-
'I feel if I say this in my essay it’s not going to be as strong’
Teaching History article
Jim Carroll was concerned that A-level textbooks failed to provide his students with a model of the multi-voicedness that characterises written history. In order to show his students that historians constantly engage in argument as they write, Carroll turned to academic scholarship for models of multi-voiced history. Carroll explains here...
'I feel if I say this in my essay it’s not going to be as strong’
-
New, Novice or Nervous? 166: Controversial issues
Teaching History feature
History thrives on questioning, debate and controversy. What makes something controversial varies, however, and we may fail to notice, unless we think very carefully about it, the particular ways in which our lessons can become controversial for our pupils.
When we tackle historical issues that might be seen as controversial, disturbing, shocking or...
New, Novice or Nervous? 166: Controversial issues
-
Putting Catlin in his place?
Teaching History article
Jess Landy’s desire to introduce her pupils to a more complex narrative of the American West led her to the life story and work of a remarkable individual, George Catlin.
In this article she shows how she used this unusual micro-narrative in order to challenge pupils’ ideas not just about the bigger narrative of which it is a part, but about the...
Putting Catlin in his place?
-
Cunning Plan 97: A-Level: International Relations 1890-1914
Teaching History feature
'No war is inevitable until it starts.' Good quote. Not mine, but A.J.P. Taylor's. The outbreak of the First World War is a good way to test it! Did the statesmen of the day know the First World War was coming? Put another way, why was there no general European...
Cunning Plan 97: A-Level: International Relations 1890-1914
-
Bringing together students from Bradford and Peshawar
Article
Connecting Classrooms: bringing together Bradford and Peshawar, primary and secondary schools, history and English
In this article, Dianne Excell shares her experience of a crossphase, collaborative project funded by the British Council that brought together teachers and pupils from three schools in Bradford and five schools in Peshawar, Pakistan. Although...
Bringing together students from Bradford and Peshawar
-
Roman Crime and Punishment
Podcast
The Romans are known as forward thinkers who were well advanced for their time. But did they manage to conquer crime? Listen to this podcast to find out.
Roman Crime and Punishment
-
What do you think? Using online forums to improve students' historical knowledge and understanding
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
In Teaching History 126, the Open University's Arguing in History project team demonstrated the power that discussion fora can have to develop pupil thinking. In this article, Dave Martin revisits this theme through a discussion...
What do you think? Using online forums to improve students' historical knowledge and understanding
-
Effective essay introductions
Teaching History article
Struck by the dullness of some of her students’ essay introductions, Paula Worth reflected on the fact that she had never focused specifically on introductions. After surveying existing work by history teachers on essay structure in general and introductions in particular, she turns to the work of historians. Drawing on...
Effective essay introductions
-
Triumphs Show 164: interpretations at A Level
Teaching History feature: celebrating and sharing success
Julia Huber and Katherine Turner found that their A-level students struggled to identify the line of argument in a passage of historical scholarship, an essential prerequisite for answering their coursework question. They devised an activity that helped students to unpick and visually contrast historians’ interpretations of the relative importance of...
Triumphs Show 164: interpretations at A Level
-
Making rigour a departmental reality
Teaching History article
Faced with the introduction of a two-year key stage and a new whole-school assessment policy, Rachel Arscott and Tom Hinks decided to make a virtue out of necessity and reconsider their whole approach to planning, teaching and assessment at Key Stage 3. In this article they give an account of...
Making rigour a departmental reality
-
Using nominalisation to develop written causal arguments
Teaching History article
How nominalisation might develop students’ written causal arguments
Frustrated that previously taught writing frames seemed to impede his A-level students’ historical arguments, James Edward Carroll theorised that the inadequacies he identified in their writing were as much disciplinary as stylistic. Drawing on two discourses that are often largely isolated from...
Using nominalisation to develop written causal arguments
-
Developing independent learning with Year 7
Teaching History article
Jaya Carrier’s decision to focus on developing a more independent approach to learning in history at Key Stage 3 was prompted by concerns about her A-level students. In seeking to establish secure foundations for students’ own historical research, Carrier first examined the assumptions of her colleagues and her students. She...
Developing independent learning with Year 7
-
Using causation diagrams to help sixth-formers think about cause and effect
Teaching History article
Alex Alcoe was concerned that mastery of certain keywords and question formulae at GCSE perhaps obscured fundamental gaps in his students’ understanding of the nature of causation. These gaps were revealed when he invited Year 12 students to make explicit, by annotating a diagram, their understanding of the relationship between...
Using causation diagrams to help sixth-formers think about cause and effect
-
New, Novice or Nervous? 161: Teaching substantive concepts
Teaching History feature
It’s worrying when pupils reach Year 9 or 10 unable to properly interpret or find fluency in major abstract nouns that crop up again and again in history. They should have bumped into ‘empire’, ‘republic’, ‘federation’, ‘peasantry’, ‘commons’ and ‘communism’, many times by Year 10, so why are many students...
New, Novice or Nervous? 161: Teaching substantive concepts
-
Using Google Docs to develop Year 9 pupils’ essay-writing skills
Teaching History article
Lucy Moonen set out to explore whether collaborative writing in small groups, facilitated by the use of Google Docs, would help to sustain students’ focus on essay writing as the development of an historical argument.
She explains how she set up an essay on the League of Nationals as a...
Using Google Docs to develop Year 9 pupils’ essay-writing skills
-
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
-
VE Day 75: free home learning resource
5th May 2020
Lots of organisations in the UK had exciting plans to commemorate the 75th anniversary of VE Day but unfortunately many of them will not now go ahead because of the Covid-19 situation. However, that doesn’t mean that young people can’t begin to understand why the first May bank holiday has...
VE Day 75: free home learning resource
-
Big Stories and Big Pictures: Making Outlines and Overviews Interesting
Teaching History journal article
An examination, with practical strategies, of the teaching of 'outlines and overviews' by Michael Riley.
Why teach overviews?
One of the problems of the first phase of National Curriculum history was the percieved overload of content. Some teachers felt obliged to race through the Programme of Study, treating issues in...
Big Stories and Big Pictures: Making Outlines and Overviews Interesting
-
How do you construct an historical claim?
Teaching History article
While preparing her Year 12 students for an International Baccalaureate paper on early Islam, Kirstie Murray became concerned that students' weaknesses in making claims would be particularly exposed by the challenging complexity of this topic's source record and its contested historiography.
Drawing on the practice of other history teachers, especially...
How do you construct an historical claim?
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
