions: strategies for improving thinking skills in history in Years 9 to 13
Teaching History article
Thinking skills’ is a term that has been substantially over-used. It often seems to be rather a lazy shorthand for justifying the teaching of history by suddenly bolting on some ‘thinking’ - as if history is not all about thought in the first place. Arthur Chapman suggests using techniques from...
Asses, archers and assumptions: strategies for improving thinking skills in history in Years 9 to 13
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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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Absence and myopia in A-level coursework
Teaching History article
It is a charge commonly laid at history teachers that we, myopically, teach only the same-old same-old. Steven Driver has taken extreme steps to avoid this by focusing on a particular neglected event – the American occupation of Nicaragua in the early twentieth century – as part of his preparation...
Absence and myopia in A-level coursework
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A team-taught conspiracy: Year 8 are caught up in a genuine historical debate
Teaching History article
Are top sets always our top priority? Of course, we know that every child matters (should that now have capital letters?) but those of us who teach in an ability-setted context also know that a bottom set left unable to access the curriculum is likely to pose bigger problems than...
A team-taught conspiracy: Year 8 are caught up in a genuine historical debate
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Period, place and mental space
Teaching History article
Period, place and mental space: using historical scholarship to develop Year 7 pupils' sense of period
What is a sense of period? And how can pupils' sense of period be developed? Questions such as these have troubled history teachers for many years, often revolving around debates over the role played by...
Period, place and mental space
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Triumphs Show 102: communicating historical difference to children with literacy problems
Teaching History feature
With the summer break stretching forth its welcome hand and the final lesson with my lowband Year 7 class looming, I wanted to ensure that the enthusiasm and dedication that this class had shown throughout the year was kept alive over the holiday period. We had been studying the Norman...
Triumphs Show 102: communicating historical difference to children with literacy problems
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Learning history outside the classroom in an age of climate crisis
Teaching History article
Helen Snelson has long been an enthusiastic advocate for learning history outside the classroom. In recent years, as the extent of the climate crisis has become ever more apparent, she has been rethinking her approach to teaching within and about the historic environment. In this article, written in consultation with Adrian Gonzalez, she focuses...
Learning history outside the classroom in an age of climate crisis
