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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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Transforming Year 11's conceptual understanding of change
Teaching History article
For all that history teachers appreciate the need to build substantive knowledge and conceptual understanding systematically over time, they are also likely to have experienced that sickening moment when they realise that a Year 11 pupil has somehow missed something fundamental.
In Anna Fielding's case, her pupil's misconception was related to...
Transforming Year 11's conceptual understanding of change
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Helping Year 9s explore multiple narratives through the history of a house
Teaching History article
A host of histories: helping Year 9s explore multiple narratives through the history of a house
Described by the author Monica Ali as a building that ‘sparks the imagination and sparks conversations', 19 Princelet Street, now a Museum of Diversity and Immigration, captivated the imagination of teacher David Waters. He...
Helping Year 9s explore multiple narratives through the history of a house
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Triumphs Show 155: beyond trivial judgements of 'bias'
Teaching History feature: celebrating and sharing success
Towards victory in that battle...
10A were nearly a term into their GCSE history course, working on an 1890-1918 British history ‘depth study'. They had already completed work on the Liberal welfare reforms and on the women's suffrage movement, and they had been practising a range of source evaluation approaches....
Triumphs Show 155: beyond trivial judgements of 'bias'
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Remembering the First World War: Using a battlefield tour of the Western Front
Teaching History article
Remembering the First World War: Using a battlefield tour of the Western Front to help pupils take a more critical approach to what they encounter
The first year of the government's First World War Centenary Battlefield Tours Programme is now under way, allowing increasing numbers of students from across Britain...
Remembering the First World War: Using a battlefield tour of the Western Front
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Cunning Plan 152.1: visual sources
Teaching History feature
The principles outlined here were developed in response to three key concerns. The first was consideration of the needs of students learning English as an additional language who face particular challenges with reading and writing.
Images could perhaps offer them more direct, less abstract, ways into an understanding of challenging...
Cunning Plan 152.1: visual sources
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Why we would miss controlled assessments in history
Teaching History article
A place for individual enquiry? Why we would miss controlled assessments in history
Most history teachers will, at some point, recognise the tension between teaching an engaging history course while at the same time meeting the requirements of an exam specification. Mark Fowle and Ben Egelnick reflect here on how...
Why we would miss controlled assessments in history
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Developing awareness of the need to select evidence
Teaching History article
Let's play Supermarket ‘Evidential' Sweep: developing students' awareness of the need to select evidence
Despite having built a sustained focus on historical thinking into their planning for progression across Years 7 to 13, Rachel Foster and Sarah Gadd remained frustrated with stubborn weaknesses in the evidential thinking of students in...
Developing awareness of the need to select evidence
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Continuity in the treatment of mental health through time
Teaching History article
Where's the other ‘c'? Year 9 examine continuity in the treatment of mental health through time
Helen Murray, Rachel Burney and Andrew Stacey-Chapman show how they strengthened three goals of their practice - secure knowledge, narrative shapes and conceptual analysis - by securing strong connection between them. The curricular focus...
Continuity in the treatment of mental health through time
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Planning and teaching linear GCSE
Teaching History article
Planning and teaching linear GCSE: inspiring interest, maximising memory and practising productively
As proposed changes to the National Curriculum are furiously debated, and details of future changes to GCSE are anxiously awaited, history teachers in England are already wrestling with the implications of one change to the public examination system:...
Planning and teaching linear GCSE
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An attempt to make Year 9 Masters of Learning
Teaching History article
‘Much to learn you still have!' An attempt to make Year 9 Masters of Learning
How can history teachers structure learning pathways through historical content in ways that engage and challenge all pupils, that enable them to work at an appropriate pace and that also encourage pupils to self-assess and...
An attempt to make Year 9 Masters of Learning
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Move Me On 149: how to provide appropriate support for particular students
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem: Helen Troy is uncertain how to provide appropriate support for certain students without restricting what they can achieve.
Helen showed considerable determination in securing her teacher training place. Her own education had been within a highly selective school system and her first application was unsuccessful because of...
Move Me On 149: how to provide appropriate support for particular students
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Designing an enquiry in a challenging setting
Teaching History article
The Association for Historical Dialogue and Research (AHDR) is a Cyprus-based organization that works to foster dialogue among history teachers and other educators across the divide in Cyprus. In one of their UN-funded projects, ADHR members worked with UK colleagues to shape a lesson sequence and resources on the Ottoman period...
