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Found 151 results matching 'brief history' within Secondary > Curriculum > Principles of planning > Substantive Knowledge   (Clear filter)

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  • 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

  • Low-stakes testing

      Teaching History article
    The emphasis on the power of secure substantive knowledge reflected in recent curriculum reforms has prompted considerable interest in strategies to help students retain and deploy such knowledge effectively. One strategy that has been strongly endorsed by some cognitive psychologists is regular testing; an idea that Nick Dennis set out...
    Low-stakes testing

  • Cunning Plan 177: teaching about life in Elizabethan England by looking at death

      Teaching History feature
    ‘We already did the Tudors in primary school’ was the most frequent comment made by students about our Year 7 scheme of learning in our annual review. Students reported covering the Tudors at least once, sometimes twice, before reaching secondary school and they had clearly not faced extensive further study...
    Cunning Plan 177: teaching about life in Elizabethan England by looking at death

  • 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

  • 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

  • Enquiries to engage Year 7 in medieval anarchy

      Teaching History article
    Wrestling with Stephen and Matilda: planning challenging enquiries to engage Year 7 in medieval anarchy McDougall found learning about Stephen and Matilda fascinating, was sure that her pupils would also and designed an enquiry to engage them in ‘the anarchy' of 1139-1153 AD. Pupils enjoyed exploring ‘the anarchy' and learning...
    Enquiries to engage Year 7 in medieval anarchy

  • Time for chronology? Ideas for developing chronological understanding

      Teaching History article
    The successful study of history requires many things, but few would contest that an understanding of time is one of them. Quite what we mean by ‘an understanding of time’ needs clarification, however. Chronological understanding is one feature. But it is not simply an ability to place events in order...
    Time for chronology? Ideas for developing chronological understanding

  • 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

  • Witchcraft - Using fiction with Year 8s

      Teaching History article
    Which women were executed for witchcraft? And which pupils cared?  Paula Worth was concerned that her low-attaining set were only going through the motions when tackling causal explanation. Identifying, prioritising and weighing causes seemed an empty routine rather than a fascinating puzzle engaging intellect and imagination. She was also concerned...
    Witchcraft - Using fiction with Year 8s

  • 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

  • Nazi perpetrators in Holocaust education

      Teaching History article
    The Holocaust is often framed, in textbooks and exam syllabi, from a perpetrator perspective as a narrative of Nazi policy. We are offered a different orientation here. Interrogating and understanding the Holocaust involves understanding why the people who perpetrated the Holocaust did the things that they did. As Wolf Kaiser...
    Nazi perpetrators in Holocaust education

  • Triumphs Show 158: interactive learning walls and substantive vocabulary

      Teaching History feature
    Year 10 use an interactive learning wall to cement their understanding of substantive vocabulary It is the first term of their GCSE course and Year 10 are already starting to flag a little. They are enjoying studying the Russian Revolution, but are struggling to remember all the new words they...
    Triumphs Show 158: interactive learning walls and substantive vocabulary

  • Securing contextual knowledge in year 10

      Teaching History article
    Using regular, low-stakes tests to secure pupils' contextual knowledge in Year 10 Lee Donaghy was concerned that his GCSE students' weak contextual knowledge was letting them down. Inspired by a mixture of cognitive science and the arguments of other teachers expressed in various blogs, he decided to tackle the problem...
    Securing contextual knowledge in year 10

  • Move Me On 157: Getting knowledge across

      Teaching History feature
    This issue's problem: Rose Valognes feels she hasn't got enough ways of getting knowledge across to the students before they can do something with it. After a positive start to her training year, Rose Valognes seems to have got stuck in a rut in her thinking, with her lessons falling...
    Move Me On 157: Getting knowledge across

  • 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

  • Getting Year 7 to vocalise responses to the murder of Thomas Becket

      Teaching History article
    Mary Partridge wanted her pupils not only to become more aware of competing and contrasting voices in the past, but to understand  how historians orchestrate those voices. Using Edward Grim's eye-witness account of Thomas Becket's murder, her Year 7 pupils explored nuances in the word ‘shocking' as a way of...
    Getting Year 7 to vocalise responses to the murder of Thomas Becket

  • 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

  • Polychronicon 141: Adolf Eichmann

      Teaching History feature
    Almost 60 years ago Adolf Eichmann went on trial for crimes committed against the Jews while he was in the service of the Nazi regime. His capture by the Israeli secret service and his abduction from Argentina triggered a number of journalistic books that portrayed him as a pathological monster...
    Polychronicon 141: Adolf Eichmann

  • Investigating students' prior understandings of the Holocaust

      Teaching History article
    Students make sense of new learning on the basis of their prior understandings: we cannot move our students' thinking on unless we understand what they already know. In this article, Edwards and O'Dowd report how they set out to scope a group of Y ear 8  students' prior learning and...
    Investigating students' prior understandings of the Holocaust

  • 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

  • What Have Historians Been Arguing About... the long-term impact of the Black Death on English towns

      A Polychronicon of the Past
    In the summer of 1348, the Chronicle of the Grey Friars at Lynn described how sailors had arrived in Melcombe (now Weymouth) bringing from Gascony ‘the seeds of the terrible pestilence’. The Black Death spread rapidly throughout England, killing approximately half the population. While the cause of the disease, the...
    What Have Historians Been Arguing About... the long-term impact of the Black Death on English towns

  • Key Concepts at Key Stage 3

      Key Concepts
    Please note: This unit was produced before the 2014 National Curriculum and therefore while much of the advice is still useful, there may be some out of date references or links. For more recent resources on key concepts, see our What's the Wisdom on series. The key concepts can be divided into three...
    Key Concepts at Key Stage 3

  • Using individuals’ stories to help GCSE students to explain change and causation

      Article
    Should we, and how do we, develop in our students a sense of period – or a series of senses of period – in a thematic study spanning a thousand years? This was the problem faced by Matthew Fearns-Davies in preparing for the GCSE ‘Health and the People’ paper. He shows...
    Using individuals’ stories to help GCSE students to explain change and causation

  • Trampolines and Springboards

      Journal article
    Frustrated by his pupils’ tendency to compartmentalise source analysis into two discrete parts of ‘source’ and ‘own knowledge’, Jonathan Sellin reflected that his use of scaffolds might be to blame. Inspired by recent work by teacher-researchers Hammond and King on the importance of secure substantive knowledge in the area of...
    Trampolines and Springboards