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Found 78 results matching 'brief history' within Secondary > Curriculum > Curriculum Issues > Historical Argument   (Clear filter)

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  • Designing learning activities to stimulate domain-specific thinking

      Article
    Active Historical Thinking: designing learning activities to stimulate domain-specific thinking. ‘Thinking Skills' have been much discussed in England since, at least, the revision of the National Curriculum in 2000 and have recently morphed, with the 2008 revisions to the curriculum, into ‘Personal, Learning and Thinking Skills'. Often, however, such ‘skills'...
    Designing learning activities to stimulate domain-specific thinking

  • Cunning Plan 165: Helping lower-attaining students

      Teaching History feature
    My GCSE students were about to embark on their controlled assessment, which asked them to weigh up conflicting views on the British military’s contribution to the D-Day landings. Students were asked to engage  with a range of historians’ views and textbooks as well as some contemporary source material to assess...
    Cunning Plan 165: Helping lower-attaining students

  • Modelling the discipline

      Teaching History article
    David Hibbert and Zaiba Patel decided to work together after becoming concerned that school history curricula might not enable students to interrogate popular British mythologising about World War II. Building on these pre-existing concerns, their collaboration with the historian Yasmin Khan yielded an Interpretations enquiry which asked students to consider...
    Modelling the discipline

  • The devil is the detail

      Teaching History journal article
    Like many history departments, Hugh Richards' department at Huntington School uses enquiry questions to structure their medium-term planning. Yet Richards noticed that his efforts to build knowledge across an enquiry by teaching macro-narratives as an unfolding story seemed to make it harder for some pupils to see and retain the...
    The devil is the detail

  • Frameworks for linking pupils' evidential understanding with growing skill in structured, written argument: the 'evidence sandwich'

      article
    History teachers are increasingly good at designing exercises which develop skill in evidence analysis. The ubiquitous ‘source' is invariably analysed for utility and reliability. But how do pupils integrate such understandings with extended written work? How can they be helped to use these understandings in the creation of written argument?...
    Frameworks for linking pupils' evidential understanding with growing skill in structured, written argument: the 'evidence sandwich'

  • Exploring big overviews through local depth

      Teaching History article
    Exploring big overviews through local depth Rachel Foster and Kath Goudie's search for a more rigorous and interesting way of teaching Year 7 the Norman Conquest was initially driven by a desire to incorporate local history in a more meaningful way in their Key Stage 3 schemes of work. This...
    Exploring big overviews through local depth

  • Teaching students to argue for themselves - KS3

      Teaching History article
    Keeley Richards secured a fundamental shift in some of her Year 13 students' ability to argue. She did it by getting them to engage more fully with the practice of argument itself, as enacted by four historians. At the centre of her lesson sequence was an original activity: the historians'...
    Teaching students to argue for themselves - KS3

  • The Tudor Monarchy in crisis: using a historian's account to stretch the most able students in Year 8

      Teaching History article
    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. Contributors to this journal have long recognised that success in public examinations is at least partly achieved by carefully teaching in Key Stage 3. A critical component of A-Level is that students who wish to...
    The Tudor Monarchy in crisis: using a historian's account to stretch the most able students in Year 8

  • Does the linguistic release the conceptual? Helping Year 10 to improve their casual reasoning

      Teaching History article
    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. Does new vocabulary help students to express existing ideas for which they do not yet have words or does it actually give them new ideas which they did not previously hold? James Woodcock asks whether...
    Does the linguistic release the conceptual? Helping Year 10 to improve their casual reasoning

  • Being an historian

      Teaching History article
    In this article, Robin Conway and Amy Scott show how they made use of online source archives to replicate the experience of an academic historian in the classroom. By changing the way that students approach sources, moving away from both ‘fun activities’ and formulaic exam preparation towards a more authentic experience, they show how students’ interpretation of sources can demonstratehigher-level thinking. Through the use...
    Being an historian

  • Beyond 'I speak, you listen boy!' Exploring diversity of attitudes and experiences through speaking and listening

      Teaching History article
    What is historical rigour in a speaking and listening activity? How do we make sure that a direct focus on improving the quality of pupils’ classroom talk is, at the same time, a focus upon strengthening historical knowledge, skill and understanding? For while it is possible to make a very...
    Beyond 'I speak, you listen boy!' Exploring diversity of attitudes and experiences through speaking and listening

  • Democracy is not boring

      Teaching History article
    Seán Lang argues that whilst history teachers have expressed much support for the citizenship education proposals, and whilst their practice already addresses the skills of evidence-weighing, debate and argument, there are huge gaps in our coverage of relevant content. He argues that the freedom with which teachers may currently interpret...
    Democracy is not boring

  • Short cuts to deep knowledge

      Teaching History article
    Sam Pullan explains how a chance encounter has helped him to improve his introduction to the modern themes and founding documents of US politics. Working with a professional historian whom he met, by chance, over dinner, he was able to produce lessons at the cutting edge of subject knowledge to...
    Short cuts to deep knowledge

  • Getting ready for the Grand Prix: Learning how to build a substantial argument in year 7

      Article
    Dale Banham’s Grand Prix race has helped many history teachers in Suffolk to think freshly about metaphors and images that will inspire and enable pupils (especially underachieving boys) to write analytically and at length. In this article he explores the reasons for the race’s success. His first theme is the...
    Getting ready for the Grand Prix: Learning how to build a substantial argument in year 7

  • Year 9 use sources to explore contemporary meanings and understandings of appeasement

      Teaching History article
    After reflecting on the difference between his study of source extracts at university and how he was using source extracts in the classroom, Jonathan Sellin went in search of a new way to help his pupils to situate sources in context. Finding inspiration in the work of intellectual historian Quentin...
    Year 9 use sources to explore contemporary meanings and understandings of appeasement

  • 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

  • Why does anyone do anything? Attempts to improve agentive explanations with Year 12

      Teaching History article
    In this article Sophie Harley-McKeown identifies and addresses her Year 12 students’ blind spot over agentive explanation. Noticing that the examination board to which she teaches uses ‘motivations’ rather than ‘aims’ prompted her to consider whether her students really knew what that meant. Finding that her students’ causal explanations tended...
    Why does anyone do anything? Attempts to improve agentive explanations with Year 12

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • The Harkness Method: achieving higher-order thinking with sixth-form

      Teaching History article
    Hark the herald tables sing! Achieving higher-order thinking with a chorus of sixth-form pupils On 9 April 1930, a philanthropist called Edward Harkness donated millions of dollars to the Phillips Exeter Academy in the USA. He hoped that his donation could be used to find a new way for students to sit around a table...
    The Harkness Method: achieving higher-order thinking with sixth-form

  • Helping Year 9 debate the purposes of genocide education

      Teaching History article
    Connecting the dots: helping Year 9 to debate the purposes of Holocaust and genocide education Why do we teach about the Holocaust and about other genocides? The Holocaust has been a compulsory part of the English National Curriculum since 1991; however, curriculum documents say little about why pupils should learn...
    Helping Year 9 debate the purposes of genocide education

  • Helping Year 9 evaluate explanations for the Holocaust

      Teaching History article
    ‘It made my brain hurt, but in a good way': helping Year 9 learn to make and to evaluate explanations for the Holocaust Why genocides occur is a perplexing and complex question. Leanne Judson reports a strategy designed to help students think about perpetration and evaluate and propose explanations for...
    Helping Year 9 evaluate explanations for the Holocaust