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Changing thinking about cause
Article
Aware both that causation is the bread and butter of the historian’s craft, and that trainee teachers find it far harder to teach well than they anticipate, Alex Ford sought to get to the heart of the problem with causation, especially at GCSE. When teaching to a specification and mark...
Changing thinking about cause
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Historical scholarship, archaeology and evidence in Year 7
Teaching History article
The stimulus for this article came from two developmental tasks that Barbara Trapani was set during the course of her initial teacher education programme: planning her first historical enquiry and bringing the work of an historian into the classroom. Trapani chose to tackle the two tasks together, using Susan Whitfield’s...
Historical scholarship, archaeology and evidence in Year 7
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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
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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
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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?'
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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
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Polychronicon 167: The strange career of Richard Nixon
Teaching History feature
If you know just one thing about the career of the 37th President of the United States, it is likely to be this: Watergate. Nixon’s resignation in August 1974 was caused by his decision to cover up a burglary at the Democratic Party’s campaign headquarters for the 1972 election, which...
Polychronicon 167: The strange career of Richard Nixon
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‘If you had told me before that these students were Russians, I would not have believed it’
Teaching History article
Bjorn Wansink and his co-authors have aligned their teaching of a recent and controversial historical issue – the Cold War – in the light of a contemporary incident.
This article demonstrates a means of ensuring that students understand that different cultures’ views of their shared past are nuanced, rather than monolithic – a different concept in philosophy as well as in...
‘If you had told me before that these students were Russians, I would not have believed it’
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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?
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Of the many significant things that have ever happened, what should we teach?
Teaching History article
There are three basic strands to our lessons. How should we teach? What skills should we enable our students to build? What content should we use to deliver those skills?
In this article Tony McConnell, who has been re-designing the curriculum in his school in response to a changed examination regimen, considers the issue of subject...
Of the many significant things that have ever happened, what should we teach?
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Active remembrance
Teaching History article
A year after the end of the First World War, George V stated: "I believe that my people in every part of the Empire fervently wish to perpetuate the memory of the Great Deliverance and those who laid down their lives to achieve it."
From that moment, the idea of large-scale remembrance...
Active remembrance
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Polychronicon 163: Europe: the longest debate
Teaching History feature
On 23 June, electors in the United Kingdom will vote on whether they wish to remain part of the European Union. The passionate debate around the question has seen the spectre of Hitler and the example of Churchill invoked, with varying plausibility, by both sides. It has also drawn on the...
Polychronicon 163: Europe: the longest debate
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Cunning Plan 163.1: GCSE Thematic study
Teaching History feature
I started teaching ‘crime and punishment through time’ thematically a few years ago. I was teaching it as a Schools History Project ‘study in development’. We had moved from ‘medicine through time’ in order to keep things fresh. After six times through the content, much as I loved it, crime,...
Cunning Plan 163.1: GCSE Thematic study
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Climate change: greening the curriculum?
Teaching History article
Inspired by the news that Bristol had become the UK’s first Green Capital, Kate Hawkey, Jon James and Celia Tidmarsh set out to explore what a ‘Green Capital’ School Curriculum might look like. They explain how they created a cross-curricular project to deliver in-school workshops focused on the teaching of...
Climate change: greening the curriculum?
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The knowledge illusion
Teaching History article
Focusing on students’ attempts to explain the relative significance of different factors in Hitler’s rise to power, Catherine McCrory explores the vexed question of why students who seem able to express necessary historical knowledge on one occasion cannot effectively reproduce it on another. Drawing on a detailed analysis of what...
The knowledge illusion
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Teaching the very recent past
Teaching History article
‘Miriam's Vision' is an educational project developed by the Miriam Hyman Memorial Trust, an organisation set up in memory of Miriam Hyman, one of the 52 victims of the London bombings of 2005. The project has developed a number of subject-based modules, including history, which are provided free to schools...
Teaching the very recent past
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The Power of Context: using a visual source
Teaching History article
Drawing on her wealth of experience and expertise in using visual sources in the classroom, in this article Jane Card explores how a single painting, a portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray, might form the basis for a sequence of lessons.
Arguing that although highly...
The Power of Context: using a visual source
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New, Novice or Nervous? 160: Progression in evidential understanding
Teaching History feature
You have a wealth of fascinating sources you would love to explore with students but despair at their seeming inability to connect ‘source work' with the construction of historical claims. Year 7 get stuck in the ‘it's biased so we can never know' trap again and again. Year 9 students...
New, Novice or Nervous? 160: Progression in evidential understanding
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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
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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
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Using timelines in assessment
Teaching History article
Bridging a twenty-year gap in their practice, Elizabeth Carr and Christine Counsell bring out the similarities in their use of timelines in their planning, teaching and assessment. What they also have in common is the fact that their experimentation with timelines as a way of strengthening cumulative knowledge emerged in...
Using timelines in assessment
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Triumphs Show 157: What makes art history?
Teaching History feature: celebrating and sharing success
What do 14 Year 7 students, an art teacher, a history teacher and the Victoria and Albert Museum have in common? They are all part of the ‘Stronger Together' Museum Champion project run by The Langley Academy and the River & Rowing Museum and supported by Arts Council England, designed to...
Triumphs Show 157: What makes art history?
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Assessing the Battle of Waterloo in the classroom
Teaching History article
Defying the Iron Duke: assessing the Battle of Waterloo in the classroom
The approaching bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo has stimulated debate about how it should be commemorated. This article reports a collaboration between the Waterloo200 Committee and Tom Wheeley, history teacher, to create a lesson sequence analysing the...
Assessing the Battle of Waterloo in the classroom
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Triumphs Show 156: Fresh perspectives on the First World War
Teaching History feature: celebrating and sharing success
Year 9 think they know a lot about the First World War. After all, they read Michael Morpurgo's novel Private Peaceful in their English lessons all the way back in Year 7, they've seen Blackadder so many times they can recite it, and in the centenary year of the war's...
Triumphs Show 156: Fresh perspectives on the First World War
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Triumphs Show 155: beyond trivial judgements of 'bias'
Teaching History feature: celebrating and sharing success
Towards victory in that battle...
10A were nearly a term into their GCSE history course, working on an 1890-1918 British history ‘depth study'. They had already completed work on the Liberal welfare reforms and on the women's suffrage movement, and they had been practising a range of source evaluation approaches....
Triumphs Show 155: beyond trivial judgements of 'bias'
