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Picturing place: what you get may be more than what you see
Teaching History article
Pictures abound in history classrooms and teachers use them in many different ways. They add - often literally - some colour to the past, helping us to imagine what different worlds were like. Pictures can be used quite legitimately in this way to fire imagination and stimulate interest. But we...
Picturing place: what you get may be more than what you see
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The teaching and learning of history for 15-16 year olds: have the Japanese anything to learn from the English experience
Teaching History article
What would you expect the differences to be between Japan and England in how pupils learn history in the post-14 phase? Perhaps your guess would be: Japanese school students learn a lot of historical facts and focus upon their own identity and English school students talk a lot more in...
The teaching and learning of history for 15-16 year olds: have the Japanese anything to learn from the English experience
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Empathy without illusions
Teaching History article
Empathy may have disappeared from official documents but the history teacher who does not still regularly think about it, plan for it and teach it would be hard to find. What is history if not, in part, an attempt to understand how people thought and felt in the past? This...
Empathy without illusions
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'Please send socks': How much can Reg Wilkes tell us about the Great War?
Teaching History article
This was an opportunity all good historians dream about. A large box crammed with artefacts about a soldier who fought in the First World War, just begging to be read, studied, sorted and organised. Being faced with such a wealth of uncatalogued primary evidence could have proved daunting enough without...
'Please send socks': How much can Reg Wilkes tell us about the Great War?
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'Britain was our home': Helping Years 9, 10, and 11 to understand the black experience of the Second World War
Teaching History article
In this article, Helena Stride shows how the Imperial War Museum responded to criticism that insufficient attention had been paid to the contribution of black and Asian people to Britain’s wars. She focuses on one of two resource-packs produced by the Museum, which highlights the experience of Britain’s colonial peoples,...
'Britain was our home': Helping Years 9, 10, and 11 to understand the black experience of the Second World War
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Professional wrestling in the history department: a case study in planning the teaching of the British Empire at Key Stage 3
Article
Three years ago ( TH 99, Curriculum Planning Edition), Michael Riley illustrated ways in which history departments could exploit the increased flexibility of the revised National Curriculum.1 He showed that precisely-worded enquiry questions, positioned thoughtfully across the Key Stage, help to ensure progression, challenge and coherence. His picturesque image for...
Professional wrestling in the history department: a case study in planning the teaching of the British Empire at Key Stage 3
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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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Meeting the historian through the text
Teaching History article
Edna Shoham and Neomi Shiloah describe a process by which they taught their 15-year-old students to read historians’ accounts for sub-text, meaning and assumptions. In its emphasis on ‘meeting the historian’, their work overlaps with much of the thinking about teaching pupils about historical ‘interpretations’ as specifically required by the...
Meeting the historian through the text
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'What's that stuff you're listening to Sir?' Rock and pop music as a rich source for historical enquiry
Teaching History article
Building on the wonderful articles by Mastin and Sweerts & Grice in TH 108, Simon Butler urges us here to make greater use of rock and pop music in history classrooms. His reasons are persuasive. First, it provides a rich vein of initial stimulus material to tap, helping us to...
'What's that stuff you're listening to Sir?' Rock and pop music as a rich source for historical enquiry
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Reading and enquiring in Years 12 and 13
Teaching History article
Historical enquiry is blooming at Key Stage 3. Thanks to a rich array of source materials available on the web and in textbooks, superb history-specific training courses and genuinely innovative practice in schools, pupils can increasingly be found wrestling with demanding and often lengthy sources. They do this in order...
Reading and enquiring in Years 12 and 13
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'Don't worry, Mr. Trimble. We can handle it' Balancing the rationale and the emotional in teaching of contentious topics
Teaching History article
A common line amongst teachers and policy-makers seeking to theorise a workable relationship between history and the new subject of citizenship is to say that there must be a link with the present. This is harder than it sounds. If the implication is that the study of the past should...
'Don't worry, Mr. Trimble. We can handle it' Balancing the rationale and the emotional in teaching of contentious topics
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'Really weird and freaky': using a Thomas Hardy short story as a source of evidence in the Year 8 classroom
Teaching History article
Can 25 so-called ‘low ability’ girls access 30 pages of difficult text? Yes, much more easily they can access the tiny, sanitised, made-easy ‘gobbets’ that they are normally exposed to in the name of ‘access’. Mary Woolley makes the point that boring texts are those that tell you only essential...
