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Who wants to fight? Who wants to flee? Teaching history from a 'thinking skills' perspective
Teaching History article
Whatever shape the National Curriculum of the 21st century takes, history will have to show its relevance to major curricular areas and themes such as literacy, citizenship education and thinking skills. This ought to be easy: the critical, informed decision-making required by the modern citizen is practised in virtually every...
Who wants to fight? Who wants to flee? Teaching history from a 'thinking skills' perspective
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Three lessons about a funeral: Second World War cemeteries and twenty years of curriculum change
Article
Mike Murray analyses the way in which curriculum development has broadened and strengthened our conceptions of high standards in historical learning for school students. He pays tribute to ground-breaking new theoretical principles from the Schools History Project and from new emphases upon contextual knowledge and ‘interpretations' in the first National...
Three lessons about a funeral: Second World War cemeteries and twenty years of curriculum change
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Being ambitious with the causes of the First World War: interrogating inevitability
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated
Gary Howells asks hard questions about typical teaching and assessment of historical causation at Key Stage 3. Popular activities that may be helpful in addressing particular learning areas, or in teaching pupils to use the...
Being ambitious with the causes of the First World War: interrogating inevitability
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Cooperative Learning: the place of pupil involvement in a history textbook
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Pupil involvement is at the heart of every good history lesson. Its planning ensures that pupils are given the opportunity to think for themselves, share ideas, discuss evidence and debate points. The history education community...
Cooperative Learning: the place of pupil involvement in a history textbook
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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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'You be Britain and I'll be Germany...' Inter-school e-mailing in Year 9
Teaching History article
E-mailing is fast becoming our preferred means of communication and for good reason. It is immediate: we can fire off a few lines and receive a reply within seconds. It is also flexible: unlike a telephone conversation, we do not have to reply there and then; we can go away...
'You be Britain and I'll be Germany...' Inter-school e-mailing in Year 9
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New, Novice or Nervous? 157: Teaching Overview
Teaching History feature
Overwhelmed by overview? Bewildered by how to teach bigger pictures? Tied up in mental knots by trying to work out the difference between thematic stories, frameworks and outlines? You are not alone.
Like many history teachers, you feel more confident when teaching depth studies but find yourself beating a rapid...
New, Novice or Nervous? 157: Teaching Overview
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Teaching History 140: Creative History
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
02 Editorial
03 HA Secondary News
04 Ellen Buxton - Fog over channel; continent accessible? Year 8 use counterfactual reasoning to explore place and social upheaval in eighteenth-century France and Britain (Read article)
16 Gary Hillyard - Dickens...Hardy...Jarvis?! A novel take on the Industrial Revolution (Read article)
25 Triumphs show: Leading a...
Teaching History 140: Creative History
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Teaching History 139: Analysing History
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
02 Editorial
03 HA Secondary News
04 From human-scale to abstract analysis: Year 7 analyse the changing relationship of Henry II and Becket - Tim Jenner (Read article)
11 Encountering diversity in the history of ideas: engaging Year 9 with Victorian debates about ‘progress' - Jonathan White (Read article)
14 Cunning Plan: Teaching about...
Teaching History 139: Analysing History
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Teaching History 172: Cause and consequence
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
02 Editorial (Read article)
03 HA Secondary News
04 HA Update
08 ‘Its ultimate pattern was greater than its parts’: using a patchwork quilt analogy at Key Stage 3 to support analytical thinking at GCSE – Ed Durbin (Read article)
16 Triumphs Show: the history classroom lending library – Tim...
Teaching History 172: Cause and consequence
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Teaching History 39
Journal
Editorial, 2
A Small Local Investigation - David Wright, 3
A Journey Back into the Past - Rebecca Bell, 5
History Workshop Centre (Report), 7
History of Education in Schools - Richard Aldrich, 8
Christmas Holiday Lecture Quiz Prizewinner, 11
Recreating a Trip to York in Victorian Times - Mike...
