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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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Move Me On 139: teaching about change and continuity
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem: Debbie Samson is finding it difficult to teach about change and continuity in meaningful ways.
Move Me On 139: teaching about change and continuity
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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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Triumphs Show 160: Prezi and propaganda
Teaching History feature: celebrating and sharing success
Laura Tilley recognised that her Year 9 students were finding it difficult to work out the intended message of visual propaganda. To help her students make better use of the substantive knowledge they already had, she devised an interactive activity using a presentation software, Prezi. This approach provided students with...
Triumphs Show 160: Prezi and propaganda
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Polychronicon 128: The Death of Captain Cook
Teaching History feature
In popular perception, anthropologists and historians cut very different figures. The anthropologist, a hybrid of Indiana Jones and a Kiplingesque colonial official, wears a bush hat or pith helmet and tirelessly trudges up mountains or hacks through jungle in search of lost tribes and ancient, unchanging, folklore. The historian, a...
Polychronicon 128: The Death of Captain Cook
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Polychronicon 127: The Crusades
Teaching History feature
Modern research on the crusades has concentrated on three basic questions. What were they? How were they justified? What motivated the crusaders? The first of these questions became controversial twenty-five years ago, when historians with a traditional approach to the subject, who took into consideration only those expeditions launched to...
Polychronicon 127: The Crusades
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Holistic assessment through speaking and listening
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Giles Fullard and Kate Dacey wanted to enrich their department's planning for progression across Key Stage 3 with a strong sequence of activities fostering argument. They wanted an opportunity for students to draw together their...
Holistic assessment through speaking and listening
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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
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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
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Cunning Plan 178: How far did Anglo-Saxon England survive the Norman Conquest?
Teaching History feature
Cunning Plan for using the metaphor of a tree to help students characterise the process of change and engage with a historian’s argument.
In this Cunning Plan, Eve Hackett sets out how she used a recent work of history about the Norman Conquest as inspiration for her teaching of Year...
Cunning Plan 178: How far did Anglo-Saxon England survive the Norman Conquest?
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Why Gerry now likes evidential work
Teaching History article
Phil Smith resurrects the lovable Gerry who was first introduced to Teaching History readers by Ben Walsh. Gerry now pops up in another history classroom, and, sadly, has had a few terrible teachers since Ben was looking after him. Phil brings Gerry back to the path of righteousness. Through an...
Why Gerry now likes evidential work
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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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Using metaphor to highlight causal processes with Year 13
Article
Alarmed by his students’ random use of causal language in their essays, James Edward Carroll resolved to help his students improve their understanding of causal processes. Carroll decided to introduce his students to the metaphors that historians use to describe causation in the historiography of the Salem witch trials. By modelling...
Using metaphor to highlight causal processes with Year 13
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Polychronicon 170: The Becket Dispute
Journal article
‘The Becket Dispute’ (or ‘Controversy’) refers to the quarrel between Henry II and Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, which dominated English ecclesiastical politics in the 1160s. It was a conflict with multiple dimensions: a clash of Church and State; a prolonged struggle between two prominent individuals; a close friendship turned...
Polychronicon 170: The Becket Dispute
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Past Foward: Continuity and progression
Article
I recently had the pleasure of teaching a class about a Victorian “inventor” (although we eventually agreed that ‘innovator” may be a more appropriate term). The man in question was Joseph Lister. I told the class the story of how he came to use carbolic acid as an antiseptic. I...
Past Foward: Continuity and progression
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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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Census of Ireland, Dublin 1911 - National Archives of Ireland
Article
The household returns and ancillary records for the censuses of Ireland of 1901 and 1911, which are in the custody of the National Archives of Ireland, represent an extremely valuable part of the Irish national heritage. Click here to go to the site:
National Archives of Ireland
Census of Ireland, Dublin 1911 - National Archives of Ireland
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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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Myths and Monty Python: using the witch-hunts to introduce students to significance
Article
In this article Kerry Apps introduces students to the significance of the witch-hunts in the modern era, at the time when they occurred, and in the middle of the eighteenth century. She presents her rationale for choosing the witch-hunts as a focus for the study of significance, and shows how her thinking about her teaching has evolved through her evaluation of her students’...
Myths and Monty Python: using the witch-hunts to introduce students to significance
