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What’s The Wisdom On... Extended writing
Teaching History feature
Writing history is hard! But the things that make it challenging are the things that make it worth doing. They are also the key to enabling all students to write, to embrace the challenge and to enjoy its rewards enough to keep going. A big mistake is to kid ourselves...
What’s The Wisdom On... Extended writing
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Triumphs Show: Making their historical writing explode
Teaching History feature
‘Who hates PEE paragraphs?’ A collective groan resounds around my classroom. ‘Today, Year 10 we are going to master PEE paragraphs, and make our written historical explanations explode.’
I always remember one deflated Year 10 student who said, ‘Miss, I just don’t get PEE paragraphs. I couldn’t do them in Year 7, and I still...
Triumphs Show: Making their historical writing explode
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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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Direct teaching of paragraph cohesion
Teaching History article
How do we help pupils to write better paragraphs without actually doing it for them? How do we break down the process of essay writing into smaller steps without taking away pupils’ sense of the essay as a whole? How do we give lower-attaining pupils models, structures and frames without...
Direct teaching of paragraph cohesion
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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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Developing awareness of the need to select evidence
Teaching History article
Let's play Supermarket ‘Evidential' Sweep: developing students' awareness of the need to select evidence
Despite having built a sustained focus on historical thinking into their planning for progression across Years 7 to 13, Rachel Foster and Sarah Gadd remained frustrated with stubborn weaknesses in the evidential thinking of students in...
Developing awareness of the need to select evidence
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‘One big cake’: substantive knowledge of the mid-Tudor crisis in Year 7 students’ writing
Teaching History article
While looking to revamp his department’s Year 7 enquiry on the Tudors, Jack Mills turned to historiographical debates regarding the ‘mid-Tudor crisis’ to inform his curricular decision making. In doing so, Mills noted that the debate hinged on interpretations of substantive concepts such as ‘crisis’. He therefore also drew on previous...
‘One big cake’: substantive knowledge of the mid-Tudor crisis in Year 7 students’ writing
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Getting personal: making effective use of historical fiction in the history classroom.
Teaching History article
Writing stories in history lessons? But we don’t do things like that in history do we? Strange bedfellows though history and fiction might seem, Dave Martin and Beth Brooke make a strong case for collaboration between the English and history departments in order to introduce students to the challenging task...
Getting personal: making effective use of historical fiction in the history classroom.
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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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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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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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‘Weaving’ knowledge
Teaching History article
Diane Relf was concerned by what felt like an unbridgeable gulf between Year 7’s vocabulary and comprehension, and her aspirations both for their inclusion in history and their later academic success. As a subject leader without the benefit of any history-specific training at the start of her career, she embarked on...
‘Weaving’ knowledge
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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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Training for the marathon: history at Michaela
Teaching History article
Michael Taylor begins his piece by reminding us that writing great history essays is hard. He compares the process to running a marathon, and his central thesis is that, just as the best training for running a marathon is not running marathons, so the way to encourage students to produce...
Training for the marathon: history at Michaela
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‘I need to know…’: creating the conditions that make students want knowledge
Teaching History journal article
Chloe Bateman recognised the value to her Key Stage 3 pupils of developing rich subject knowledge, but wanted to find a way of encouraging them to value that knowledge for themselves. In this article she explains how she provided that inspiration by setting her Year 7 class the challenge of...
‘I need to know…’: creating the conditions that make students want knowledge
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Does the grammatical ‘release the conceptual’?
Teaching History article
Jim Carroll noticed basic literacy errors in his Year 13s’ writing, but on closer examination decided that these were not best addressed purely as literacy issues. Through an intervention based on clauses, Carroll managed to enable his students to write better, but he did this by teasing out principles of...
Does the grammatical ‘release the conceptual’?
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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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What made your essay successful? I ‘T.A.C.K.L.E.D' the essay question!
Teaching History article
Teaching in Singapore, Tze Kwang Teo cannot conceive of a history teacher unfamiliar with the mnemonic ‘PEE' (or ‘PEEL') used to structure students' essays. Its ubiquity is testimony to its power, reminding students both to explain and to substantiate their claims. Yet, as Foster and Gadd have argued, its neat formulation can restrict and distort historical thinking. Building on their critique, Teo argues that the focus of PEE/L...
What made your essay successful? I ‘T.A.C.K.L.E.D' the essay question!
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Using family history to provoke rigorous enquiry
Teaching History article
The idea of using ‘little stories' to illuminate the ‘big pictures' of the past was creatively explored in Teaching History 107, which offered teachers a wealth of detailed vignettes with which to kindle young people's interest and illuminate major historical events. Paul Barrett builds on the ideas explored in that...
Using family history to provoke rigorous enquiry
