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Move Me On 186: trainee provides little scope for students to use their knowledge in analysis/argument
Teaching History feature
Move Me On is designed to build critical, informed debate about the character of teacher training, teacher education and professional development. It is also designed to offer practical help to all involved in training new history teachers. Each issue presents a situation in initial teacher education/training with an emphasis upon...
Move Me On 186: trainee provides little scope for students to use their knowledge in analysis/argument
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What’s The Wisdom On... Extended writing
Teaching History feature
Writing history is hard! But the things that make it challenging are the things that make it worth doing. They are also the key to enabling all students to write, to embrace the challenge and to enjoy its rewards enough to keep going. A big mistake is to kid ourselves...
What’s The Wisdom On... Extended writing
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HA Update: History for all – a wider view
Teaching History feature
In this update, I plan to share ideas and practice from colleagues who lead and teach history in special schools in the northeast of England. Ten years have passed since the publication of History for All and this therefore seems a good moment for reflection. By 2011, in many of England’s schools,...
HA Update: History for all – a wider view
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Triumphs Show: Making their historical writing explode
Teaching History feature
‘Who hates PEE paragraphs?’ A collective groan resounds around my classroom. ‘Today, Year 10 we are going to master PEE paragraphs, and make our written historical explanations explode.’
I always remember one deflated Year 10 student who said, ‘Miss, I just don’t get PEE paragraphs. I couldn’t do them in Year 7, and I still...
Triumphs Show: Making their historical writing explode
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Transatlantic slavery – shaping the question, lengthening the narrative, broadening the meaning
Teaching History article
Nathanael Davies explains his radical rethink of how to teach transatlantic slavery. He explains how he came to question his earlier approach of focusing on the causation of ‘abolition’ and ‘emancipation’ and, instead, allowed scholarship, sources and his own students’ meaning-making to guide him to a different, and much more...
Transatlantic slavery – shaping the question, lengthening the narrative, broadening the meaning
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Using extra-curricular opportunities to broaden students’ encounters with history
Teaching History article
In this article, Jess Angell shows how her department seeks to make extra-curricular activities accessible to all. There is a strong focus on involving professional historians, since so many students seem not to understand who historians are, or what they do. But the audience is wider than just history students:...
Using extra-curricular opportunities to broaden students’ encounters with history
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How introducing cultural and intellectual history improves critical analysis in the classroom
Teaching History article
In his article in this journal just over a year ago, Steven Driver set out his vision for a less myopic range of topics in A-level coursework. In this edition, Driver demonstrates how he has built student enthusiasm for, and knowledge of, a topic which he had previously identified as...
How introducing cultural and intellectual history improves critical analysis in the classroom
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Teaching History 173: Opening Doors
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
02 Editorial (Read article)
03 HA Secondary News
04 HA Update
08 Identity in history: why it matters and must be addressed! – Sophia Nzeribe Nascimento (Read article)
20 Triumphs Show: teaching Black Tudors as a window into Tudor England – Chris Lewis (Read article)
23 Cunning Plan... to use Black Tudors as a...
Teaching History 173: Opening Doors
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‘Its ultimate pattern was greater than its parts’
Teaching History journal article
Identifying the challenges his students faced both with recall and analysis of the content they had learned for their GCSE course, Ed Durbin devised a solution which focused not on exam skills and revision lessons, but on using Key Stage 3 to build the ‘hinterland’ of contextual knowledge and causal...
‘Its ultimate pattern was greater than its parts’
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From The Holocaust To Recent Mass Murders And Refugees
IJHLTR Article
International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research [IJHLTR], Volume 14, Number 2 – Spring/Summer 2017ISSN: 14472-9474
Abstract
Through studying cases of genocide and mass atrocities, students can come to realize that: democratic institutions and values are not automatically sustained but need to be appreciated, nurtured, and protected; silence and indifference to the...
From The Holocaust To Recent Mass Murders And Refugees
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Anything but brief: Year 8 students encounter the longue durée
Article
Inspired by The History Manifesto, Suzanne Powell describes in this article her rationale for expanding her students’ horizons by asking them to think about change, similarity and difference on a grand scale. She sets ‘big history’ into its curricular context, and shows the way in which her students could, and...
