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Approaches to planning interpretations-focused enquiries.
Article
Michael Riley, member of the HA Secondary Committee and History PGCE Tutor at Bath Spa University. In recent years, teaching about different interpretations of history has been one of the most exciting and challenging aspects of Key Stage 3 history. Interpretations-focused enquiries allow pupils to see that argument and debate are...
Approaches to planning interpretations-focused enquiries.
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Getting Year 7 to set their own questions about the Islamic Empire, 600-1600
Teaching History article
Sometimes particular problems can lead to unexpected solutions. In this case, Sally Burnham decided to solve a problem that she had identified among her Year 12 students by changing the way in which she teaches Year 7. Her Year 12s were finding it difficult to set appropriate questions for their...
Getting Year 7 to set their own questions about the Islamic Empire, 600-1600
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Using 1980s popular music to explore historical significance
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Scott Allsop helped his students to uncover the implicit criteria informing someone else's attribution of historical significance to past events. That ‘someone else' was Billy Joel whose 1989 song became the focus for deconstructive analysis....
Using 1980s popular music to explore historical significance
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Is any explanation better than none?
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
What do we know about progression in historical understanding? In Teaching History 113, Lee and Shemilt discussed what progression models can and cannot do to help us think about measuring and developing pupils' understanding and...
Is any explanation better than none?
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Information and Evidence In a Nutshell
Article
Nutshell, what's the National Curriculum Attainment Target on about when it contrasts "information" and "evidence"? Aren't they the same thing?
They aren't really things. The contrast is between ways of thinking about knowledge rather than between things.
Pardon me?
One way of talking about knowledge involves ‘looking things up': we...
Information and Evidence In a Nutshell
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Are we creating a generation of 'historical tourists'?
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
A trip to the battlefields of the First World War throws into stark relief the challenges presented by work on interpretations related to historical sites. Andrew Wrenn first drew attention to the difficulties of promoting...
Are we creating a generation of 'historical tourists'?
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A modest proposal for change in Canadian history education
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Peter Seixas recounts the development of a history education reform project in Canada. Like all good histories, it is a complex story and a matter of unanticipated consequences and ironic narrative twists.
Seixas' history is,...
A modest proposal for change in Canadian history education
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Triumphs Show 137: Assessing through reflection
Teaching History feature
Assessing through reflection:
How one history department has found a way to satisfy the Senior Leadership Team, parents and pupils through tightly focused self-assessment Teachers are caught between a rock and hard place when it comes to assessment. Senior leaders want to see evidence of regular ‘levelling' while (most) pupils...
Triumphs Show 137: Assessing through reflection
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Building and assessing a frame of reference in the Netherlands
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Concerns about our ability to equip young people with a frame of reference that they can actually use to orient themselves in time are widespread. The challenges were extensively debated within the last issue of...
Building and assessing a frame of reference in the Netherlands
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What they think they know: the impact of pupils' preconceptions on their understanding of historical significance
Teaching History article
Robin Conway suspected that his students’ concepts of the significance of different aspects of historical periods was affected by the preconceptions that they brought to his lessons. These preconceptions were leading his students into making unhistorical judgments, without any real understanding on their part of what had affected their thinking....
What they think they know: the impact of pupils' preconceptions on their understanding of historical significance
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Politics, history and stories about the Cold War
Article
Interpretation of the Cold War is a fascinating area. Many students begin to study it certain pre-formed ideas – gleaned from their parents, perhaps, or from films or computer games. Historians have interpreted it in different ways – and those who believe in the ‘twenty-year rule’ that historical judgment is...
Politics, history and stories about the Cold War
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Top Tip: Approaches to planning interpretations-focused enquiries.
Article
Top Tip: Approaches to planning interpretations-focused enquiries.
Top Tip: Approaches to planning interpretations-focused enquiries.
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Polychronicon 118: interpretations of Henry VII
Teaching History feature
Polychronicon was a fourteenth-century chronicle that brought together much of the knowledge of its own age. Our Polychronicon in Teaching History is a regular feature helping school history teachers to update their subject knowledge, with special emphasis on recent historiography and changing interpretation. This edition of 'Polychronicon' explores the historical...