Teaching History 39
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Teaching History 196: Demanding History
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
03 Editorial (Read article - open access)
04 HA Secondary News
06 HA Update
08 Mudlarking in the Thames: evidence, ecology and enquiry – Maryam Dorudi (Read article)
19 Britain’s forgotten colony? Why Hong Kong deserves a place in the story of empire – Ollie Barnes (Read article)
32 Triumphs Show: Year 9...
Teaching History 196: Demanding History
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Potential and pitfalls in teaching 'big pictures' of the past
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Jonathan Howson summarises findings from the recent ESRC funded research project - Usable Historical Pasts - and suggests how its insights might inform continuing professional debate and enquiry concerning both frameworks and ‘big pictures'.
In...
Potential and pitfalls in teaching 'big pictures' of the past
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Teaching History 176: Widening Vistas
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
02 Editorial (Read article)
03 HA Secondary News
04 HA Update: thinking beyond boundaries – Jason Todd (Read article for free)
10 Visions of America: using historical discourse to find narrative coherence in the GCSE period study – Alex Ford (Read article)
22 What’s The Wisdom On... evidence and sources (Read article)...
Teaching History 176: Widening Vistas
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Teaching History 178: Out now
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Read Teaching History 178
Constructing Accounts
Teachers of history have long recognised the tensions inherent in our role. We must deal with the existence of notions of a core narrative (or narratives) of areas of the past, communicating what those notions are while enabling our students to engage critically with...
Teaching History 178: Out now
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Move Me On 186: trainee provides little scope for students to use their knowledge in analysis/argument
Teaching History feature
Move Me On is designed to build critical, informed debate about the character of teacher training, teacher education and professional development. It is also designed to offer practical help to all involved in training new history teachers. Each issue presents a situation in initial teacher education/training with an emphasis upon...
Move Me On 186: trainee provides little scope for students to use their knowledge in analysis/argument
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Working with sources: scepticism or cynicism? Putting the story back together again
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Many history teachers will remember the feature on Jamie Byrom's teaching in Times Educational Supplement of July 1996 where he attacked the recent fashion of history textbooks for encouraging only short (and usually formulaic) responses...
Working with sources: scepticism or cynicism? Putting the story back together again
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When computers don't give you a headache: the most able lead a debate on medicine through time
Teaching History article
Dan Moorhouse begins with a complaint about ICT. It is not the clichéd teacher-complaint – that the computers keep crashing, and the students are messing around on the Internet (and how, exactly, do you turn the things on?) Instead, he observes that the use of ICT in the classroom is...
When computers don't give you a headache: the most able lead a debate on medicine through time
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Plotting maps and mapping minds: what can maps tell us about the people who made them
Teaching History article
As historians, we know that ‘factual’ information should never be uncritically accepted. And yet, too often, that is exactly what we do with the maps we use to locate ourselves and our students. Evelyn Sweerts and Marie-Claire Cavanagh, who now work in a European School in Brussels but until recently...
Plotting maps and mapping minds: what can maps tell us about the people who made them
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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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Narrative: the under-rated skill
Teaching History article
‘Mere narrative’, ‘lapses into narrative’, ‘a narrative answer that fails to answer the question set’. These phrases flow in the blood of history teachers, from public examination criteria to regular classroom discourse. Whilst most of us use narrative in our teaching methods, we have demonised narrative in pupils’ written answers....
Narrative: the under-rated skill
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Modelling the discipline
Teaching History article
David Hibbert and Zaiba Patel decided to work together after becoming concerned that school history curricula might not enable students to interrogate popular British mythologising about World War II. Building on these pre-existing concerns, their collaboration with the historian Yasmin Khan yielded an Interpretations enquiry which asked students to consider...
Modelling the discipline
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Teaching History 152: Pulling it all together
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
02 Editorial
03 HA Secondary News
04 HA Update
08 Catherine McCrory - How many people does it take to make an Essex man? Year 9 face up to historical difference (Read article)
20 Cunning Plan: placing visual sources at the heart of historical learning - Shaun Collins (Read article)...
Teaching History 152: Pulling it all together
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Historical and interdisciplinary enquiry into the sinking of the Mary Rose
Teaching History article
The raising of Henry VIII’s warship, the Mary Rose, from the sea bed set in train an extraordinary programme of interdisciplinary research, relentlessly pursuing the clues to Tudor life and death provided by the remains of the ship, its cargo and crew. In this article Clare Barnes offers fascinating insights...
Historical and interdisciplinary enquiry into the sinking of the Mary Rose
