Found 84 results matching 'revolutions' within Secondary > Curriculum > A Level   (Clear filter)

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  • Chatting about the sixties: historical reasoning in essay-writing

      Teaching History article
    An article about essay writing may not seem the most obvious choice for an issue of Teaching History devoted to creative thinking. Yet, as Christine Counsell so richly demonstrated in her work on analytical and discursive writing, the process of crafting an argument is a highly complex and creative challenge....
    Chatting about the sixties: historical reasoning in essay-writing
  • Cunning Plan 190: Using art to make A-level history more accessible

      Teaching History feature
    Many pupils love the Horrible Histories books, television programmes and songs. Over the years a number of A-level pupils have proudly told me that it was Horrible Histories that sparked their love of the subject, and they are quick to recite the songs word for word! But it is also the...
    Cunning Plan 190: Using art to make A-level history more accessible
  • Triumphs Show 182: A public lecture series

      Teaching History feature
    The history we present to students, however rigorous and challenging, and however full of integrity in eflecting history as a discipline, is a shiny show of our best resources. Peeling back this curtain and allowing students to see the real world of academic history was a major motivation in inviting some...
    Triumphs Show 182: A public lecture series
  • Allowing A-level students to choose their own coursework focus

      Teaching History article
    Faced with the introduction of the new A-levels in 2015 and with a move to a new school, Eleanor Thomas took the opportunity to embrace yet another challenge: giving her students a complete free choice about the focus of their non-examined  assessment (NEA). This article presents the rationale for her...
    Allowing A-level students to choose their own coursework focus
  • New, Novice or Nervous? 172: Curriculum planning

      Teaching History feature: the quick guide to the ‘no-quick-fix’
    This page is for those new to the published writings of history teachers. Each problem you wrestle with, other teachers have wrestled with too. Quick fixes don’t exist. But in others’ writing, you’ll find something better: conversations in which history teachers have debated or tackled your problems – conversations which...
    New, Novice or Nervous? 172: Curriculum planning
  • Dealing with the consequences

      Teaching History journal article
    Do GCSE and A-level questions that purport to be about consequences actually reward reasoning about historical consequences at all? Molly-Ann Navey concluded that they do not and that they fail to encourage the kind of argument that academic historians engage in when reaching judgements about consequences. Navey decided that it...
    Dealing with the consequences
  • Cultivating curiosity about complexity

      Teaching History article
    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. A great deal has been written recently about the importance of encouraging and enabling all students to read beyond their comfort zones, beyond the textbook and certainly beyond the obvious requirements of an examination specification....
    Cultivating curiosity about complexity
  • Polychronicon 166: The ‘new’ historiography of the Cold War

      Teaching History feature
    A great deal of new writing on the Cold War sits at the crossroads of national, transnational and global perspectives. Such studies can be so self-consciously multi-archival and multipolar, methodologically pluralist in approach and often ‘decentring’ in aim, that some scholars now worry that the Cold War risks losing its coherence as a distinct object of...
    Polychronicon 166: The ‘new’ historiography of the Cold War
  • 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
  • Does the grammatical ‘release the conceptual’?

      Teaching History article
    Jim Carroll noticed basic literacy errors in his Year 13s’ writing, but on closer examination decided that these were not best addressed purely as literacy issues. Through an intervention based on clauses, Carroll managed to enable his students to write better, but he did this by teasing out principles of...
    Does the grammatical ‘release the conceptual’?
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • The Harkness Method: achieving higher-order thinking with sixth-form

      Teaching History article
    Hark the herald tables sing! Achieving higher-order thinking with a chorus of sixth-form pupils On 9 April 1930, a philanthropist called Edward Harkness donated millions of dollars to the Phillips Exeter Academy in the USA. He hoped that his donation could be used to find a new way for students to sit around a table...
    The Harkness Method: achieving higher-order thinking with sixth-form
  • 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
  • Move Me On 154: Mixed Ability Groups

