-
Promoting rigorous historical scholarship
Teaching History article
The history department at Cottenham Village College has one more member than you might expect. Ruth Brown is a teaching assistant (TA) and one of the longest-standing members of the department, and this article is about how her work has an impact on specific pupils, whole classes and teachers. The key...
Promoting rigorous historical scholarship
-
Film: What's the wisdom on... Historical Significance
Your Virtual History Department Meeting
'What’s the wisdom on…' is a popular feature in our secondary journal Teaching History and provides the perfect stimulus for a department meeting. 'What’s the wisdom on…' provides history teachers with an overview of the ‘story so far’ of many years of practice-based professional thinking about a particular aspect of history teaching.
To...
Film: What's the wisdom on... Historical Significance
-
Historical scholarship and feedback
Teaching History article
In her introduction to this piece, Carolyn Massey describes history teachers as professionals who pride themselves on ‘a sophisticated understanding of change and continuity’. How often, though, do we bemoan change when it comes, as it so often has recently? Massey’s article provides an example of how to embrace change,...
Historical scholarship and feedback
-
Curating the imagined past: world building in the history curriculum
Teaching History article
Mike Hill was concerned that his students were unable to genuinely inhabit the historical places they encountered in his lessons. Drawing on fields as varied as history-teacher research, philosophy, and literary and media theory, Hill identified ways to curate his students’ constructions of ‘secondary worlds’ in the historical past, including...
Curating the imagined past: world building in the history curriculum
-
Structuring a history curriculum for powerful revelations
Teaching History article
When planning a Key Stage 3 curriculum with his department, Will Bailey-Watson began to question some of the commonsense orthodoxies regarding chronological sequencing and curriculum design. Drawing on pre-existing debates about curricular structuring in the history education community both in England and internationally, Bailey-Watson identified cognitive, motivational, and disciplinary justifications...
Structuring a history curriculum for powerful revelations
-
Currency and the Economy in Tudor and early Stuart England
Classic Pamphlet
Before the development of paper money, which in England did not really occur until later in the seventeenth century, the circulating medium consisted of coins and tokens. The unit of account in which they were valued was the pound sterling; in which there were twenty shillings each of twelve pence,...
Currency and the Economy in Tudor and early Stuart England
-
Film: What's the wisdom on... Historical Interpretations
Your Virtual History Department Meeting
We’ve been talking to our secondary school members and we know how difficult life is for teachers in the current circumstances, so we wanted to lend a helping hand.
'What’s the wisdom on…' is a new and already popular feature in our secondary journal Teaching History and provides the perfect stimulus for a...
Film: What's the wisdom on... Historical Interpretations
-
Bringing historical method into the classroom
Teaching History article
Shortly before their final A-level examination, Peter Turner was alarmed to discover some fundamental weaknesses in his Year 13 students’ understanding of the nature of historical interpretations. Determined to address this concern at a much earlier point with his next cohort of students he developed a new six-lesson enquiry. His...
Bringing historical method into the classroom
-
Census 2021: using the census in the history classroom
Article
As we approach the next census in March 2021, we are reminded of what a rich historical source the census is. For historians, using the census can shine a light on particular people and places – a snapshot in time. Big stories can be told through a sharp local lens...
Census 2021: using the census in the history classroom
-
Using oral history to enhance a local history partnership
Teaching History article
Eliza West and Emily Toettcher explain how a partnership between school and museum has evolved into a four-year enquiry into local history. The article focuses on the successful introduction of an oral history element in the GCSE syllabus and how the investigation into ‘remembered’ history helps students to appreciate the complexities of truth...
Using oral history to enhance a local history partnership
-
Podcast Series: Confronting Controversial History
Podcast Series
Controversial History formed the focus of the Historical Association’s report, Teaching Emotive and Controversial History 3-19 (TEACH). Published in 2007, it offered teachers invaluable guidance for teaching historical topics that can stir emotion and controversy. However, the authors noted how the nature of the sensitivity can be affected by ‘time, geography and...
Podcast Series: Confronting Controversial History
-
Imagining cities: exploring historical sites as contested spaces
Teaching History article
Geraint Brown and Matt Stanford share the daunting challenge and intriguing opportunities that are presented by leading a school history trip to a site as complex as Berlin. That the city is a palimpsest, layered with stories and tissued with conflicting identities, experiences and meanings, makes planning a trip extremely...
