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What do you think? Using online forums to improve students' historical knowledge and understanding
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
In Teaching History 126, the Open University's Arguing in History project team demonstrated the power that discussion fora can have to develop pupil thinking. In this article, Dave Martin revisits this theme through a discussion...
What do you think? Using online forums to improve students' historical knowledge and understanding
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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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Analysing Anne Frank: a case study in the teaching of thinking skills
Teaching History article
For those lucky history departments in and around Newcastle this article will not be news. Peter Fisher alludes to the quasi-religious atmosphere that is often discernible amongst history teachers who have been working with the Thinking Skills groups linked to University of Newcastle Department of Education. He is not exaggerating...
Analysing Anne Frank: a case study in the teaching of thinking skills
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Talk to your inspector: making the most of your history inspection
Teaching History article
Scott Harrison gives the official view on what history teachers can expect from an OFSTED inspection. He emphasises the need to communicate, as fully as possible, the department's rationale underlying all professional practice. This is essential if the inspector is to analyse the reasons why standards are as they are....
Talk to your inspector: making the most of your history inspection
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Ants and the Tet Offensive: teaching Year 11 to tell the difference
Article
The history department at Morpeth School in East London has improved performance at GCSE. The department has also done something unusual: it has abandoned coursework. This might seem a surprising decision but the rationale is interesting and clear. Arguably, the fundamental examination skills are identical to those needed for coursework...
Ants and the Tet Offensive: teaching Year 11 to tell the difference
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Move Me On 137: Regards PGCE assignments as unhelpful distractions
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem: Ellen Wilkinson regards her PGCE assignments as an unhelpful distraction from the real business of learning to teach.
Ellen has just had her first PGCE assignment returned to her by her tutor and is furious about the comments she has received and the indicative Masters level mark it...
Move Me On 137: Regards PGCE assignments as unhelpful distractions
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Using 1980s popular music to explore historical significance
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Scott Allsop helped his students to uncover the implicit criteria informing someone else's attribution of historical significance to past events. That ‘someone else' was Billy Joel whose 1989 song became the focus for deconstructive analysis....
Using 1980s popular music to explore historical significance
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Is any explanation better than none?
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
What do we know about progression in historical understanding? In Teaching History 113, Lee and Shemilt discussed what progression models can and cannot do to help us think about measuring and developing pupils' understanding and...
Is any explanation better than none?
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A modest proposal for change in Canadian history education
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Peter Seixas recounts the development of a history education reform project in Canada. Like all good histories, it is a complex story and a matter of unanticipated consequences and ironic narrative twists.
Seixas' history is,...
A modest proposal for change in Canadian history education
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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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What is progress in history?
Teaching History article
Evelyn Vermeulen argues that in order for teachers to identify outcomes for the learning of history, they must think clearly about the different attributes of the discipline - its ideas, structures and processes - and the relationship between them. Here, she takes us on her own professional thinking journey. She...
What is progress in history?
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Nutshell 135: The challenge of analysing 'difference'
Teaching History feature
Hello Nutshell. What's all this stuff in the NC Attainment Target about ‘nature', ‘extent' and ‘interplay' of diversity?
The trick is to look behind the word ‘diversity'. Then it all makes sense...
Nutshell 135: The challenge of analysing 'difference'
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Super history teaching on the Superhighway: the Internet for beginners
Article
Isobel Jenkins and Mike Turpin answer some of those basic questions which many history teachers are afraid to ask, like ‘What exactly is it anyway?' and ‘Is this really worth my valuable time?' They outline the internet's value as a means of improving information access and as a way of...
Super history teaching on the Superhighway: the Internet for beginners
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Learning to read, reading to learn: strategies to move students from 'keen to learn' to 'keen to read'
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Conventionally, students learn to read before they come to secondary school. As a result, for the majority of our students, reading can be taken for granted. Yet sometimes, as history teachers, we can find that...
Learning to read, reading to learn: strategies to move students from 'keen to learn' to 'keen to read'
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Move Me On 136: Struggling to teach elite politics/international relations
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem: Ernest Briggs, who wants pupils to engage with the real lives of ordinary people in the past, is struggling to learn to teach courses that he thinks are too narrowly focused on elite politics and international relations.
Ernest, initially one of the most animated and enthusiastic trainees on...
Move Me On 136: Struggling to teach elite politics/international relations
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Polychronicon 136: Interpreting the Beatles
Teaching History feature
‘The Beatles were history-makers from the start,' proclaimed the liner notes for the band's first LP in March 1963. It was a bold claim to make on behalf of a beat combo with one charttopping single, but the Beatles' subsequent impact on 1960s culture put their historical importance (if not...
Polychronicon 136: Interpreting the Beatles
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Gladstone spiritual or Gladstone material? A rationale for using documents at AS and A2
Teaching History article
Rather than taking a sledgehammer approach to planning for the new AS and A2 courses Gary Howells has used the opportunity to reflect on characteristics of students' historical learning in the post-16 phase. He argues for a much fuller rationale for using documents than mere preparation for exams or coursework....
Gladstone spiritual or Gladstone material? A rationale for using documents at AS and A2
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Seeing a different picture: exploring migration through the lens of history
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Rosie Sheldrake and Dale Banham here share the results of their desire to use the curriculum changes which are upon us to do something which they had intended for some time. Their modern world study...
Seeing a different picture: exploring migration through the lens of history
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An introduction to Teaching History
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Teaching History – the HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Teaching History is the UK’s leading professional journal for history teachers at secondary level. Published quarterly with a distribution of over 3,000, Teaching History also boasts a growing international readership. These include teachers, heads of department, trainees, and libraries.
Teaching History is free...
An introduction to Teaching History
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Was the workhouse really so bad? An encounter with a cantekerous tramp
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Have you stuggled to find an invigorating, exciting local enquiry to motivate your Year 9 class ? How do you engage students in lively debate? This was the challenge for one Norfolk school who wanted...
Was the workhouse really so bad? An encounter with a cantekerous tramp
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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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Factors influencing pupil take-up of history post Key Stage 3: an exploratory enquiry
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Last year, in Teaching History 132, Richard Harris and Terry Haydn shared their findings from a research project exploring children's views of school history. Here they report on further research, seeking to explain the wide...
Factors influencing pupil take-up of history post Key Stage 3: an exploratory enquiry
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Move Me On 131: Mentor struggling to help trainee learn to plan independently
Teaching History feature
Richard Baxter's mentor is struggling to know how to help him plan independently.
Richard Baxter is a relatively young trainee with a background in ancient history. He came to the PGCE course straight after completing his undergraduate degree, and is aware of his relative youth as well as what he...
Move Me On 131: Mentor struggling to help trainee learn to plan independently
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Polychronicon 135: Post-modern Holocaust Historiography
Teaching History feature
The field of Holocaust studies has been hit by an intellectual earthquake whose precise magnitude and long-term consequences cannot be ascertained at this stage. In 2007 Saul Friedländer published The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939-1945. The book has been rightly celebrated as the first victim-centred synthetic history...
Polychronicon 135: Post-modern Holocaust Historiography
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Triumphs Show 135: how trainee teachers learned to put history back into GCSE
Teaching History feature
What do you know about how your local museums can help your GCSE planning and teaching? How can your new GCSE courses for September make use of the free resources, artefacts and images that our local and national museums house? That's just what the PGCE history group from Leeds Trinity...
Triumphs Show 135: how trainee teachers learned to put history back into GCSE