Polychronicon 118: interpretations of Henry VII
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Polychronicon 114: interpretations of Oliver Cromwell
Teaching History feature
Polychronicon was a fourteenth-century chronicle that brought together much of the knowledge of its own age. Our Polychronicon in Teaching History is a regular feature helping school history teachers to update their subject knowledge, with special emphasis on recent historiography and changing interpretation. This edition of 'Polychronicon' investigates the differing...
Polychronicon 114: interpretations of Oliver Cromwell
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Teaching history's big pictures: including continuity as well as change
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
School history teachers are not the only ones wrestling with the challenges of building ‘big pictures' that do justice to complexity. In this article, social and cultural historian Penelope Corfield puts our interest in long-term...
Teaching history's big pictures: including continuity as well as change
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Building memory and meaning
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Sarah Gadd attempted to re-think her department's usual approach to the two-year Key Stage 3. Concerned that a thematic approach might not be securing the overview perspective it was designed to achieve, she decided instead...
Building memory and meaning
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Potential and pitfalls in teaching 'big pictures' of the past
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Jonathan Howson summarises findings from the recent ESRC funded research project - Usable Historical Pasts - and suggests how its insights might inform continuing professional debate and enquiry concerning both frameworks and ‘big pictures'.
In...
Potential and pitfalls in teaching 'big pictures' of the past
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Shaping macro-analysis from micro-history
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Many history teachers are inspired by the work of historians and want to share their stories and arguments with students in school. Hywel Jones found Malcolm Gaskill's Witchfinders ‘gripping and intriguing'.
He decided to use...
Shaping macro-analysis from micro-history
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What is APP?
Article
Assessing Pupils' Progress in History
APP is a tool to view pupil progress periodically by making use of collections of day to day learning in order to ‘make periodic judgements on pupils' progress using a wide range of evidence taken from a variety of classroom contexts.'[i] QCDA is currently working...
What is APP?
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What is bias?
Article
There is a nice story about how Calvin Coolidge went to hear a clergyman preach on sin. 'What did he say?' he was asked. 'He said he was against it', Coolidge replied. The history teacher or student, well used by know to the normal form of questions at GCSE, might...
What is bias?
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Rethinking progression in historical interpretations through the British Empire
Teaching History article
Let’s stop saying sorry for the Empire! Thus Mastin and Wallace introduce one of their lessons on interpretations of the British Empire. They develop Gary Howells’s ideas from the previous edition of Teaching History to demonstrate exactly what we might get our students to do with interpretations of the past....
Rethinking progression in historical interpretations through the British Empire
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Interpretations and history teaching
Teaching History article
Gary Howells offers us a challenge: are we sure that we are teaching the study of interpretations correctly? It is much criticised at GCSE, but do we really engage our students in the process of writing history, and in understanding how history works, from 11-14? Or do we use reductive...
Interpretations and history teaching
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How did changing conceptions of place lead to conflict in the American West? Reflecting on revision methods for GCSE
Teaching History article
Mary Woolley decided to make four revision sheets for her lower-band Year 11 set. Each was to help them view their American West study through a different lens. She was rather uncertain, however (and so were the pupils) about her fourth sheet on places. Her reflections on the revision sheet...
How did changing conceptions of place lead to conflict in the American West? Reflecting on revision methods for GCSE
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Sense, relationship and power: uncommon views of place
Teaching History article
Liz Taylor invites history teachers to consider how diverse and uncommon the ‘common’ person’s experience of place might be. She draws upon cultural geography to show how words like ‘place’, ‘space’ and ‘landscape’ can be unpacked and questioned and so become better tools for pupils’ critical thinking in both geography...
Sense, relationship and power: uncommon views of place
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Using fictional characters to explore the relationship between historical interpretation and contemporary attitude
Teaching History article
Helping students to understand how and why people in the present interpret the past differently is a challenge. It is also vital if we are to develop an understanding of why the meanings we ascribe to the past are not fixed, but rather are subject to our own prejudices or...
Using fictional characters to explore the relationship between historical interpretation and contemporary attitude