      Teaching History feature
    This issue's problem:Joe Priestley is having problems providing sufficient challenge for the higher attainers within his mixed ability groups Joe Priestley has settled into his training placement very well and has impressed other members of the history department with his lively and engaging ideas. In his early teaching he was...
    Move Me On 154: Mixed Ability Groups
  • Carr, Evans, Oakshott and Rudge: the benefits of AEA history

      Teaching History article
    Sometimes the only way to go beyond the exam is to take another, more difficult, test. For the top—the very top—A2 students, there is such a test available. The Advanced Extension Award [AEA] is a history paper which encourages students finishing their school careers to think about history in a...
    Carr, Evans, Oakshott and Rudge: the benefits of AEA history
  • Assessment of students' uses of evidence

      Teaching History article
    Drawing on her research into students' evidential reasoning, Elisabeth Pickles explores the possibilities for how such reasoning might be assessed. Existing exam mark schemes focus too heavily on generic processes involved in the analysis of source material and insufficiently on the historical validity of reasoning and conclusions produced. Approaching the...
    Assessment of students' uses of evidence
  • Developing sixth-form students' thinking about historical interpretation

      Teaching History article
    Understanding historical interpretation involves understanding how historical knowledge is constructed. How do sixth formers model historical epistemology? In this article Arthur Chapman examines a small sample of data relating to sixth form students' ideas about why historians construct differing interpretations of the past. He argues that understanding interpretation requires students to...
    Developing sixth-form students' thinking about historical interpretation
  • OCR History A Level History: Democracy and Dictatorship in Germany 1919-63

      Review
    Professor Mary Fulbrook and David Williamson with Nick Fellows and Mike Wells Review by Barbara Hibbert This resource is one of a series produced by Heinemann to support the new OCR History A AS course.  It claims that it ‘exactly reflects the key issues and skills in the specification topics'. ...
    OCR History A Level History: Democracy and Dictatorship in Germany 1919-63
  • Couching counterfactuals in knowledge when explaining the Salem witch trials with Year 13

      Teaching History journal article
    Puzzled by the shrugs and unimaginative responses of his students when asked certain counterfactual questions, James Edward Carroll set out to explore what types of counterfactual questions would elicit sophisticated causal explanations. During his pursuit of the ‘gold standard’ of counterfactual reasoning, Carroll drew upon theories of academic history in...
    Couching counterfactuals in knowledge when explaining the Salem witch trials with Year 13
  • Polychronicon 170: The Becket Dispute

      Journal article
    ‘The Becket Dispute’ (or ‘Controversy’) refers to the quarrel between Henry II and Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, which dominated English ecclesiastical politics in the 1160s. It was a conflict with multiple dimensions: a clash of Church and State; a prolonged struggle between two prominent individuals; a close friendship turned...
    Polychronicon 170: The Becket Dispute
  • ‘This extract is no good, Miss!’

      Journal article
    Frustrated that her A-level students were being overly dismissive when asked to judge the convincingness of academic historians’ arguments, Paula Worth drew on previous history-teacher research and theories of history for inspiration. After noting that her students would unjustly reject esteemed historians’ accounts for lack of comprehensiveness, Worth explains here...
    ‘This extract is no good, Miss!’
  • Reading? What reading?

      Journal article
    Discussions with sixth-form students about reading led Carolyn Massey and Paul Wiggin to start a sixth-formreading group. They describe here the series of themed sessions that they planned, and the student discussion and reflections that resulted. Listening to their students discuss their reading led Massey and  Wiggin to reflect on what is meant by ‘reading around’ the subject, and its role in students’ intellectual...
    Reading? What reading?
  • Worlds in collision: university tutor and student perspectives on the transition to degree level history

      Teaching History article
    What does it mean to be good at history? At certain times during their formal education students seem to be required to adjust their understanding of what studying history entails. Alan Booth writes from the viewpoint of a university tutor. He has collated ‘student voice’ on the experience of studying...
    Worlds in collision: university tutor and student perspectives on the transition to degree level history