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Mughal moments made memorable by Movie Maker
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Rosalind Stirzaker has introduced some fascinating topics at Key Stage 3. Her pupils, living in Dubai, have the opportunity to study the Islamic Empire, the Mughal Empire and Mespotamia as well as many of the...
Mughal moments made memorable by Movie Maker
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Triumphs Show 130: Righting the Revolution
Teaching History feature
It was period 5 on a wet Wednesday afternoon deep into the winter term. Year 9 were even more difficult than usual. Being cooped up inside at lunch, without supervision, had not helped the situation. What was I going to do with this untamed bunch? Put on a trusted video?...
Triumphs Show 130: Righting the Revolution
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Waking up to complexity
Teaching History article
Waking up to complexity: using Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers to challenge over-determined causal explanations
Teaching student to construct causal argument is a staple of history teaching and, in this year, questions about the causes of the First World War are particularly pertinent and once again the public eye. Claire Holliss,...
Waking up to complexity
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Triumphs Show 137: Assessing through reflection
Teaching History feature
Assessing through reflection:
How one history department has found a way to satisfy the Senior Leadership Team, parents and pupils through tightly focused self-assessment Teachers are caught between a rock and hard place when it comes to assessment. Senior leaders want to see evidence of regular ‘levelling' while (most) pupils...
Triumphs Show 137: Assessing through reflection
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Reading? What reading?
Journal article
Discussions with sixth-form students about reading led Carolyn Massey and Paul Wiggin to start a sixth-formreading group. They describe here the series of themed sessions that they planned, and the student discussion and reflections that resulted. Listening to their students discuss their reading led Massey and Wiggin to reflect on what is meant by ‘reading around’ the subject, and its role in students’ intellectual...
Reading? What reading?
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'I've been in the Reichstag': Rethinking roleplay
Teaching History article
Ian Luff constructs a rationale for the use of drama, practical demonstration and roleplay in pupils' learning. He follows this with a wealth of practical examples and detailed advice based on his own professional experience and his experience in running training sessions for other teachers. His analysis of the value...
'I've been in the Reichstag': Rethinking roleplay
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Subject exemplification of the Initial Teacher Training National Curriculum for ICT: how the history examples were developed
Article
David Linsell describes how the Teacher Training Agency's history working group provided history-specific examples for the new ICT initial teacher training National Curriculum. He stresses the group's ‘history first' thinking. The aim was to provide realistic examples of ICT use, through which trainee teachers might develop and ultimately demonstrate their...
Subject exemplification of the Initial Teacher Training National Curriculum for ICT: how the history examples were developed
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Learning without limits
Teaching History article
Richard Kerridge writes here about his efforts to help students to overcome an experience that was once his own: of being labelled low-ability, with all the attendant lowering of expectations that this entails. He recognises the merits of rigorously ensuring that all students should be able to access their entitlement...
Learning without limits
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Looking through the keyhole at Birkenhead from 1900 to 1950 with Year 7
Journal article
Matt Jones wanted to harness the power of local history to help his students understand the profound social changes experienced across Britain in the first half of the twentieth century.
While he hoped that the personal stories of six families in Birkenhead would help to humanise abstract concepts such as...
Looking through the keyhole at Birkenhead from 1900 to 1950 with Year 7
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Practical classroom approaches to the iconography of Irish history or: how far back do we really have to go?
Teaching History article
Ben Walsh presents a structured practical activity for teaching pupils about Northern Ireland through the use of murals. The activity can be carried out in Year 9 as part of a study on the twentieth-century world, or as part of a GCSE course. He stresses the importance of an informed...
Practical classroom approaches to the iconography of Irish history or: how far back do we really have to go?
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Move Me On 166: getting the right pitch for GCSE teaching
Teaching History feature
This feature is designed to build critical, informed debate about the character of teacher training, teacher education and professional development.
This issue’s problem: Bob Williams is struggling to get the pitch right in teaching topics at GCSE that the school previously taught to Year 7.
Bob Williams, now half way through his training year, is feeling very out...
Move Me On 166: getting the right pitch for GCSE teaching
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Exploring big overviews through local depth
Teaching History article
Exploring big overviews through local depth
Rachel Foster and Kath Goudie's search for a more rigorous and interesting way of teaching Year 7 the Norman Conquest was initially driven by a desire to incorporate local history in a more meaningful way in their Key Stage 3 schemes of work.
This...
Exploring big overviews through local depth
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Teaching History 32
Journal
Editorial, page 2
The Role of History in Multi-Cultural Education - David Edgington, page 3
The Perception of Indian History Teachers about the Ideal Pupil - Vijay K. Raina, page 6
Can History Survive? - Trevor Fisher, page 8
Report: Teaching A Level History: A Conference Report - Sandra Armstrong,...
