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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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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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Using causation diagrams to help sixth-formers think about cause and effect
Teaching History article
Alex Alcoe was concerned that mastery of certain keywords and question formulae at GCSE perhaps obscured fundamental gaps in his students’ understanding of the nature of causation. These gaps were revealed when he invited Year 12 students to make explicit, by annotating a diagram, their understanding of the relationship between...
Using causation diagrams to help sixth-formers think about cause and effect
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Helping Year 9s explore multiple narratives through the history of a house
Teaching History article
A host of histories: helping Year 9s explore multiple narratives through the history of a house
Described by the author Monica Ali as a building that ‘sparks the imagination and sparks conversations', 19 Princelet Street, now a Museum of Diversity and Immigration, captivated the imagination of teacher David Waters. He...
Helping Year 9s explore multiple narratives through the history of a house
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Stepping into the past: using images to travel through time
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Pupils are eternally curious about their teachers. Do they really have lives outside the classroom? Could Miss Jones have once been a child? Does she have parents and grandparents and a past of her own?...
Stepping into the past: using images to travel through time
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Polychronicon 155: Interpreting the Origins of of the First World War
Teaching History feature
As I write this article I have before me my grandfather's Victory Medal from the First World War. It has inscribed on the reverse side, ‘The Great War for Civilisation 1914-1919'. The absolute certainty of such a justification for Britain's entry into the war seems somewhat hollow as we approach...
Polychronicon 155: Interpreting the Origins of of the First World War
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An authentic voice: perspectives on the value of listening to survivors of genocide
Teaching History article
It is common practice to invite survivors of the Holocaust to speak about their experiences to pupils in schools and colleges. Systematic reflection on the value of working with survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides and on how to make the most of doing so is rarer, however. In...
An authentic voice: perspectives on the value of listening to survivors of genocide
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Teaching Year 9 about historical theories and methods
Teaching History article
Kate Hammond sets out a rationale for linking the National Curriculum requirement to study interpretations of history with her pupils’ own evidence handling skills. She makes connections with history-teacher-led debates and innovations in both areas, but particularly the work of Howells (2005). She describes and evaluates a learning sequence that...
Teaching Year 9 about historical theories and methods
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Out went Caesar and in came the Conqueror: A case study in professional thinking
Teaching History article
A case study in professional thinking
Michael Fordham examines the evolution of his own practice as an example of how history teachers draw upon collective, professional knowledge constructed by other history teachers in journals, books, conferences and seminars. Fordham explains how a particular Year 7 enquiry examining historical change from the...
Out went Caesar and in came the Conqueror: A case study in professional thinking
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'Doing justice to history': the learning of African history in a North London secondary school
Teaching History article
‘Doing justice to history': the learning of African history in a North London secondary school and teacher development in the spirit of ubuntu
The medium is the message, Marshall McLuhan observed many years ago and the ‘form' of what we do carries ‘content' as Hayden White has argued. This article...
'Doing justice to history': the learning of African history in a North London secondary school
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How students make sense of the historical concepts of change, continuity and development
Teaching History article
First order knowledge and understanding, relating to the ‘stuff' of history, is, of course, absolutely fundamental to the development of children's historical knowledge and understanding. However, as Frances Blow shows, in a contribution to a series of articles exploring second order concepts in history published in Teaching History by Peter...
How students make sense of the historical concepts of change, continuity and development
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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
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Creating controversy in the classroom: making progress with historical significance
Teaching History article
No longer is historical significance the ‘forgotten key element.’ Indeed, it is now being remembered at last – by politicians, telly-dons and the media in any case. Matthew Bradshaw suggests that the popular emphasis on significant events is wrong. Instead, we should be enabling our pupils to make their own...
Creating controversy in the classroom: making progress with historical significance
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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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History and the perils of multiculturalism in 1990s Britain
Teaching History article
Ian Grosvenor's article points both to dangers and to positive potential in the National Curriculum for history. Critical of the published proposals for history in the current curriculum review, he points not only at the continuing narrowness of the perspectives enshrined by the proposed curriculum but at the reasons why...
History and the perils of multiculturalism in 1990s Britain
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The wrong beach? Interpretation, location and film
Teaching History article
In this article Paul Sutton examines the concerns associated with place in films. He points out the problems that this poses for our students - problems mainly, but not only, associated with a common lack of geographical authenticity. But this, he suggests, can be turned to our advantage. For what...
The wrong beach? Interpretation, location and film
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Using the Attainment Target in Key Stage 3: Interpretations of History
Article
An individual's knowledge of history is dependent not only on the events of the past but also on the way such events are presented. These presentations of the past come in a variety of forms and an educated person should be able to reflect purposefully on their worth...
Using the Attainment Target in Key Stage 3: Interpretations of History
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Unpacking the suitcase and finding history: doing justice to the teaching of diverse histories in the classroom
Teaching History article
Unpacking the suitcase and finding history: doing justice to the teaching of diverse histories in the classroom
It has become a truism that Britain is a multi-cultural society yet, as Mohamud and Whitburn argue, there is still a great deal of thinking to be done by history teachers in accounting...
Unpacking the suitcase and finding history: doing justice to the teaching of diverse histories in the classroom
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Rethinking progression in historical interpretations through the British Empire
Teaching History article
Let’s stop saying sorry for the Empire! Thus Mastin and Wallace introduce one of their lessons on interpretations of the British Empire. They develop Gary Howells’s ideas from the previous edition of Teaching History to demonstrate exactly what we might get our students to do with interpretations of the past....
Rethinking progression in historical interpretations through the British Empire
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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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What they think they know: the impact of pupils' preconceptions on their understanding of historical significance
Teaching History article
Robin Conway suspected that his students’ concepts of the significance of different aspects of historical periods was affected by the preconceptions that they brought to his lessons. These preconceptions were leading his students into making unhistorical judgments, without any real understanding on their part of what had affected their thinking....
What they think they know: the impact of pupils' preconceptions on their understanding of historical significance
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Maybe they haven't decided yet what is right: English and Spanish perspectives on teaching historical significance
Teaching History article
Historians and history teachers understand well that students, when they ‘answer’ questions, are creating their own interpretation. We take account of this in our teaching too: we do not pretend that, beyond the level of the simplest closed questioning, there is ever a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer approach to history....
Maybe they haven't decided yet what is right: English and Spanish perspectives on teaching historical significance
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'Didn't we do that in Year 7?' Planning for progress in evidential understanding
Teaching History article
Christine Counsell describes a lively activity, ideal for Year 9, in which pupils compare and interrelate a collection of sources. The activity leads pupils into thinking about the sources as a collection, and about the enquiry as an evidential problem. Or at least it can do. The article discusses the...
'Didn't we do that in Year 7?' Planning for progress in evidential understanding
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Being ambitious with the causes of the First World War: interrogating inevitability
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated
Gary Howells asks hard questions about typical teaching and assessment of historical causation at Key Stage 3. Popular activities that may be helpful in addressing particular learning areas, or in teaching pupils to use the...
Being ambitious with the causes of the First World War: interrogating inevitability
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Working with sources: scepticism or cynicism? Putting the story back together again
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Many history teachers will remember the feature on Jamie Byrom's teaching in Times Educational Supplement of July 1996 where he attacked the recent fashion of history textbooks for encouraging only short (and usually formulaic) responses...
Working with sources: scepticism or cynicism? Putting the story back together again
