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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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Teaching History 111: Reading History
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
06 ‘Really weird and freaky’: using a Thomas Hardy short story as a source of evidence in the Year 8 classroom - Mary Woolley (Read article)
13 Reading and enquiring in Years 12 and 13: a case study on women in the Third Reich - Alison Kitson (Read article)
20...
Teaching History 111: Reading History
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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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Equiano - voice of silent slaves?
Teaching History article
Andrew Wrenn shows how a study of the life of Olaudah Equiano can support pupils’ historical learning in a number of ways. Not only is this a ‘little story’ that can help to illuminate or raise questions about the the ‘big picture’, it can also help pupils to reflect upon...
Equiano - voice of silent slaves?
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Teaching History 103: Puzzling History
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
This edition looks at two types of puzzles: first, those we tackle as historians, puzzles about the past and, second, those puzzles that occured for people living in the past, puzzles form their perspectives - dilemmas, decisions and judgements that require us to imagine ourselves into their situation in a...
Teaching History 103: Puzzling History
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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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Ensuring progression continues into GCSE: let's not do for our pupils with our plan of attack
Teaching History article
Dale Banham continues a theme explored by many other teacher-authors in recent years, how to ensure that progression does not just stop in Year 9, leaving pupils stagnant in key areas of historical learning before getting picked up again in Year 12. He produces a more thorough rationale and commentary...
Ensuring progression continues into GCSE: let's not do for our pupils with our plan of attack
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Teaching History 39
Journal
Editorial, page 2
A Small Local Investigation - David Wright, page 3
A Journey Back into the Past - Rebecca Bell, page 5
History Workshop Centre (Report), page 7
History of Education in Schools - Richard Aldrich, page 8
Christmas Holiday Lecture Quiz Prizewinner, page 11
Recreating a Trip to...
Teaching History 39
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How Michael moved us on: transforming Key Stage 3 through peer review
Teaching History article
Thomas Tallis history department have an interesting approach to planning. Whereas, all too often, this most time-consuming and intellectually demanding of teachers’ tasks is rendered invisible, and is supposed to happen by magic in the middle of the night, this department chose to make the planning process genuinely collaborative, pivotal...
How Michael moved us on: transforming Key Stage 3 through peer review
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Teaching History 36
Journal
Teaching History, June 1983 Number 36
In this issue:
Editorial, page 2
Off the Record: the Ommission of Women from Classroom Historical Evidence - Carol Adams, page 3
Sex Differences and Historical Understanding - Martin Booth, page 7
Sexist Microcosm - R.J. Bradbury and C.A. Newbould, page 9
A Feast...
Teaching History 36
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Teaching History 34
Journal
Teaching History, October 1982 Number 34
In this issue:
Editorial, page 2
Museums and the Use of Evidence in History Teaching - Carol Adams and Sue Millar, page 3
A Course of Local History for 12-13 year olds and their Reactions to it - John Mathews, page 7
Developments in...
Teaching History 34
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Move Me On 167: Frames of reference
Teaching History feature
This feature is designed to build critical, informed debate about the character of teacher training, teacher education and professional development.
This issue’s problem: Eleanor Franks doesn’t really understand her students’ frames of reference and the difficulties that many of them have in making sense of the particular historical phenomena she is teaching them about.
Eleanor Franks,...
Move Me On 167: Frames of reference
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Absence and myopia in A-level coursework
Teaching History article
It is a charge commonly laid at history teachers that we, myopically, teach only the same-old same-old. Steven Driver has taken extreme steps to avoid this by focusing on a particular neglected event – the American occupation of Nicaragua in the early twentieth century – as part of his preparation...
Absence and myopia in A-level coursework
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Triumphs Show 160: Prezi and propaganda
Teaching History feature: celebrating and sharing success
Laura Tilley recognised that her Year 9 students were finding it difficult to work out the intended message of visual propaganda. To help her students make better use of the substantive knowledge they already had, she devised an interactive activity using a presentation software, Prezi. This approach provided students with...
Triumphs Show 160: Prezi and propaganda
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Exploring big overviews through local depth
Teaching History article
Exploring big overviews through local depth
Rachel Foster and Kath Goudie's search for a more rigorous and interesting way of teaching Year 7 the Norman Conquest was initially driven by a desire to incorporate local history in a more meaningful way in their Key Stage 3 schemes of work.
This...
Exploring big overviews through local depth
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Transforming Year 11's conceptual understanding of change
Teaching History article
For all that history teachers appreciate the need to build substantive knowledge and conceptual understanding systematically over time, they are also likely to have experienced that sickening moment when they realise that a Year 11 pupil has somehow missed something fundamental.
In Anna Fielding's case, her pupil's misconception was related to...
Transforming Year 11's conceptual understanding of change
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Building meaningful models of progression
Teaching History article
Setting us free? Building meaningful models of progression for a ‘post-levels' world
Alex Ford was thrilled by the prospect of freedom offered to history departments in England by the abolition of level descriptions within the National Curriculum.
After analysing the range of competing purposes that the level descriptions were previously...
Building meaningful models of progression
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Building and assessing historical knowledge on three scales
Teaching History article
The knowledge that ‘flavours' a claim: towards building and assessing historical knowledge on three scales
While marking some Year 11 essays, Kate Hammond found her interest caught by significant differences between one kind of strong analysis and another. Some scored high marks but were less convincing. The achievement in these...
Building and assessing historical knowledge on three scales
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Assessment after levels
Free Teaching History article
Ten years ago, two heads of department in contrasting schools presented a powerfully-argued case for resisting the use of level descriptions within their assessment regimes. Influenced both by research into the nature of children's historical thinking and by principles of assessment for learning, Sally Burnham and Geraint Brown argued that...
Assessment after levels
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Polychronicon 156: The transnational history of the First World War
Teaching History feature
With the publication in 2014 of the Cambridge History of the First World War, we enter a new transnational phase in the historical understanding of the conflict. The reasons why this change has come about are evident.
The first is that there are more transnational historians writing the history of...
Polychronicon 156: The transnational history of the First World War
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Using The Wipers Times to build an enquiry on the First World War
Teaching History article
Teaching ‘the lesson of satire': using The Wipers Times to build an enquiry on the First World War
‘Blackadder for real' is how the British journalist and broadcaster, Ian Hislop, characterised The Wipers Time, the newspaper published on the front line by members of the 12th Battalion Sherwood, and recently brought...
Using The Wipers Times to build an enquiry on the First World War
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Helping Year 9 explore the cultural legacies of WW1
Teaching History article
A world turned molten: helping Year 9 to explore the cultural legacies of the First World War
Rachel Foster shows how her own study of cultural history led to a new dimension in her planning. She wanted to show her students not only that historians are interested in many different...
Helping Year 9 explore the cultural legacies of WW1
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History, music and law: commemorative cross-curricularity
Teaching History article
James Woodcock continues his theme from Teaching History 138 about the difference between superficial, thematic cross-curricularity and much more rigorous interdisciplinarity. His concern is to retain rather than compromise the integrity of the subject disciplines. Woodcock argues that interdisciplinary working adds value to learning only when the knowledge and the distinctive...
History, music and law: commemorative cross-curricularity