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An attempt to make Year 9 Masters of Learning
Teaching History article
‘Much to learn you still have!' An attempt to make Year 9 Masters of Learning
How can history teachers structure learning pathways through historical content in ways that engage and challenge all pupils, that enable them to work at an appropriate pace and that also encourage pupils to self-assess and...
An attempt to make Year 9 Masters of Learning
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Improving Year 12's extended writing
Teaching History article
From Muddleton Manor to Clarity Cathedral: improving Year 12's extended writing through an enhanced sense of the reader
Mary Brown recognised that her A-level students were finding extended writing difficult, particularly in terms of guiding the reader through the argument with appropriate ‘signposting'. To help her students manage this, Brown...
Improving Year 12's extended writing
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Move Me On 149: how to provide appropriate support for particular students
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem: Helen Troy is uncertain how to provide appropriate support for certain students without restricting what they can achieve.
Helen showed considerable determination in securing her teacher training place. Her own education had been within a highly selective school system and her first application was unsuccessful because of...
Move Me On 149: how to provide appropriate support for particular students
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New, Novice or Nervous? 149: Getting pupils to argue about causes
Teaching History feature
Every problem you're wrestling with in the history classroom, other history teachers have wrestled with too. This page is for all those new to the published writings of history teachers in Teaching History. It shows how to make a start in understanding how others have explored and discussed common and...
New, Novice or Nervous? 149: Getting pupils to argue about causes
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Competition and counterfactuals without confusion
Teaching History article
Paula Worth was searching not only for a rigorous question, capable of engendering genuine debate, but also for an engaging and enjoyable activity that would secure GCSE students' substantive knowledge. The answer - or rather the question - lay in counterfactual thinking: a carefully crafted game that she devised, based...
Competition and counterfactuals without confusion
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Move Me On 100: Deciding on lesson objectives
Teaching History feature
This Issue's Problem: Hugh Horsea, PGCE student, is having difficulty deciding on his lesson objectives
Problem:
Hugh is a few weeks into his first placement. He is enthusiastic and hard working and was successful in the first teaching tasks that he undertook. However, now that he has moved beyond directed...
Move Me On 100: Deciding on lesson objectives
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Cunning Plan 139: Victorian debates about progress
Teaching History feature
How can we interest students in the world of ideas? How can we help them to see how important ideas were in shaping and reflecting the world of the Victorians? Working with the overarching enquiry question, ‘Why did some Victorians believe in progress in the nineteenth century and others did not?’ I devised...
Cunning Plan 139: Victorian debates about progress
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Polychronicon 118: interpretations of Henry VII
Teaching History feature
Polychronicon was a fourteenth-century chronicle that brought together much of the knowledge of its own age. Our Polychronicon in Teaching History is a regular feature helping school history teachers to update their subject knowledge, with special emphasis on recent historiography and changing interpretation. This edition of 'Polychronicon' explores the historical...
Polychronicon 118: interpretations of Henry VII
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Move Me On 147: Making Analogies Meaningful
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem: Emma Norman finds the analogies that she's using to make historical ideas meaningful end up distracting or confusing the students.
Emma has come into history teaching after a number of years at home looking after children. Her previous work was as a fundraiser for an environmental campaign group,...
Move Me On 147: Making Analogies Meaningful
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Polychronicon 117: interpretations of Douglas Haig
Teaching History feature
Polychronicon was a fourteenth-century chronicle that brought together much of the knowledge of its own age. Our Polychronicon in Teaching History is a regular feature helping school history teachers to update their subject knowledge, with special emphasis on recent historiography and changing interpretation. This edition of 'Polychronicon' considers the historical...
Polychronicon 117: interpretations of Douglas Haig
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Move Me On 146: Knowing enough to be able to start planning
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem: Jim Boswell is constantly anxious about whether he knows enough to be able to start planning.
Jim Boswell is an articulate, enthusiastic student teacher, with previous voluntary work experience teaching English to young asylum-seekers and refugees. Other previous roles in sports coaching and refereeing have clearly paid dividends...
