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Significance
Key Concepts
Please note: these links were compiled in 2009. For a more recent resource, please see: What's the Wisdom on: Historical significance.
This selection of Teaching History articles on 'Significance' are highly recommended reading to anyone who wants to get to grips with this key concept. All Teaching History articles are free to HA Secondary Members...
Significance
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International relations at GCSE... they just can't get enough of it
Teaching History article
There is no reason why pupils of so-called ‘average’ and ‘below-average ability’ cannot both understand and enjoy studying complicated international events. Indeed, in the interests of inclusion and raised standards, it is vital that they do. Our Letters Pages in the last two editions captured something of the history teaching...
International relations at GCSE... they just can't get enough of it
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'How our area used to be back then': An oral history project in an east London school
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
How can oral history enquiries engage students with the study of history and help them connect their learning about the past to their present lives? How can oral history engage and develop students' understanding of...
'How our area used to be back then': An oral history project in an east London school
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Riots, railways and a Hampshire hill fort: Exploiting local history for rigorous evidential enquiry
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Rigorous historical enquiry is integral to effective history teaching. The 2008 National Curriculum has recognised its importance by giving it a broader definition as a key process to include not only the use of historical...
Riots, railways and a Hampshire hill fort: Exploiting local history for rigorous evidential enquiry
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Cunning Plan 134: local history at KS3
Teaching History feature
Question: How can we plan to integrate local history into Key Stage 3 schemes of work so that pupils are engaged by the relevance of the subject across different periods of time?
Local history can come in all shapes and sizes, from a large-scale oral history project to the perusal...
Cunning Plan 134: local history at KS3
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Relevant, rigorous and revisited: using local history to make meaning of historical significance
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
The idea of engaging pupils with the relevance of local memorials is becoming commonplace in the history classroom. In Teaching History 109, Examining History Edition, Dale Banham's pupils used First World War memorials to assess...
Relevant, rigorous and revisited: using local history to make meaning of historical significance
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Teaching History 134: Local Voices
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
02 Editorial
03 HA Secondary News
04 Relevant, rigorous and revisited: using local history to make meaning of historical significance – Geraint Brown and James Woodcock (Read article)
12 Cunning Plan: Local history at KS3 – Dan Moorhouse (Read article)
15 Nutshell
16 Riots, railways and a Hampshire hill fort: exploiting local...
Teaching History 134: Local Voices
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What is progress in history?
Teaching History article
Evelyn Vermeulen argues that in order for teachers to identify outcomes for the learning of history, they must think clearly about the different attributes of the discipline - its ideas, structures and processes - and the relationship between them. Here, she takes us on her own professional thinking journey. She...
What is progress in history?
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My essays could go on forever: using Key Stage 3 to improve performance at GCSE
Teaching History article
History teachers are waking up to the fact that you cannot raise standards in GCSE by very much if you leave this work until Year 10. To leave it that late is to resort to surface, tactical moves rather than to address the deep reasons why so many pupils find...
My essays could go on forever: using Key Stage 3 to improve performance at GCSE
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Doomed Youth: Using theatre to support teaching about the First World War
Teaching History article
Many history teachers will have taken their GCSE pupils to School History Scene's Hitler on Trial for a rigorous and inspirational session, using drama, in preparation for the GCSE examination. Josh Brooman has now broadened the work of School History Scene by writing a new play, Doomed Youth, aimed at...
Doomed Youth: Using theatre to support teaching about the First World War
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A hankering for the blank spaces: enabling the very able to explore the limits of GCSE
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Many of us would love to have the problems encountered by Oliver Knight at his previous school. His students were simply doing too well - leaving him wondering how to stretch them to the limit...
A hankering for the blank spaces: enabling the very able to explore the limits of GCSE
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Telling and suggesting in the Conwy Valley
Teaching History article
Thelma Wiltshire applies a ‘telling' and ‘suggesting' strategy to an enquiry involving an historical site. Getting beyond more simplistic approaches to ‘fact' and ‘opinion', she describes how a pack of curriculum materials was designed to give pupils a precise language to talk about layers of certainty and uncertainty in their...
