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New, Novice or Nervous? 164: Constructing narrative
Teaching History feature: the quick guide to the no-quick-fix
Narrative is shedding its status as the ‘underrated skill’, re-emerging as a requirement of the new GCSE in England. As Counsell has argued, constructing a narrative is ‘no easy option’, however, and asking students to ‘Write an account…’ lacks the comfortable familiarity of ‘Explain why…’ or ‘How far…’. Fortunately, many...
New, Novice or Nervous? 164: Constructing narrative
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History as a foreign language
Teaching History article
Disappointed that the use of the ‘PEEL’ writing scaffold had led her Year 11 students to write some rather dreary essays, Claire Simmonds reflected that a lack of specific training on historical writing might be to blame. Drawing on genre theory and the work of the history teaching community, Simmonds attempted...
History as a foreign language
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New, Novice or Nervous? 159: Writing history essays
Teaching History feature
Until the 1990s, it was unusual for the majority of England's secondary school students to write history essays. The traditional essay was a staple of the old History O Level examinations, but fewer than 20% of pupils did these history exams. In the 1980s, various history teachers became increasingly concerned...
New, Novice or Nervous? 159: Writing history essays
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Move Me On 159: Writing Frames
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem: Hannah Mitchell would like to wean pupils off the use of writing frames.
Hannah Mitchell has embarked on her PGCE training after a year spent working as a Teaching Assistant. Her varied experiences in that role - sometimes working one-to-one with young people, within a targeted intervention programme,...
Move Me On 159: Writing Frames
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Why we would miss controlled assessments in history
Teaching History article
A place for individual enquiry? Why we would miss controlled assessments in history
Most history teachers will, at some point, recognise the tension between teaching an engaging history course while at the same time meeting the requirements of an exam specification. Mark Fowle and Ben Egelnick reflect here on how...
Why we would miss controlled assessments in history
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Improving Year 12's extended writing
Teaching History article
From Muddleton Manor to Clarity Cathedral: improving Year 12's extended writing through an enhanced sense of the reader
Mary Brown recognised that her A-level students were finding extended writing difficult, particularly in terms of guiding the reader through the argument with appropriate ‘signposting'. To help her students manage this, Brown...
Improving Year 12's extended writing
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Developing pupil explanation through web debates
Teaching History article
Kathryn Greenfield became dissatisfied with her pupils' written responses, particularly the rather limited explanations that they were giving in support of points that they made. Drawing here on recent work in using Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) to develop pupil historical argument and reasoning, Greenfield explains how she used web debates...
Developing pupil explanation through web debates
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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
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'I feel if I say this in my essay it’s not going to be as strong’
Teaching History article
Jim Carroll was concerned that A-level textbooks failed to provide his students with a model of the multi-voicedness that characterises written history. In order to show his students that historians constantly engage in argument as they write, Carroll turned to academic scholarship for models of multi-voiced history. Carroll explains here...
'I feel if I say this in my essay it’s not going to be as strong’
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Effective essay introductions
Teaching History article
Struck by the dullness of some of her students’ essay introductions, Paula Worth reflected on the fact that she had never focused specifically on introductions. After surveying existing work by history teachers on essay structure in general and introductions in particular, she turns to the work of historians. Drawing on...
Effective essay introductions
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Using nominalisation to develop written causal arguments
Teaching History article
How nominalisation might develop students’ written causal arguments
Frustrated that previously taught writing frames seemed to impede his A-level students’ historical arguments, James Edward Carroll theorised that the inadequacies he identified in their writing were as much disciplinary as stylistic. Drawing on two discourses that are often largely isolated from...
Using nominalisation to develop written causal arguments
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Using Google Docs to develop Year 9 pupils’ essay-writing skills
Teaching History article
Lucy Moonen set out to explore whether collaborative writing in small groups, facilitated by the use of Google Docs, would help to sustain students’ focus on essay writing as the development of an historical argument.
She explains how she set up an essay on the League of Nationals as a...
Using Google Docs to develop Year 9 pupils’ essay-writing skills
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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
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Pipes's punctuation and making complex historical claims
Teaching History article
Long, unreadable sentences in her students' essays led Rachel Foster to improve her post-16 students' punctuation. Her journey resulted, however, in more than improved punctuation.
It led her to theorise what historians are really doing in their ‘signpost sentences'. She found herself showing students how an academic historian anticipates a chunk of argument in a single, well-turned, opening sentence. Foster created an intervention in which students...
Pipes's punctuation and making complex historical claims
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Triumphs Show 159: teaching paragraph construction
Teaching History feature
My adventures in dancing in the classroom started back in the autumn term. I was working with a group of Year 8 students looking at interpretations of King John and we were selecting and analysing quotations from historians as part of the enquiry question ‘Was King John really so bad?' My students were struggling with...
Triumphs Show 159: teaching paragraph construction
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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
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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
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Essay writing for everyone: an investigation into different methods used to teach Year 9 to write an essay
Teaching History article
Essay writing is at the very heart of school history, yet despite the wide range of developments in this area over the past decade, pupils still struggle. Alex Scott and his department decided to investigate a variety of methods to see what methods worked in enabling pupils to construct essays...
Essay writing for everyone: an investigation into different methods used to teach Year 9 to write an essay
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Triumphs Show 144: Active learning to engage ‘challenging students'
Teaching History feature
Active learning to engage and challenge ‘challenging students'
Historical significance may have been the ‘forgotten element' in 2002 when Rob Phillips first offered us the acronym ‘GREAT', but it has been seized upon with enthusiasm by the history education community. Christine Counsell's now famous five ‘R's (remarkable, remembered, resonant, resulting...
Triumphs Show 144: Active learning to engage ‘challenging students'
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A most horrid malicious bloody flame: using Samuel Pepys to improve Year 8 boys' historical writing
Teaching History article
Unusually, instead of moving from a narrative to an analytic structure, David Waters moves his pupils from causal analysis to narrative. By the time pupils are ready to produce their storyboard narrative, their thinking about the Great Fire has been shaped and re-shaped not only by structural exercises and argument...
A most horrid malicious bloody flame: using Samuel Pepys to improve Year 8 boys' historical writing