Move Me On 146: Knowing enough to be able to start planning
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Giving students proper recognition for historical oracy
Teaching History article
It was concern about Year 13 students’ reluctance to articulate their thinking that prompted Toby Dove to review his approach to the promotion of oracy within history. Having recognised the importance of young people being able to express and defend their claims in valid ways, as well as the ways...
Giving students proper recognition for historical oracy
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... global history?
Teaching History feature
In 1990, the inaugural edition of the Journal of World History was published. The articles within included William H. McNeill’s reflection on his 1963 magnum opus The Rise of the West: a history of the human community. Both a self-critique and a call to action, in this article McNeill acknowledged...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... global history?
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... transnational history
Teaching History feature
Until the beginning of the twenty-first century, historians’ aversion to sweeping generalisations meant that they typically conducted their research within the boundaries of the nation state. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of globalisation and the birth of the internet, new political, intellectual, and practical developments began...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... transnational history
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A knowledge-rich approach to introducing China’s history to Year 9
Teaching History article
Freya George was wondering how best to integrate more Asian histories into her school’s curriculum when a conversation among history teachers on social media led her to Jung Chang’s Wild Swans: three daughters of China. George then planned two enquiries, one introducing twentieth-century China, and one focusing entirely on Chang’s work. George styles...
A knowledge-rich approach to introducing China’s history to Year 9
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Move Me On 145: Uncomfortable with Storytelling
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem: Claudia Jones is very uncomfortable with any kind of sustained story-telling.
Claudia Jones is a quietly spoken and rather nervous trainee. She struggled from the beginning of the PGCE to establish a strong presence in the classroom, and although she has become more assertive about insisting on basic...
Move Me On 145: Uncomfortable with Storytelling
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Establishing a dialogue with Year 9 about why environmental history matters
Teaching History article
The enquiry sequence on which Alex Benger reports in this article was inspired by two specific concerns: a sense that history education must have more to contribute to young people’s understanding of and ability to confront the climate crisis; and a desire to help pupils to engage more broadly with...
Establishing a dialogue with Year 9 about why environmental history matters
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No more mark schemes: manageable and meaningful assessment for Years 7–9
Teaching History article
In seeking to answer the question of how to make valid, reliable, and meaningful judgements about students’ work in history, Elizabeth Carr’s department abandoned criteria-based mark schemes and replaced them with a form of comparative judgement conducted in relation to a series of exemplars. In this article, Carr explains the...
No more mark schemes: manageable and meaningful assessment for Years 7–9
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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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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... Modern British LGBTQ+ history
Teaching History feature
While academic historians began to make important contributions to our understanding of British LGBTQ+ history in the 1970s (and, indeed, this built on historical scholarship from as early as the 1880s), the field of British queer history became properly established within university history departments and mainstream academic scholarship from the...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... Modern British LGBTQ+ history
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Teaching Years 8 and 9 to write analytically about similarity and difference
Teaching History article
Reflecting on the quality of her pupils’ analyses of past diversity and complexity, Molly-Ann Navey was struck by the contrast with their writing geared to other types of disciplinary problem. Navey therefore set out to develop entirely new sequences of lessons which would teach pupils to shape arguments about similarity...
Teaching Years 8 and 9 to write analytically about similarity and difference
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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 114: interpretations of Oliver Cromwell
Teaching History feature
Polychronicon was a fourteenth-century chronicle that brought together much of the knowledge of its own age. Our Polychronicon in Teaching History is a regular feature helping school history teachers to update their subject knowledge, with special emphasis on recent historiography and changing interpretation. This edition of 'Polychronicon' investigates the differing...
Polychronicon 114: interpretations of Oliver Cromwell
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About… climate history
Teaching History feature
Although some historians object to ‘presentism’ – studies of the past that are explicitly driven by present-day concerns – climate history as a field would probably not exist otherwise. Expensive technology is required to gather the raw data for research into past climates. Interdisciplinary collaboration is needed to develop robust...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About… climate history
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Move Me On 143: Trying to tackle everything at once
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem: Emily Hobhouse seems to feel obliged to implement all the new ideas she is learning about at once.
Emily Hobhouse has made an impressive start to her PGCE course. She switched to teaching after several years' work in legal practice which meant that she was already used to...
Move Me On 143: Trying to tackle everything at once
