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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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International relations at GCSE... they just can't get enough of it
Teaching History article
There is no reason why pupils of so-called ‘average’ and ‘below-average ability’ cannot both understand and enjoy studying complicated international events. Indeed, in the interests of inclusion and raised standards, it is vital that they do. Our Letters Pages in the last two editions captured something of the history teaching...
International relations at GCSE... they just can't get enough of it
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Move Me On 140: Getting students to generate their own enquiry questions
Teaching History feature
This Issue's Problem: Rafe Sadler has just started his second teaching placement and is worried about the very different ways of working and expectations of teachers in his new department.
In his first school, where history was taught within a humanities programme, the Key Stage 3 scheme of work had...
Move Me On 140: Getting students to generate their own enquiry questions
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Polychronicon 154: Elizabeth I
Teaching History feature
Elizabeth I is admired today for her power dressing and her power portraits; her political acumen and her success in a man's world.
The adulation of Elizabeth started during her own lifetime when she was praised as a goddess and even as a celestial power. Elizabeth's semi-mythical status is reflected...
Polychronicon 154: Elizabeth I
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Making sense of the eighteenth century
Teaching History article
Making sense of the eighteenth century
Pressures on curriculum time force us all to make difficult choices about curriculum content, but the eighteenth century seems to have suffered particular neglect. Inspired by the tercentenary of the accession of the first Georgian king and the interest in the Acts of Union prompted...
Making sense of the eighteenth century
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Polychronicon 143: the Balfour Declaration
Teaching History feature
In a letter from the British Foreign Secretary, A.J. Balfour, to Lord Rothschild, the Anglo-Jewish leader, on 2 November 1917, the British Government declared its intention to ‘facilitate' the ‘establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people'. The Balfour Declaration, as it became known, was endorsed by...
Polychronicon 143: the Balfour Declaration
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Move Me On 138: Uncertain about his Year 7 teaching in a competency based curriculum
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem: Amir Timur is very uncertain about his Year 7 teaching within a competency-based curriculum.
Amir has just returned from the induction day at his second placement school and is very worried about the Year 7 curriculum he has to teach. The history, geography and RE departments are working...
Move Me On 138: Uncertain about his Year 7 teaching in a competency based curriculum
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An authentic voice: perspectives on the value of listening to survivors of genocide
Teaching History article
It is common practice to invite survivors of the Holocaust to speak about their experiences to pupils in schools and colleges. Systematic reflection on the value of working with survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides and on how to make the most of doing so is rarer, however. In...
An authentic voice: perspectives on the value of listening to survivors of genocide
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Triumphs Show 169: Using 360 VR Technology with the GCSE Historic Environment study
Teaching History feature: celebrating and sharing success
One of the biggest changes in the new GCSE specifications is the requirement for all students to undertake a study of the historic environment. Unsurprisingly the approach taken by the exam boards to this requirement varies widely. While some boards allow schools a free choice of site, others have decided...
Triumphs Show 169: Using 360 VR Technology with the GCSE Historic Environment study
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Polychronicon 153: Re-interpreting Liberation: the end of the Holocaust?
Teaching History feature
In August 1945, Zalman Grinberg, a doctor from Kovno and spokesman for the Liberated Jews in the American Zone of Germany, addressed 1,700 Jewish survivors. ‘What is the logic of destiny to let these individuals remain alive?!' he asked them:
We are free now, but we do not know what...
Polychronicon 153: Re-interpreting Liberation: the end of the Holocaust?
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Learning lessons from genocides
Teaching History article
‘Never again'? Helping Year 9 think about what happened after the Holocaust and learning lessons from genocides
‘Never again' is the clarion call of much Holocaust and genocide education. There is a danger, however, that it can become an empty, if pious, wish. How can we help pupils reflect seriously on...
Learning lessons from genocides
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Helping Year 9 evaluate explanations for the Holocaust
Teaching History article
‘It made my brain hurt, but in a good way': helping Year 9 learn to make and to evaluate explanations for the Holocaust
Why genocides occur is a perplexing and complex question. Leanne Judson reports a strategy designed to help students think about perpetration and evaluate and propose explanations for...
