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Found 239 results matching 'brief history'

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  • Short cuts to deep knowledge

      Teaching History article
    Sam Pullan explains how a chance encounter has helped him to improve his introduction to the modern themes and founding documents of US politics. Working with a professional historian whom he met, by chance, over dinner, he was able to produce lessons at the cutting edge of subject knowledge to...
    Short cuts to deep knowledge

  • Being an historian

      Teaching History article
    In this article, Robin Conway and Amy Scott show how they made use of online source archives to replicate the experience of an academic historian in the classroom. By changing the way that students approach sources, moving away from both ‘fun activities’ and formulaic exam preparation towards a more authentic experience, they show how students’ interpretation of sources can demonstratehigher-level thinking. Through the use...
    Being an historian

  • Do we have to read all of this?' Encouraging students to read for understanding

      Teaching History article
    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. What’s the hardest part of history? Heads of Year 9 at options time seem depressingly clear - ‘Don’t do history, there’s too much writing.’ David Hellier and Helen Richards show that at The Green School...
    Do we have to read all of this?' Encouraging students to read for understanding

  • Thinking from the inside: je suis le roi

      Teaching History article
    Dale Banham and Ian Dawson show how active learning deepens students’ understanding of attitudes and reactions to the Norman Conquest. At the same time they build a bold argument for active learning, including a direct strike at the two most common objections to it. Many teachers still see it as...
    Thinking from the inside: je suis le roi

  • It’s just reading, right? Exploring how Year 12 students approach sources

      Teaching History article
    Frustrated by the generic statements that her Year 12 students were making about sources, Jacqueline Vyrnwy-Pierce resolved to undertake a research project into how her students were approaching sources about the French Revolution. Fascinated by the research of American educational psychologist Sam Wineburg, Vyrnwy-Pierce decided to use Wineburg’s methods to find...
    It’s just reading, right? Exploring how Year 12 students approach sources

  • Using the concept of place to help Year 9 students to visualise the complexities of the Holocaust

      Teaching History article
    Inspired by the work of the social and cultural historian Tim Cole, Stuart Farley decided to look again at the way he teaches the Holocaust. He wanted to focus on the geographical concept of place as a way of enabling his Year 9 students to build far more diverse narratives,...
    Using the concept of place to help Year 9 students to visualise the complexities of the Holocaust

  • Deepening Year 9’s knowledge for better causation arguments

      Teaching History article
    Frustrated by her students’ glib use of catch-all terms such as ‘militarism’ in addressing causation, Alexia Michalaki wanted her Year 9 students to produce mature causal explanations of World War I. To encourage this to happen she went back into decades of pedagogical writing and research, teasing out the ways...
    Deepening Year 9’s knowledge for better causation arguments

  • Year 9 use sources to explore contemporary meanings and understandings of appeasement

      Teaching History article
    After reflecting on the difference between his study of source extracts at university and how he was using source extracts in the classroom, Jonathan Sellin went in search of a new way to help his pupils to situate sources in context. Finding inspiration in the work of intellectual historian Quentin...
    Year 9 use sources to explore contemporary meanings and understandings of appeasement

  • Why does anyone do anything? Attempts to improve agentive explanations with Year 12

      Teaching History article
    In this article Sophie Harley-McKeown identifies and addresses her Year 12 students’ blind spot over agentive explanation. Noticing that the examination board to which she teaches uses ‘motivations’ rather than ‘aims’ prompted her to consider whether her students really knew what that meant. Finding that her students’ causal explanations tended...
    Why does anyone do anything? Attempts to improve agentive explanations with Year 12

  • The dialogic dimensions of knowing and understanding the Norman legacy in Chester

      Teaching History article
    Michael Bird and Thomas Wilson focus their attention directly on the voices of pupils, in dialogue with their teacher and with each other, as they draw inferences from differing sources about the Norman legacy in Chester. By carefully examining dialogue stimulated by these sources, Bird and Wilson demonstrate not only...
    The dialogic dimensions of knowing and understanding the Norman legacy in Chester

