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Living Museums and Victorian Britain
Year 6 Scheme of Work
Please note: this resource pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum.
This unit centres on ways of portraying life in Victorian Britain.
While factual knowledge of aspects of Victorian life in Britain are a vital component of the unit, the main focus is on exploring the way living museums present the period,...
Living Museums and Victorian Britain
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How cruel were the Victorians?
Year 6 Scheme of Work
Please note: this resource pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum.
This unit centres on Victorian crime and punishment.
This resource is free to everyone. For access to hundreds of other high-quality resources by primary history experts along with free or discounted CPD and membership of a thriving community of teachers and...
How cruel were the Victorians?
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Integrating black British history in the National Curriculum
Teaching History Article
The question of what to include is a constant challenge to those given the responsibility of education, whether writing at the level of a national curriculum or the departmental scheme of work. Dan Lyndon and his department have been rethinking inclusion in history. In any school, representative history is essential...
Integrating black British history in the National Curriculum
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Myths and War Evacuees
Year 6 Scheme of Work
Please note: this resource pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum.
This unit centres on the evacuation of children during the second world war. While the factual knowledge of evacuation is an essential component of the unit, the main focus is on exploring the varied feelings and experiences of children sent to...
Myths and War Evacuees
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Interpretation and poor Victorian Children
Year 6 Scheme of Work
Please note: this resource pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum.
This unit centres on the portrayal of poor, Victorian children. While factual knowledge about conditions in workhouses is an essential component of the unit, the main focus is on contrasting portrayals of one fictional Victorian child, Charles Dicken's Oliver Twist. The...
Interpretation and poor Victorian Children
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Was Boudicca Britain's first hero?
Year 6 Scheme of Work
Please note: this resource pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum.
This unit centres on Queen Boudicca.
While factual knowledge about her life and the Roman occupation are an essential component of the unit, the main focus is on contrasting interpretations of Boudicca over time and exploration of the reasons behind her...
Was Boudicca Britain's first hero?
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Integrating the historical Holocaust
Teaching History article
How can we help students understand the Holocaust in its full historical complexity, particularly when they often come to class with misconceptions arising from the representation of the Holocaust in popular culture? Over a three-year period, Sam Ineson set out to integrate the historical Holocaust into his school’s formal and informal...
Integrating the historical Holocaust
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Breaking the 20 year rule: very modern history at GCSE
Teaching History article
History is the study of the past; some of the past is more recent than a glance over many schemes of work might lead us to think. Chris Culpin makes the case for ignoring the 20 year rule and tackling head on – and, crucially, historically – the big issues...
Breaking the 20 year rule: very modern history at GCSE
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Illuminating the possibilities of the past
Teaching History article
Claire Holliss reports here on the ways in which she has responded over time to the call to ‘do justice’ to the histories of those long neglected within the school curriculum. Reflection on the need to ensure that the discipline of history remained central to any reform prompted her to...
Illuminating the possibilities of the past
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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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Redesigning the curriculum: a short guide for the new, novice or nervous
Article
A short guide to making a start with redesigning the curriculum
We realise that the task of curriculum redesign is huge and these steps are to help you make a start.
It's also important to note that Heather Fearn, Ofsted Curriculum and Development lead, has said:
that Ofsted is NOT expecting...
Redesigning the curriculum: a short guide for the new, novice or nervous
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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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Women in British Coal Mining
Historian article
With the final closure of Britain’s deep coal mines, Chris Wrigley examines the long-standing involvement of women in and around this challenging and dangerous form of work.
With the closure in 2015 of Thoresby and Kellingley mines, the last two working deep coal mines in Britain, leaving only open-cast coal...
Women in British Coal Mining
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Change and Continuity
Key Concepts
Please note: these links were compiled in 2009. For a more recent resource, please see: What's the Wisdom on: Change and Continuity.
This selection of useful Teaching History articles on Change and Continuity are highly recommended reading to those who would like to get to grip with these key concepts:
1. Michael Riley: Big Stories and...
Change and Continuity
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Understanding Slavery
Free Online Resource
Teaching the transatlantic slave trade and its abolition in British history is now a compulsory component of the revised KS3 History curriculum.
The Understanding Slavery Initiative (USI) is a national education project set up in 2003. The initiative has been developed in partnership with the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich,...
Understanding Slavery
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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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Revealing the big picture: patterns, shapes and images at Key Stage 3.
Teaching History article
It is easy enough to incorporate overview and depth studies into a scheme-of-work. Units are carved up into those topics that last for several weeks and those that are covered in one. Isn’t that enough to satisfy the requirements of the National Curriculum? Many teachers have gone much further than...
Revealing the big picture: patterns, shapes and images at Key Stage 3.
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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
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Liz Kellaway's Top Tips
Article
" If you are close enough to a university library and the university is willing, try to take A level students there for research on their individual assignments and general extended reading. Often sixth formers are allowed to use the university library as a reference library. This is really useful...
Liz Kellaway's Top Tips
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Progression & Assessment without Levels - Guide
Progression & Assessment
In the 2014 national curriculum for primary and secondary history one of the key differences is that, for the first time since 1991, there are no level descriptions against which you can assess pupils' progress. The new attainment target says simply that:
‘By the end of each key stage, pupils...
Progression & Assessment without Levels - Guide
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Challenging stereotypes and avoiding the superficial: a suggested approach to teaching the Holocaust
Teaching History article
Alison Kitson provides a rationale for a scheme of work for Year 9 (13-14 year-olds). She argues that teachers should analyse the kind of historical learning that is taking place when the Holocaust is studied. Critical of the assumption that learning will take place as a result of exposure, she...
Challenging stereotypes and avoiding the superficial: a suggested approach to teaching the Holocaust
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Progression - more than 'could do better'?
E-CPD
Some notion of progression underpins all teaching as well as curriculum, course design, work scheme construction lesson planning, evaluation and assessment. But what do we mean by progression and how do we help our students achieve it? Does our assessment reflect progression? Do our reports to parents comment on progression? In this E-CPD...
Progression - more than 'could do better'?
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What they think they know: the impact of pupils' preconceptions on their understanding of historical significance
Teaching History article
Robin Conway suspected that his students’ concepts of the significance of different aspects of historical periods was affected by the preconceptions that they brought to his lessons. These preconceptions were leading his students into making unhistorical judgments, without any real understanding on their part of what had affected their thinking....
What they think they know: the impact of pupils' preconceptions on their understanding of historical significance
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Dickens...Hardy...Jarvis?! A novel take on the Industrial Revolution
Teaching History article
‘Empathy with edge' was the editorial description given eight years ago to the kind of historical fiction that Dave Martin and Beth Brooke first argued history students should be writing (TH 108). The winning entries from the annual ‘Write Your Own Historical Story Competition' to which their work gave rise...
Dickens...Hardy...Jarvis?! A novel take on the Industrial Revolution
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Inventing race? Using primary sources to investigate the origins of racial thinking in the past
Teaching History article
Having been given some additional curriculum time, Kerry Apps and her department made decisions about what had been missing in the previous curriculum diet. Building on an existing enquiry (in TH 176), Apps decided to focus on how and when the idea of race in its modern sense developed in early modern...
Inventing race? Using primary sources to investigate the origins of racial thinking in the past
