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Picturing place: what you get may be more than what you see
Teaching History article
Pictures abound in history classrooms and teachers use them in many different ways. They add - often literally - some colour to the past, helping us to imagine what different worlds were like. Pictures can be used quite legitimately in this way to fire imagination and stimulate interest. But we...
Picturing place: what you get may be more than what you see
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Tripping over the levels: experiences from Ontario
Teaching History article
Here in the United Kingdom, we are used to the idea of assessing pupils’ work against Levels. In fact, perhaps we are a little too used to it. Our familiarity with the Level Descriptions in the National Curriculum, and the ways they might inform our Key Stage 3 assessments, can...
Tripping over the levels: experiences from Ontario
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Making learning drive assessment: Joan of Arc - saint, witch or warrior?
Teaching History article
Andrew Wrenn describes his work with Barry Williams and the teachers of the history department at Ailwyn School (11-14 comprehensive), Ramsey in Cambridgeshire. Devoting equal attention to the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of history assessment, he shows how this group of teachers developed a fresh approach to assessment out of...
Making learning drive assessment: Joan of Arc - saint, witch or warrior?
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Question: When is a comment not worth the paper it's written on? Answer: When it's accompanied by a Level, grade or mark!
Teaching History article
In this article, Simon Butler advances a strong case for ‘comments only’ marking. Good assessment, he argues, is about encouraging students to reflect on their current performance and take responsibility for their own progress. Assigning Levels to pupils’ work is often justified in terms of the generation of targets which...
Question: When is a comment not worth the paper it's written on? Answer: When it's accompanied by a Level, grade or mark!
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The teaching and learning of history for 15-16 year olds: have the Japanese anything to learn from the English experience
Teaching History article
What would you expect the differences to be between Japan and England in how pupils learn history in the post-14 phase? Perhaps your guess would be: Japanese school students learn a lot of historical facts and focus upon their own identity and English school students talk a lot more in...
The teaching and learning of history for 15-16 year olds: have the Japanese anything to learn from the English experience
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Empathy without illusions
Teaching History article
Empathy may have disappeared from official documents but the history teacher who does not still regularly think about it, plan for it and teach it would be hard to find. What is history if not, in part, an attempt to understand how people thought and felt in the past? This...
Empathy without illusions
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'Please send socks': How much can Reg Wilkes tell us about the Great War?
Teaching History article
This was an opportunity all good historians dream about. A large box crammed with artefacts about a soldier who fought in the First World War, just begging to be read, studied, sorted and organised. Being faced with such a wealth of uncatalogued primary evidence could have proved daunting enough without...
'Please send socks': How much can Reg Wilkes tell us about the Great War?
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Keeping the kids on message...one school's attempt at helping sixth form students to engage in historical debating using ICT
Teaching History article
At post-16 level, keeping the ‘kids’ on message is critical. Teaching and learning must be focused on the relatively narrow goals of the examination syllabus, but set within broader historical and historiographical contexts. Students need to how know, and where, to fit their ideas into those of existing historians. Ideally...
Keeping the kids on message...one school's attempt at helping sixth form students to engage in historical debating using ICT
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Stretching the straight jacket of assessment: use of role play and practical demonstration to enrich pupils' experience of history at GCSE and beyond
Teaching History article
As in his previous, popular and influential Teaching History articles, Ian Luff has once again provided us with a wide range of high-quality, practical activities informed by a rigorous and persuasive rationale. This time, he has turned his attention to the use of role play and active demonstration at GCSE...
Stretching the straight jacket of assessment: use of role play and practical demonstration to enrich pupils' experience of history at GCSE and beyond
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A scaffold, not a cage: progression and progression models in history
Teaching History article
The need to understand ways of defining progression in history becomes ever more pressing in the face of a target-setting, assessment-driven regime which requires us to measure progress at every turn. We must defend our professional expertise in terms of measurable outcomes. Did we add value? Have our end of...
A scaffold, not a cage: progression and progression models in history
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JFK: the medium, the message and the myth
Teaching History article
Dale Banham and Russell Hall present a multi-faceted rationale for an in-depth study of the 1991 film, JFK. They treat it as an ‘interpretation’ in the National Curriculum sense, constructing a varied and meticulous learning journey towards its analysis. By the end of that journey pupils had examined the central...
JFK: the medium, the message and the myth
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'Britain was our home': Helping Years 9, 10, and 11 to understand the black experience of the Second World War
Teaching History article
In this article, Helena Stride shows how the Imperial War Museum responded to criticism that insufficient attention had been paid to the contribution of black and Asian people to Britain’s wars. She focuses on one of two resource-packs produced by the Museum, which highlights the experience of Britain’s colonial peoples,...