  • 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

  • Essay writing for everyone: an investigation into different methods used to teach Year 9 to write an essay

      Teaching History article
    Essay writing is at the very heart of school history, yet despite the wide range of developments in this area over the past decade, pupils still struggle. Alex Scott and his department decided to investigate a variety of methods to see what methods worked in enabling pupils to construct essays...
    Essay writing for everyone: an investigation into different methods used to teach Year 9 to write an essay

  • And Joe arrives...: stretching the very able pupil in the mixed ability classroom

      Articles
    Kate Hammond examines a sequence of three history lessons in order to evaluate techniques for stretching a very able 11 year-old. She adopts a complex blend of differentiation strategies. Rather than merely bolting on ‘extension activities', she starts with demanding objectives for all, as the whole-class entitlement. She then attempts...
    And Joe arrives...: stretching the very able pupil in the mixed ability classroom

  • From road map to thought map: helping students theorise the nature of change

      Teaching History article
    Warren Valentine was dissatisfied with his Year 7 students’ accounts of change across the Tudor period. Fixated with Henry VIII’s wives, they failed to reflect on or analyse the bigger picture of the whole Tudor narrative. In order to overcome this problem, his department created a ‘thought-map’ exercise in which...
    From road map to thought map: helping students theorise the nature of change

  • Move Me On 162: Reading

      Teaching History feature
    This issue’s problem: James Connolly is finding it difficult to judge how much or what kind of reading he should expect of his students. James Connolly, an eager and knowledgeable historian, has frequently struggled to pitch things appropriately for students. This applies particularly to his expectations of their reading, but also...
    Move Me On 162: Reading

  • 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

  • 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

  • Triumphs Show 159: teaching paragraph construction

      Teaching History feature
    My adventures in dancing in the classroom started back in the autumn term. I was working with a group of Year 8 students looking at interpretations of King John and we were selecting and analysing quotations from historians as part of the enquiry question ‘Was King John really so bad?' My students were struggling with...
    Triumphs Show 159: teaching paragraph construction

  • Helping Year 9 evaluate explanations for the Holocaust

      Teaching History article
    ‘It made my brain hurt, but in a good way': helping Year 9 learn to make and to evaluate explanations for the Holocaust Why genocides occur is a perplexing and complex question. Leanne Judson reports a strategy designed to help students think about perpetration and evaluate and propose explanations for...
    Helping Year 9 evaluate explanations for the Holocaust

  • Helping Year 9 debate the purposes of genocide education

      Teaching History article
    Connecting the dots: helping Year 9 to debate the purposes of Holocaust and genocide education Why do we teach about the Holocaust and about other genocides? The Holocaust has been a compulsory part of the English National Curriculum since 1991; however, curriculum documents say little about why pupils should learn...
    Helping Year 9 debate the purposes of genocide education

  • Developing students' thinking about change and continuity

      Teaching History article
    The more things change, the more they stay the same: developing students' thinking about change and continuity Finding ways to characterise the nature of change and continuity is an important part of the historian's task, yet students find it particularly challenging to do. Building on her previous work on change, Rachel...
    Developing students' thinking about change and continuity

  • Improving Year 12's extended writing

      Teaching History article
    From Muddleton Manor to Clarity Cathedral: improving Year 12's extended writing through an enhanced sense of the reader Mary Brown recognised that her A-level students were finding extended writing difficult, particularly in terms of guiding the reader through the argument with appropriate ‘signposting'. To help her students manage this, Brown...
    Improving Year 12's extended writing

  • 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

  • Triumphs Show 148.1: collaborating to commemorate Olaudah Equiano

      Teaching History feature
    How a drink in the bar at the SHP conference - and discovery of a shared interest in ICT - led to the campaign for a Blue Plaque for an eighteenth-century abolitionist. What do the 1970 Brazil World Cup-winning team, Charles Darwin and Vanilla Ice all have in common? This...
    Triumphs Show 148.1: collaborating to commemorate Olaudah Equiano