Helping Year 9 evaluate explanations for the Holocaust
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Helping Year 9 debate the purposes of genocide education
Teaching History article
Connecting the dots: helping Year 9 to debate the purposes of Holocaust and genocide education
Why do we teach about the Holocaust and about other genocides? The Holocaust has been a compulsory part of the English National Curriculum since 1991; however, curriculum documents say little about why pupils should learn...
Helping Year 9 debate the purposes of genocide education
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Move Me On 152: How to teach meaningful overviews
Teaching History feature
This Issue's Problem: Martin King is worried about how to teach meaningful overviews...
Move Me On 152: How to teach meaningful overviews
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Polychronicon 152: Changing interpretations of the workhouse?
Teaching History feature
The workhouse has long held a negative reputation in the popular imagination as the dreaded destination of the destitute, an institution guaranteed to strike fear into the hearts of the Victorian poor. This is partly owing to its design under the New Poor Law of 1834 as an explicit punishment...
Polychronicon 152: Changing interpretations of the workhouse?
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Cunning Plan 106: Political literacy
Teaching History feature
The onset of citizenship brings with it the need to cover political literacy. The topic can be seen as dry and complex by Year 9 pupils. But ‘democracy is not boring’ (Lang in Teaching History 96). We need to educate our pupils to understand the complexity and features of a...
Cunning Plan 106: Political literacy
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Polychronicon 151: Interpreting the Revolution of 1688
Teaching History feature
John Morrill, one of the foremost historians of the British civil wars, has described the events of 1688-9 as the ‘Sensible Revolution'. The phrase captures the essence of a long-standing scholarly consensus, that this was a very unrevolutionary revolution.
The origins of this interpretation go back to the late eighteenth...
Polychronicon 151: Interpreting the Revolution of 1688
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Developing students' thinking about change and continuity
Teaching History article
The more things change, the more they stay the same: developing students' thinking about change and continuity
Finding ways to characterise the nature of change and continuity is an important part of the historian's task, yet students find it particularly challenging to do. Building on her previous work on change, Rachel...
Developing students' thinking about change and continuity
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MTL in a Nutshell
Teaching History feature
Help nutshell! I hear that all new history teachers being trained now have to have a Masters degree.
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
It's certainly not compulsory, but you're right that a new kind of Masters course - a Masters...
MTL in a Nutshell
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Exploring change and continuity with Year 7
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
A great deal has been written about causation in the pages of Teaching History. From camels to linguistics, this is a second-order concept that teachers and pupils frequently deliberate.
Departments balance the need for substantive knowledge with explicit...
Exploring change and continuity with Year 7
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How did changing conceptions of place lead to conflict in the American West? Reflecting on revision methods for GCSE
Teaching History article
Mary Woolley decided to make four revision sheets for her lower-band Year 11 set. Each was to help them view their American West study through a different lens. She was rather uncertain, however (and so were the pupils) about her fourth sheet on places. Her reflections on the revision sheet...
How did changing conceptions of place lead to conflict in the American West? Reflecting on revision methods for GCSE
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Move Me On 150: Planning
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem: Simon Montfort is given very little freedom to learn how to plan.
Simon considered himself very fortunate when he arrived in his training school. Even on the induction day his mentor had been able to give him copies of the schemes of work for each year group...
Move Me On 150: Planning
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Triumphs Show 150.2: Year 13 game for reaching substantiated judgements
Teaching History feature
Year 13 play a competitive game to help them arrive at strong and substantiated judgements.
Year 13 were in the library again, sinking under tomes of weighty works on the German Reformation. James was feverishly rifling through a book on the ‘Reformation World' for something (anything!) to do with Luther's...
Triumphs Show 150.2: Year 13 game for reaching substantiated judgements
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Enquiries to engage Year 7 in medieval anarchy
Teaching History article
Wrestling with Stephen and Matilda: planning challenging enquiries to engage Year 7 in medieval anarchy
McDougall found learning about Stephen and Matilda fascinating, was sure that her pupils would also and designed an enquiry to engage them in ‘the anarchy' of 1139-1153 AD. Pupils enjoyed exploring ‘the anarchy' and learning...
Enquiries to engage Year 7 in medieval anarchy
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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