Anything but brief: Year 8 students encounter the longue durée
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‘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!’
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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
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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
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Direct teaching of paragraph cohesion
Teaching History article
How do we help pupils to write better paragraphs without actually doing it for them? How do we break down the process of essay writing into smaller steps without taking away pupils’ sense of the essay as a whole? How do we give lower-attaining pupils models, structures and frames without...
Direct teaching of paragraph cohesion
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Polychronicon 147: Witchcraft, history and children
Teaching History feature
Witchcraft is serious history. 1612 marks the 400th anniversary of England's biggest peacetime witch trial, that of the Lancashire witches: 20 witches from the Forest of Pendle were imprisoned, ten were hanged in Lancaster, and another in York. As a result of some imaginative commemorative programmes, a number of schools...
Polychronicon 147: Witchcraft, history and children
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Getting ready for the Grand Prix: Learning how to build a substantial argument in year 7
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated
Dale Banham’s Grand Prix race has helped many history teachers in Suffolk to think freshly about metaphors and images that will inspire and enable pupils (especially underachieving boys) to write analytically and at length. In...
Getting ready for the Grand Prix: Learning how to build a substantial argument in year 7
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Transforming historical understanding through scripted drama
Teaching History article
An article on scripted drama might seem an unlikely choice for an edition devoted to getting students talking. Surely the point about a script is that the words used are chosen and prescribed by others. However, the examples presented here by Helen Snelson, Ruth Lingard and Kate Brennan demonstrate how...
Transforming historical understanding through scripted drama
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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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Triumphs Show 144: Active learning to engage ‘challenging students'
Teaching History feature
Active learning to engage and challenge ‘challenging students'
Historical significance may have been the ‘forgotten element' in 2002 when Rob Phillips first offered us the acronym ‘GREAT', but it has been seized upon with enthusiasm by the history education community. Christine Counsell's now famous five ‘R's (remarkable, remembered, resonant, resulting...
Triumphs Show 144: Active learning to engage ‘challenging students'
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Conceptual awareness through categorising: using ICT to get Year 13 reading
Teaching History article
When presenting their practical approaches to post-16 teaching in Teaching History 103, both Richard Harris and Rachael Rudham argued that students need to ‘do’ things with information, to process it, play with it, classify it, if they are ever to understand or remember it. They made a case for not...
Conceptual awareness through categorising: using ICT to get Year 13 reading
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'You be Britain and I'll be Germany...' Inter-school e-mailing in Year 9
Teaching History article
E-mailing is fast becoming our preferred means of communication and for good reason. It is immediate: we can fire off a few lines and receive a reply within seconds. It is also flexible: unlike a telephone conversation, we do not have to reply there and then; we can go away...
'You be Britain and I'll be Germany...' Inter-school e-mailing in Year 9
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Narrative: the under-rated skill
Teaching History article
‘Mere narrative’, ‘lapses into narrative’, ‘a narrative answer that fails to answer the question set’. These phrases flow in the blood of history teachers, from public examination criteria to regular classroom discourse. Whilst most of us use narrative in our teaching methods, we have demonised narrative in pupils’ written answers....
Narrative: the under-rated skill
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Cunning Plan 174: creating a narrative of the interwar years
Teaching History feature
The major aim of this sequence of lessons was to teach Year 8 how to create and refine a narrative. I chose a period I was substantively confident on, which lent itself well to the narrative form, had a number of prominent academic narratives published about it and followed neatly...
Cunning Plan 174: creating a narrative of the interwar years
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You are members of a United Nations Commission...' Recent world crises simulations
Teaching History article
David Ghere presents a teaching and learning rationale for simulations where the location is not identified. This creates a deliberately artificial situation where the student can tackle the problems and carry out the decision-making and problem-solving exercise without preconceptions. The author does not recommend leaving the activity at this stage,...
You are members of a United Nations Commission...' Recent world crises simulations