'Britain was our home': Helping Years 9, 10, and 11 to understand the black experience of the Second World War
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Confounding expectation at Key Stage 3: flower-songs from an indigenous empire
Teaching History article
In this article Nicolas Kinloch examines aspects of an indigenous empire: that of Aztec Mexico. He attempts to persuade a group of mixed-ability Year 8 students to examine - and question - some of the assumptions they bring to the study of this empire. Their attitudes reflect quite widespread beliefs...
Confounding expectation at Key Stage 3: flower-songs from an indigenous empire
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History's future: facing the challenge
Teaching History article
Trevor Fisher argues that pressures on our subject are now so intense and multi-faceted that a wider coalition is necessary if history is to fight back. Our difficulties are compounded, he suggests, by a lack of consensus and by acute lack of knowledge about school history among those who produce...
History's future: facing the challenge
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Transforming Year 7's understanding of the concept of Imperialism: a case study on the Roman Empire
Teaching History article
Those of us in the U.K. know that many of our pupils finish their entire historical education without a satisfactory grasp of basic substantive concepts as they are used in history. Do all our low-attaining or ‘low ability’ 14-year-olds who are pressured to drop history at 14 really emerge with...
Transforming Year 7's understanding of the concept of Imperialism: a case study on the Roman Empire
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A complex empire: National Archives Learning Curve takes on the British Empire
Teaching History article
Ben Walsh describes some of the rationale behind the construction of the new Learning Curve exhibition on the British Empire and, in so doing, makes a strong case for placing empire generally and the British Empire in particular at the heart of historical study for all teenagers. A complex and...
A complex empire: National Archives Learning Curve takes on the British Empire
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Using this map and all your knowledge, become Bismarck
Teaching History article
Understanding the past is not an abstract exercise. Historical questions revolve around decisions made by real people under real pressure. As historians, we factor psychological pressure into our analysis. How, though, are we to enable our students to do the same? To study why Bismarck began a programme of overseas...
Using this map and all your knowledge, become Bismarck
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Conceptual awareness through categorising: using ICT to get Year 13 reading
Teaching History article
When presenting their practical approaches to post-16 teaching in Teaching History 103, both Richard Harris and Rachael Rudham argued that students need to ‘do’ things with information, to process it, play with it, classify it, if they are ever to understand or remember it. They made a case for not...
Conceptual awareness through categorising: using ICT to get Year 13 reading
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Meeting the historian through the text
Teaching History article
Edna Shoham and Neomi Shiloah describe a process by which they taught their 15-year-old students to read historians’ accounts for sub-text, meaning and assumptions. In its emphasis on ‘meeting the historian’, their work overlaps with much of the thinking about teaching pupils about historical ‘interpretations’ as specifically required by the...
Meeting the historian through the text
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A most horrid malicious bloody flame: using Samuel Pepys to improve Year 8 boys' historical writing
Teaching History article
Unusually, instead of moving from a narrative to an analytic structure, David Waters moves his pupils from causal analysis to narrative. By the time pupils are ready to produce their storyboard narrative, their thinking about the Great Fire has been shaped and re-shaped not only by structural exercises and argument...
A most horrid malicious bloody flame: using Samuel Pepys to improve Year 8 boys' historical writing
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'What's that stuff you're listening to Sir?' Rock and pop music as a rich source for historical enquiry
Teaching History article
Building on the wonderful articles by Mastin and Sweerts & Grice in TH 108, Simon Butler urges us here to make greater use of rock and pop music in history classrooms. His reasons are persuasive. First, it provides a rich vein of initial stimulus material to tap, helping us to...
'What's that stuff you're listening to Sir?' Rock and pop music as a rich source for historical enquiry
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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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'Don't worry, Mr. Trimble. We can handle it' Balancing the rationale and the emotional in teaching of contentious topics
Teaching History article
A common line amongst teachers and policy-makers seeking to theorise a workable relationship between history and the new subject of citizenship is to say that there must be a link with the present. This is harder than it sounds. If the implication is that the study of the past should...
'Don't worry, Mr. Trimble. We can handle it' Balancing the rationale and the emotional in teaching of contentious topics
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'Really weird and freaky': using a Thomas Hardy short story as a source of evidence in the Year 8 classroom
Teaching History article
Can 25 so-called ‘low ability’ girls access 30 pages of difficult text? Yes, much more easily they can access the tiny, sanitised, made-easy ‘gobbets’ that they are normally exposed to in the name of ‘access’. Mary Woolley makes the point that boring texts are those that tell you only essential...
'Really weird and freaky': using a Thomas Hardy short story as a source of evidence in the Year 8 classroom
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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?