Teaching History 32
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Cunning Plan 183: Teaching a broader Britain, 1625–1714
Teaching History feature
‘Gruesome!’ was how we decided to describe our teaching of seventeenth-century British history, although ‘inadequate’ was probably more accurate. Oh, how much was wrong! We had…
Incoherence. The Civil War and Protectorate years plonked in between the Elizabethan Age and the origins of the industrial revolution. We had lost years!
A...
Cunning Plan 183: Teaching a broader Britain, 1625–1714
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Polychronicon 169: Herodotus
Journal article
You can buy a cheap flight to Bodrum (south-west Turkey), now a popular package holiday tourist destination and in antiquity named Halicarnassus, and visit ancient Greek temples and a theatre dating back more than 2,000 years. In Bodrum’s incomparable Underwater Archaeology Museum, you can admire the extraordinary Phoenician, Carian, Cypriot,...
Polychronicon 169: Herodotus
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Teaching History 34
Journal
Teaching History, October 1982 Number 34
In this issue:
Editorial, page 2
Museums and the Use of Evidence in History Teaching - Carol Adams and Sue Millar, page 3
A Course of Local History for 12-13 year olds and their Reactions to it - John Mathews, page 7
Developments in...
Teaching History 34
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'Assessing Pupil Progress'
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
England's Qualification and Curriculum Development Authority (QCDA) has been working on a new way of trying to support teachers in handling interim assessment during Key Stage 3. It is called Assessing Pupil Progress (APP).
Jerome...
'Assessing Pupil Progress'
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Transforming Year 11's conceptual understanding of change
Teaching History article
For all that history teachers appreciate the need to build substantive knowledge and conceptual understanding systematically over time, they are also likely to have experienced that sickening moment when they realise that a Year 11 pupil has somehow missed something fundamental.
In Anna Fielding's case, her pupil's misconception was related to...
Transforming Year 11's conceptual understanding of change
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Mummy Mummy 181
Teaching History feature
Mummy, mummy, when can we go and visit the Brutish Museum?
Not now, dear. Mummy’s trying to draft a letter to the head, explaining why the fact that the department has successfully taught a thematic unit on the history of medicine for more than 40 years, is not necessarily a good reason for insisting...
Mummy Mummy 181
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Questions and answers about questions and answers
Teaching History article
Intrigued by the wide range of pupils’ responses to a sourcebased essay question, Jonathan Sellin decided to investigate why pupils were using sources in such different ways. Probing his own philosophical assumptions about history, and how they have changed over time, prompted Sellin to explore pupils’ assumptions about how historians use sources to make claims about the past. By asking pupils to...
Questions and answers about questions and answers
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Note-making, knowledge-building and critical thinking are the same thing
Teaching History article
Heidi Le Cocq sets out the classic problem of the history teacher: how does she cover the content and ensure that pupils reflect and analyse at the same time? She relates this to a another problem: how do you prepare pupils well for coursework (ensuring, for example, that they adopt...
Note-making, knowledge-building and critical thinking are the same thing
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What is good citizenship education in history classrooms?
Teaching History article
Ian Davies, Geoff Hatch, Gary Martin and Tony Thorpe seek to theorise - and to support teachers in their own theorising - concerning the purpose of citizenship education and criteria for good citizenship education. They aim for a professional precision that will be helpful to teachers, getting us beyond the...
What is good citizenship education in history classrooms?
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New, Novice or Nervous? 161: Teaching substantive concepts
Teaching History feature
It’s worrying when pupils reach Year 9 or 10 unable to properly interpret or find fluency in major abstract nouns that crop up again and again in history. They should have bumped into ‘empire’, ‘republic’, ‘federation’, ‘peasantry’, ‘commons’ and ‘communism’, many times by Year 10, so why are many students...
New, Novice or Nervous? 161: Teaching substantive concepts
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Assessing the Battle of Waterloo in the classroom
Teaching History article
Defying the Iron Duke: assessing the Battle of Waterloo in the classroom
The approaching bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo has stimulated debate about how it should be commemorated. This article reports a collaboration between the Waterloo200 Committee and Tom Wheeley, history teacher, to create a lesson sequence analysing the...
Assessing the Battle of Waterloo in the classroom
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Teaching students to argue for themselves - KS3
Teaching History article
Keeley Richards secured a fundamental shift in some of her Year 13 students' ability to argue. She did it by getting them to engage more fully with the practice of argument itself, as enacted by four historians. At the centre of her lesson sequence was an original activity: the historians'...
Teaching students to argue for themselves - KS3