-
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
-
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.
-
Finding voices in the past: exploring identity through the biography of a house
Teaching History article
Heather De Silva, Jenny Smith and Jason Tranter outline a new study unit, planned jointly by their history and geography departments and designed specifically to meet the new requirements for local history required by England’s recently revised National Curriculum for history. They aimed to help pupils to capture a part...
Finding voices in the past: exploring identity through the biography of a house
-
Move Me On 152: How to teach meaningful overviews
Teaching History feature
This Issue's Problem: Martin King is worried about how to teach meaningful overviews...
Move Me On 152: How to teach meaningful overviews
-
Using an anthology of substantial sources at GCSE
Teaching History article
Struck by his GCSE students’ bewildered expressions when studying source extracts, Liam McDonnell decided to adopt a new approach to source analysis. Inspired by the work of other history teachers, McDonnell decided to use an anthology of substantial sources when studying nineteenth-century Whitechapel in London. By revisiting the sources at...
Using an anthology of substantial sources at GCSE
-
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
-
Making reading routine
Teaching History article
Inspired by the growing number of history teachers who have sought to introduce younger pupils to academic historical scholarship in the classroom, Tim Jenner wanted to bring about his own reading revolution at Key Stage 3. But rather than simply develop one-off lessons or enquiries based on scholarship his goal...
Making reading routine
-
Structuring a history curriculum for powerful revelations
Teaching History article
When planning a Key Stage 3 curriculum with his department, Will Bailey-Watson began to question some of the commonsense orthodoxies regarding chronological sequencing and curriculum design. Drawing on pre-existing debates about curricular structuring in the history education community both in England and internationally, Bailey-Watson identified cognitive, motivational, and disciplinary justifications...
Structuring a history curriculum for powerful revelations
-
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
-
Acquainted or intimate? Background knowledge and subsequent learning
Teaching History journal article
Heather Fearn was intrigued by the factors that might have led her higher-performing students to talk in historically mature ways about unseen sources without any prior knowledge of the topic in hand. She began to wonder if what she was hearing was not best accounted for by a content-free disciplinary...
Acquainted or intimate? Background knowledge and subsequent learning
-
Putting Catlin in his place?
Teaching History article
Jess Landy’s desire to introduce her pupils to a more complex narrative of the American West led her to the life story and work of a remarkable individual, George Catlin.
In this article she shows how she used this unusual micro-narrative in order to challenge pupils’ ideas not just about the bigger narrative of which it is a part, but about the...
Putting Catlin in his place?
-
Historical Perspective & 'Big History'
Teaching History article
Moving forward, looking back - historical perspective, ‘Big History' and the return of the longue durée: time to develop our scale hopping muscles
‘Big history' is a term receiving a great deal of attention at present, particularly in North America where considerable sums of money have been invested in designing curricula...
Historical Perspective & 'Big History'
-
Transforming Year 11's conceptual understanding of change
Teaching History article
For all that history teachers appreciate the need to build substantive knowledge and conceptual understanding systematically over time, they are also likely to have experienced that sickening moment when they realise that a Year 11 pupil has somehow missed something fundamental.
In Anna Fielding's case, her pupil's misconception was related to...
Transforming Year 11's conceptual understanding of change
-
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
-
New, Novice or Nervous? 157: Teaching Overview
Teaching History feature
Overwhelmed by overview? Bewildered by how to teach bigger pictures? Tied up in mental knots by trying to work out the difference between thematic stories, frameworks and outlines? You are not alone.
Like many history teachers, you feel more confident when teaching depth studies but find yourself beating a rapid...
New, Novice or Nervous? 157: Teaching Overview
-
Getting medieval (and global) at Key Stage 3
Teaching History article
Taking new historical research into the classroom: getting medieval (and global) at Key Stage 3
Although history teachers frequently work with academic historical writing, direct face-to-face encounters with academic historians are rare in secondary history classrooms. This article reports a collaboration between an academic historian and a history teacher that...
Getting medieval (and global) at Key Stage 3
-
Year 9 - Connecting past, present and future
Teaching History article
Possible futures: using frameworks of knowledge to help Year 9 connect past, present and future
How can we help pupils integrate history into coherent ‘Big Pictures' or mental frameworks? Building on traditions of classroom research and theorising reported in earlier editions of Teaching History, Dan Nuttall reports how his department set...
Year 9 - Connecting past, present and future
-
Time and chronology: conjoined twins or distant cousins?
Teaching History article
Weaknesses in pupils' grasp of historical chronology are a commonplace in popular discussion of the state of history education. However, as Blow, Lee and Shemilt argue, although undoubtedly necessary and fundamental, mastery of chronological conventions is not sufficient: the difficulties that pupils experience when learning history are conceptual, as much...
Time and chronology: conjoined twins or distant cousins?
-
Community engagement in local history
Teaching History article
This article, by Lynda Abbott and Richard Grayson, offers a fascinating example of collaboration between school and university, focused on the development of a community archive.
The project - run as an extra-curricular activity - was originally inspired by a concern to preserve the personal stories of those whose lives...
Community engagement in local history
-
‘Compressing and rendering’: using biography to teach big stories
Teaching History article
In principle, Rachel Foster had long been aware of the value of creating an interplay between depth and overview across the history curriculum. But in practice, as she acknowledges here, she had tended to shy away from telling outline stories that encompassed a big chronological or geographical range. Recognising the...
‘Compressing and rendering’: using biography to teach big stories
-
Cunning Plan 186: teaching Samurai Japan in Key Stage 3
Teaching History feature
Like many history departments we have been seeking to develop schemes of work that are more outward-looking, and, as the National Curriculum describes, ‘enable pupils to know and understand significant aspects of world history’.
To my mind, Samurai Japan offers students the opportunity to explore a time and place that is...
Cunning Plan 186: teaching Samurai Japan in Key Stage 3
-
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
-
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