Designing an enquiry in a challenging setting
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Cunning Plan 149.2: Exploring the Migration experience
Teaching History feature
Teaching a class of newly arrived immigrant teenagers from various backgrounds and ethnicities poses many interesting challenges: varied levels of schooling, varied levels of mastery in a new language, no common frame of reference, varied ways of understanding and making sense of the world and very varied ways of making...
Cunning Plan 149.2: Exploring the Migration experience
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'...trying to count the stars': using the story of Bergen-Belsen to teach the Holocaust
Teaching History article
Maria Osowiecki's search for the right questions to frame her students' study of the Holocaust was driven initially by the proximity of her school to the site of Bergen-Belsen, and the particular interests and concerns of her students as members of British Forces families. But, as this article richly demonstrates,...
'...trying to count the stars': using the story of Bergen-Belsen to teach the Holocaust
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Competition and counterfactuals without confusion
Teaching History article
Paula Worth was searching not only for a rigorous question, capable of engendering genuine debate, but also for an engaging and enjoyable activity that would secure GCSE students' substantive knowledge. The answer - or rather the question - lay in counterfactual thinking: a carefully crafted game that she devised, based...
Competition and counterfactuals without confusion
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English Heritage and Historical Association Local Heritage Project
Article
One year ago (2011), the south eastern branch of English Heritage and the Historical Association came together to see what we could do better in partnership. The outcome was the Local Heritage Partnership Project. The vision was to work together to provide access to and inspiration to carry out local...
English Heritage and Historical Association Local Heritage Project
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Triumphs Show 148.2: using pupil dialogue to encourage engagement with sources
Teaching History feature
Using pupil dialogue to encourage sophisticated engagement with source material - even at GCSE!
Frustrated by the mechanistic approach that their pupils were using when working with historical sources, Tim Jenner and Paul Nightingale sought to experiment with a method of teaching sources which eschewed practice source questions in favour...
Triumphs Show 148.2: using pupil dialogue to encourage engagement with sources
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Out went Caesar and in came the Conqueror: A case study in professional thinking
Teaching History article
A case study in professional thinking
Michael Fordham examines the evolution of his own practice as an example of how history teachers draw upon collective, professional knowledge constructed by other history teachers in journals, books, conferences and seminars. Fordham explains how a particular Year 7 enquiry examining historical change from the...
Out went Caesar and in came the Conqueror: A case study in professional thinking
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Hidden histories and heroism: post-14 course on multi-cultural Britain since 1945
Teaching History Article
A school-designed, post-14 course on multi-cultural Britain since 1945
Robin Whitburn and Sharon Yemoh describe the design of a school-generated GCSE course on the challenges that British people faced in forging a multicultural society in post-imperial Britain. Drawing on their own research into their students' experience, they build a discipline-based case...
Hidden histories and heroism: post-14 course on multi-cultural Britain since 1945
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Cunning Plan 147: Getting students to use classical texts
Teaching History feature
The following plan provides a more detailed practical example of the approaches discussed in the article on using ancient texts.
Having puzzled over what ancient texts actually are - carefully constructed interpretations? testimonies? (but testimonies to what?) myths? - I wanted my Ancient History GCSE class to engage in this...
Cunning Plan 147: Getting students to use classical texts
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Teaching History 147: Curriculum Architecture
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
02 Editorial
03 HA Secondary News
04 HA Update
08 Beth Baker and Steven Mastin - Did Alexander really ask, ‘Do I appear to you to be a bastard?' Using ancient texts to improve pupils' critical thinking (Read article)
14 Cunning Plan: Getting students to use classical texts - Beth Baker...
Teaching History 147: Curriculum Architecture
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Using family history to provoke rigorous enquiry
Teaching History article
The idea of using ‘little stories' to illuminate the ‘big pictures' of the past was creatively explored in Teaching History 107, which offered teachers a wealth of detailed vignettes with which to kindle young people's interest and illuminate major historical events. Paul Barrett builds on the ideas explored in that...
Using family history to provoke rigorous enquiry
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England's Immigrants 1330-1550
Multipage Article
An HA Podcast with Professor Mark Ormrod of the University of York looking at the research project England's Immigrants 1330-1550. In this podcast Professor Ormrod explores the extensive archival evidence about the names, origins, occupations and households of a significant number of foreigners who chose to make their lives and livelihoods in...
England's Immigrants 1330-1550
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Exploring diversity at GCSE
Teaching History article
Having already reflected on ways of improving their students' understanding of historical diversity at Key Stage 3, Joanne Philpott and Daniel Guiney set themselves the challenge of extending this to post-14 students by means of fieldwork activities at First World War battlefields sites. In addition, they wanted to link the study...
Exploring diversity at GCSE