Imagining cities: exploring historical sites as contested spaces
-
Local Community and History Month 2024: Students’ local history stories
Multipage Article
One of the strengths of the HA is our broad interest in all areas of history. So many history themes and narratives focus on the big issues, but for many of us, history starts in the local. That is why we introduced Local History and Community Month for each May...
Local Community and History Month 2024: Students’ local history stories
-
Big Picture History - GCSE
Links to Articles
GCSE Thematic Study LinksBigger picture history and teaching change and continuity over time.
Big Picture History - GCSE
-
Film: Inequalities in the teaching and practice of history in the UK
Discussion: Response to the RHS report
This resource is free to everyone. For access to our library of high-quality secondary history materials along with free or discounted CPD and membership of a thriving community of history teachers and subject leaders, join the Historical Association today
This film (above) recorded in March 2019 features a discussion between Jatinder...
Film: Inequalities in the teaching and practice of history in the UK
-
Harnessing the power of community to expand students’ historical horizons
Teaching History article
Many history teachers will already be familiar with ‘meanwhile, elsewhere...’, a website offering freely downloadable homework resources on individuals, events and developments in world history. In this article the website’s creators, Richard Kennett and Will Bailey-Watson, set out a curricular rationale for the project. They argue that using homework tasks...
Harnessing the power of community to expand students’ historical horizons
-
Using Twitter in the History Classroom
Research Report
This attached report is by Dave Martin on an H. A. action research project where three schools in Dorset experimented with using Twitter in their teaching of history. They used Twitter to explore multiple viewpoints from the battlefield at Hastings, to ask an author about the process of writing historical fiction,...
Using Twitter in the History Classroom
-
From the history of maths to the history of greatness
Teaching History article
Readers of Teaching History will be familiar with the benefits and difficulties of cross-curricular planning, and the pages of this journal have often carried analysis of successful collaborations with the English department, or music, or geography. Harry Fletcher-Wood describes in this article a collaboration involving maths, providing for us the...
From the history of maths to the history of greatness
-
Three strategies to support pupils’ study of historical significance
Teaching History article
When Paula Worth met with history-teaching colleagues to explore how they could improve their teaching about historical significance, she found that she was far from alone in finding the process a daunting one. Prompted to investigate the difficulties she had encountered, Worth realised that that she had previously reached for...
Three strategies to support pupils’ study of historical significance
-
The mechanics of history: interpretations and claim construction processes
Teaching History article
Holly Hiscox was concerned that many of her A-level students – asked to evaluate three different historical interpretations for their non-examined assessment task – still tended to hold unhelpful misconceptions about the nature of interpretations. In this article she explains how she created an introductory scheme of work to help them understand...
The mechanics of history: interpretations and claim construction processes
-
In pursuit of shared histories: uncovering Islamic history in the secondary classroom
Teaching History article
In 2005, in a Teaching History article entitled, ‘A need to know’, Nicolas Kinloch built an argument for teaching the history of Islamic civilisations to all pupils. Afia Chaudhry returns to this theme, reflecting deeply on the needs of her own students – Muslim and non-Muslim alike – within a...
In pursuit of shared histories: uncovering Islamic history in the secondary classroom
-
Exploring and Teaching Twentieth-Century History
A secondary education publication of the Historical Association
This resource is free to everyone. For access to our library of high-quality secondary history materials along with free or discounted CPD and membership of a thriving community of history teachers and subject leaders, join the Historical Association today
For a long time, history curricula on the 20th century prioritised...
Exploring and Teaching Twentieth-Century History
-
Disability history resources
Article
Disabled people are part of the fabric of every society past and present, yet the stories, achievements and struggles of disabled people have often been hidden or marginalised by societies who refuse to adapt. Coping with disability, societal attitudes towards disability and the stories, voices and contributions of disabled people...
Disability history resources
-
New, Novice or Nervous? 163: Historical significance
Teaching History feature: the quick guide to the no-quick-fix
Historical significance first appeared in England’s National Curriculum for history in 1995. It entered the assessment framework (Level Descriptions) in 2008. In 2014, it became part of the History NC ‘Aims’. One thing never changes, however: it is hard.
But history teachers have written a great deal about historical significance...
New, Novice or Nervous? 163: Historical significance
-
Introducing History Lab
A crowd-sourced history club
In 2021, teacher Richard Lewis founded History Lab as an idea for a history club that goes beyond the curriculum and enables students to think, form opinions and voice them as well as learning from one another's perspectives. The club can be led by a teacher, librarian or other knowledgeable...
Introducing History Lab
