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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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New, Novice or Nervous? 160: Progression in evidential understanding
Teaching History feature
You have a wealth of fascinating sources you would love to explore with students but despair at their seeming inability to connect ‘source work' with the construction of historical claims. Year 7 get stuck in the ‘it's biased so we can never know' trap again and again. Year 9 students...
New, Novice or Nervous? 160: Progression in evidential understanding
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Polychronicon 132: Roman Emperors
Teaching History feature
Everyone has seen a Roman emperor. Whether at the British Museum's current Hadrian exhibition, or in Derek Jacobi's stuttering Claudius, or in Joachim Phoenix's psychotic Commodus, most people are aware of Roman emperors to some extent or other.1 They can be semi-legendary, or have been entirely ignored by posterity. Some...
Polychronicon 132: Roman Emperors
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Engaging Year 9 students in party politics
Teaching History article
Sarah Black wanted to remedy Year 9's lack of knowledge about nineteenth-century politics. With just five lessons to work with, she decided to devise a sequence on Gladstone and Disraeli, shaping the sequence with an enquiry question that invited argument about change and continuity. Black analyses the status and function of different layers of knowledge within her sequence, evaluates the interaction...
Engaging Year 9 students in party politics
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Enabling Year 7 to write essays on Magna Carta
Teaching History article
Setting out to teach Magna Carta to the full attainment range in Year 7, Mark King decided to choose a question that reflected real scholarly debates and also to ensure that pupils held enough knowledge in long-term memory to be able to think about that question meaningfully. As he gradually prepared his pupils to produce their own causation arguments in response to that question, King was startled by...
Enabling Year 7 to write essays on Magna Carta
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Pipes's punctuation and making complex historical claims
Teaching History article
Long, unreadable sentences in her students' essays led Rachel Foster to improve her post-16 students' punctuation. Her journey resulted, however, in more than improved punctuation.
It led her to theorise what historians are really doing in their ‘signpost sentences'. She found herself showing students how an academic historian anticipates a chunk of argument in a single, well-turned, opening sentence. Foster created an intervention in which students...
Pipes's punctuation and making complex historical claims
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Polychronicon 159: Interpreting Magna Carta
Teaching History feature
First some history: the question of how historiographic and public historical representations of Magna Carta have changed over the last 800 years is an important one. The ‘myth' of Magna Carta as a foundational document for modern democracy is still very powerful.
That tradition of understanding the legacy and history...
Polychronicon 159: Interpreting Magna Carta
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Triumphs Show 159: teaching paragraph construction
Teaching History feature
My adventures in dancing in the classroom started back in the autumn term. I was working with a group of Year 8 students looking at interpretations of King John and we were selecting and analysing quotations from historians as part of the enquiry question ‘Was King John really so bad?' My students were struggling with...
Triumphs Show 159: teaching paragraph construction
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Historical Perspective & 'Big History'
Teaching History article
Moving forward, looking back - historical perspective, ‘Big History' and the return of the longue durée: time to develop our scale hopping muscles
‘Big history' is a term receiving a great deal of attention at present, particularly in North America where considerable sums of money have been invested in designing curricula...
Historical Perspective & 'Big History'
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Developing transferable knowledge at A-level
Teaching History article
From a compartmentalised to a complicated past: developing transferable knowledge at A-level
Students find it difficult to join up the different things they study into a complex account of the past. Examination specifications do not necessarily help with this because of the way in which history is divided up into...
Developing transferable knowledge at A-level
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Pedagogical framework for stimulating historical contextualisation
Teaching History article
'Why am I accused of being a heretic?' A pedagogical framework for stimulating historical contextualisation
One of the challenges facing students who want to make sense of a source or an interpretation of the past is the need to place it in its context. Various research studies have shown that students...
Pedagogical framework for stimulating historical contextualisation
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Move Me On 157: Getting knowledge across
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem: Rose Valognes feels she hasn't got enough ways of getting knowledge across to the students before they can do something with it.
After a positive start to her training year, Rose Valognes seems to have got stuck in a rut in her thinking, with her lessons falling...
Move Me On 157: Getting knowledge across
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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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Polychronicon 157: Reinterpreting police-public relations in modern England
Teaching History feature
The relationship between the police and the public has long been a key subject in English social history. The formative work in this field was conducted between the 1970s and 1990s, but the past few years have witnessed something of a revival of research in the area. By focusing on...
Polychronicon 157: Reinterpreting police-public relations in modern England
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King John and Magna Carta
Links to Articles & Podcasts
Magna Carta: oblivion and revival
Magna Carta and the Origins of Parliament
King John
King John and Magna Carta (Part 1)
King John and Magna Carta (Part 2)
King John and Magna Carta
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Bismarck
Historian article
Readers of this journal will need no introduction to Otto von Bismarck. There are almost as many English-language biographies of him as those written in German. The four short studies by Lynn Abrams, Bismarck and the German Empire, 1871-1918 (1995); Andrina Stiles, The Unification of Germany, 1815-1890 (1986); D. G....
Bismarck
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Move Me On 156: Assessment for Learning
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem: Fred North treats ‘Assessment for Learning' as though it is a bolt-on extra unconnected to his learning objectives
Fred is an enthusiastic trainee who has generally made a good impression on students and colleagues over the course of his first term. He has been determined to establish a...
Move Me On 156: Assessment for Learning
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Getting medieval (and global) at Key Stage 3
Teaching History article
Taking new historical research into the classroom: getting medieval (and global) at Key Stage 3
Although history teachers frequently work with academic historical writing, direct face-to-face encounters with academic historians are rare in secondary history classrooms. This article reports a collaboration between an academic historian and a history teacher that...
Getting medieval (and global) at Key Stage 3
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Late Medieval Taxation Records
Historian article
There are more than 23,000 medieval taxation records from England and Wales in the Public Record Office alone. For many years the vast majority of them have lain undisturbed in their archive boxes, but recent work is showing the true value of some of these as historical sources and making...
Late Medieval Taxation Records
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Move Me On 155: Historical Intepretation vs. Opinion
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem: Helena Swannick tends to treat differences between historical interpretations simply as matters of opinion.
Helena Swannick is a career changer who has decided to come into teaching after many years' working in human resources and some time at home caring for two young children. Her degree was a...
Move Me On 155: Historical Intepretation vs. Opinion
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Local Authority Housing
Classic Pamphlet
Local authority housing has been a distinctive feature of the British housing system throughout the twentieth century. This pamphlet outlines the development of local authority housing in Britain from its origins in the late nineteenth century to the present day, focusing on the ways in which policy changes have affected...
Local Authority Housing
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Peter Abelard
Classic Pamphlet
The Catalogue of Printed Books in the British Library contains a large number of entries under the name of Peter Abelard. Most relate to books published in the last two hundred years and most of the editions of works written by Abelard, as distinct from books about him or about...
Peter Abelard
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Waking up to complexity
Teaching History article
Waking up to complexity: using Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers to challenge over-determined causal explanations
Teaching student to construct causal argument is a staple of history teaching and, in this year, questions about the causes of the First World War are particularly pertinent and once again the public eye. Claire Holliss,...
Waking up to complexity
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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