Telling and suggesting in the Conwy Valley
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'Right well kept': Peterborough Abbey 1536-1539
Historian article
Although the reasons for and the process of dissolution in Peterborough Abbey compare closely to all other religious houses, the consequences were unique. Peterborough received favourable treatment and so emerged from the dissolution as one of six abbeys to be transformed into new cathedrals. The changes imposed on Peterborough were...
'Right well kept': Peterborough Abbey 1536-1539
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Cunning Plan 108: teaching Tudor architecture
Teaching History feature
In this edition of 'Cunning Plan' Diana Laffin illustrates how Tudor Architecture can be taught.
Cunning Plan 108: teaching Tudor architecture
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Triumphs Show 103: Using active learning to motivate GCSE groups
Teaching History feature
Phil Smith demonstrates how active learning can motivate GCSE groups.
Triumphs Show 103: Using active learning to motivate GCSE groups
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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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Why can't they just live together happily, Miss?' Unravelling the complexities of the Arab-Israeli conflict at GCSE
Teaching History article
How often do our students long for black and white rather than the shades of grey that history generally presents us with? Understanding the Arab-Israeli conflict is all about understanding diversity and complexity in all their shades of grey. Alison Stephen, teaching in an immensely diverse school herself, is determined...
Why can't they just live together happily, Miss?' Unravelling the complexities of the Arab-Israeli conflict at GCSE
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The Spice of Life? Ensuring variety when teaching about the Treaty of Versailles
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Much has been said and written about different learning styles in recent years. Some people have responded with evangelical enthusiasm, others exercise a more cautious approach, whilst a few disregard it completely. Certainly, there are...
The Spice of Life? Ensuring variety when teaching about the Treaty of Versailles
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Does the linguistic release the conceptual? Helping Year 10 to improve their casual reasoning
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Does new vocabulary help students to express existing ideas for which they do not yet have words or does it actually give them new ideas which they did not previously hold? James Woodcock asks whether...
Does the linguistic release the conceptual? Helping Year 10 to improve their casual reasoning
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The teaching and learning of history for 15-16 year olds: have the Japanese anything to learn from the English experience
Teaching History article
What would you expect the differences to be between Japan and England in how pupils learn history in the post-14 phase? Perhaps your guess would be: Japanese school students learn a lot of historical facts and focus upon their own identity and English school students talk a lot more in...
The teaching and learning of history for 15-16 year olds: have the Japanese anything to learn from the English experience
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Stretching the straight jacket of assessment: use of role play and practical demonstration to enrich pupils' experience of history at GCSE and beyond
Teaching History article
As in his previous, popular and influential Teaching History articles, Ian Luff has once again provided us with a wide range of high-quality, practical activities informed by a rigorous and persuasive rationale. This time, he has turned his attention to the use of role play and active demonstration at GCSE...
Stretching the straight jacket of assessment: use of role play and practical demonstration to enrich pupils' experience of history at GCSE and beyond
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'What's that stuff you're listening to Sir?' Rock and pop music as a rich source for historical enquiry
Teaching History article
Building on the wonderful articles by Mastin and Sweerts & Grice in TH 108, Simon Butler urges us here to make greater use of rock and pop music in history classrooms. His reasons are persuasive. First, it provides a rich vein of initial stimulus material to tap, helping us to...
'What's that stuff you're listening to Sir?' Rock and pop music as a rich source for historical enquiry
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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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Getting Year 10 to understand the value of precise factual knowledge
Teaching History article
Up until the early 1990s, historical knowledge sometimes had rather a bad press. Various developments, in National Curriculum, at GCSE and, importantly, in ordinary teachers’ practice and debate, then led to a much closer integration of what we once called ‘content’ and ‘skills’. Tony McAleavy examined changing perceptions of the...
Getting Year 10 to understand the value of precise factual knowledge
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'Now listen to Source A' : Music and History
Teaching History article
In Steve Mastin’s classroom, pupils do not just read, look at and observe their historical sources. They listen to them. Steve’s classroom is already full of music. He uses it variously - to focus, settle or simply to expand the cultural curiosity of his pupils. Pupils expect to walk in...
'Now listen to Source A' : Music and History