'Really weird and freaky': using a Thomas Hardy short story as a source of evidence in the Year 8 classroom
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Ranking and classifying: teaching political concepts to post-16 students
Teaching History article
Sometimes it is precisely in the interest of building better historical knowledge that facts and detail need temporarily to be abandoned. Gary Howells aims to secure discernible foundation understandings in his students by getting them to engage quickly with those aspects of political concepts that they can grasp. He is...
Ranking and classifying: teaching political concepts to post-16 students
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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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Basket weaving in Advanced level history...how to plan and teach the 100 year study
Teaching History article
The current specifications for AS/A2 history require students to study change over a period of at least 100 years. Given that the 100 year study represents just one module out of six and also that it may not complement any of the other modules selected and may therefore be wholly...
Basket weaving in Advanced level history...how to plan and teach the 100 year study
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Getting Year 10 to understand the value of precise factual knowledge
Teaching History article
Up until the early 1990s, historical knowledge sometimes had rather a bad press. Various developments, in National Curriculum, at GCSE and, importantly, in ordinary teachers’ practice and debate, then led to a much closer integration of what we once called ‘content’ and ‘skills’. Tony McAleavy examined changing perceptions of the...
Getting Year 10 to understand the value of precise factual knowledge
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Hitting the right note: how useful is the music of African-Americans to historians?
Teaching History article
Here is a wonderful reminder of the richness of materials available to history teachers. With ever greater emphasis being placed on different learning styles, it is a good moment to remind ourselves that we can cater for virtually all of them in our classrooms. This includes a preference for learning...
Hitting the right note: how useful is the music of African-Americans to historians?
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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
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Equiano - voice of silent slaves?
Teaching History article
Andrew Wrenn shows how a study of the life of Olaudah Equiano can support pupils’ historical learning in a number of ways. Not only is this a ‘little story’ that can help to illuminate or raise questions about the the ‘big picture’, it can also help pupils to reflect upon...
Equiano - voice of silent slaves?
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Revealing the big picture: patterns, shapes and images at Key Stage 3.
Teaching History article
It is easy enough to incorporate overview and depth studies into a scheme-of-work. Units are carved up into those topics that last for several weeks and those that are covered in one. Isn’t that enough to satisfy the requirements of the National Curriculum? Many teachers have gone much further than...
Revealing the big picture: patterns, shapes and images at Key Stage 3.
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Have we got the question right? Engaging future citizens in local history enquiry
Teaching History article
Gary Clemitshaw describes a five-lesson sequence integrating history, citizenship and ICT. He examines the varied rationales and problems underlying a citizenship-history link and then argues for the role of the local dimension in securing a connection that preserves the integrity of the discipline of history. He focuses upon causation as...
Have we got the question right? Engaging future citizens in local history enquiry
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Historical significance - the forgotten 'Key Element'?
Teaching History article
How many history departments regularly discuss the quality of their enquiries and teaching processes that relate to historical significance? It would not be unusual, in 2002, for a history department to spend time in a department meeting reflecting upon pupils’ learning about causation or to explore the connection between pupils’...
Historical significance - the forgotten 'Key Element'?
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Illuminating the shadow: making progress happen in casual thinking through speaking and listening
Teaching History article
Here is another breath of fresh air from the Thomas Tallis history department. In TH 103, Head of Department Tony Hier showed how he developed a rigorous framework for implementing government initiatives and improving departmental professional discourse at the same time. This time, from history teacher Vaughan Clark, we get...
Illuminating the shadow: making progress happen in casual thinking through speaking and listening
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Making history curious: Using Initial Stimulus Material (ISM) to promote enquiry, thinking and literacy
Teaching History article
The idea of gaining pupils’ attention, interest and curiosity at the start of the lesson with an intriguing image, story, analogy or puzzle has long been used by our best history teachers. Michael Riley, through writing and inset, popularised the term ‘hook’ and emphasised its special role at the start...
Making history curious: Using Initial Stimulus Material (ISM) to promote enquiry, thinking and literacy
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'Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?'
Teaching History article
How can the Holocaust be represented? In this article, Andrew Wrenn takes as his example the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He helps teachers encourage pupils to get beneath the surface, and look analytically at the Museum itself as an interpretation of the Holocaust. Such an investigation provides pupils and...
'Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?'
