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An Investigation into Finding Effective Ways of Presenting a Written Source to Students
IJHLTR Article
International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research [IJHLTR], Volume 15, Number 1 – Autumn/Winter 2017ISSN: 14472-9474
Abstract
Written historical sources can be quite challenging for students to analyse in secondary school. They are sometimes long and tedious to read as well as containing difficult and awkward text. The presentation of...
An Investigation into Finding Effective Ways of Presenting a Written Source to Students
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Narrating “Histories of Spain”
Article
International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research [IJHLTR], Volume 15, Number 1 – Autumn/Winter 2017 ISSN: 14472-9474
Abstract
This study analyses the role of Spanish teacher training students as narrators of what they consider to be the history of Spain. Results of this empirical study are based on a random...
Narrating “Histories of Spain”
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Academic Critical Thinking, Research Literacy and Undergraduate History
Article
International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research [IJHLTR], Volume 15, Number 1 – Autumn/Winter 2017ISSN: 14472-9474
Abstract
The concept of critical thinking is pivotal in academia. Many see it as the very core of intellectual thought and the primary learning outcome of higher education. In addition to its universal merits,...
Academic Critical Thinking, Research Literacy and Undergraduate History
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From The Holocaust To Recent Mass Murders And Refugees
IJHLTR Article
International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research [IJHLTR], Volume 14, Number 2 – Spring/Summer 2017ISSN: 14472-9474
Abstract
Through studying cases of genocide and mass atrocities, students can come to realize that: democratic institutions and values are not automatically sustained but need to be appreciated, nurtured, and protected; silence and indifference to the...
From The Holocaust To Recent Mass Murders And Refugees
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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Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.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
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SHP and 'What is history?'
Article
In the 1970s a new approach to history teaching was developed through the auspices of the Schools Council History Project (SCHP) later named the Schools History Project (SHP). In order to engage pupils (and reverse the perceived danger of a declining uptake of history amongst pupils) the project authors designed...
SHP and 'What is history?'
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Challenging not balancing: developing Year 7's grasp of historical argument through online discussion and a virtual book
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
This article is about using story to construct a learning journey for a Year 7 class. It reports an innovative use of a virtual learning environment to construct a narrative e-book into which argument tasks...
Challenging not balancing: developing Year 7's grasp of historical argument through online discussion and a virtual book
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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
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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
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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
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Historical and interdisciplinary enquiry into the sinking of the Mary Rose
Teaching History article
The raising of Henry VIII’s warship, the Mary Rose, from the sea bed set in train an extraordinary programme of interdisciplinary research, relentlessly pursuing the clues to Tudor life and death provided by the remains of the ship, its cargo and crew. In this article Clare Barnes offers fascinating insights...
Historical and interdisciplinary enquiry into the sinking of the Mary Rose
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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
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New, Novice or Nervous? 174: Building students' historical talk
The quick guide to the ‘no-quick-fix'
How do we get our students to talk more in lessons? No, not like that! How have history teachers engaged with the issue of students’ historical – and general – oracy? Talking about history is not the same skill as writing about it. It is more immediate, and more easily...
New, Novice or Nervous? 174: Building students' historical talk
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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
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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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'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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The knowledge illusion
Teaching History article
Focusing on students’ attempts to explain the relative significance of different factors in Hitler’s rise to power, Catherine McCrory explores the vexed question of why students who seem able to express necessary historical knowledge on one occasion cannot effectively reproduce it on another. Drawing on a detailed analysis of what...
The knowledge illusion
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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
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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
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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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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
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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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Strategies for A-Level marking to motivate and enable
Teaching History article
Jane Facey was unsatisfied with the way in which her A-Level students responded to typical assessment practice. This would normally involve their teacher marking their work and then providing them with written feedback. In looking to move beyond this, Facey drew upon a wide range of research and practice which...
Strategies for A-Level marking to motivate and enable
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Historiography from below: how undergraduates remember learning history at school
Teaching History article
What do our students make of the history that we teach them? As part of an introductory module on historiography, Marcus Collins asked his undergraduate students to analyse the history that they had been taught at school and college using historiographic concepts. The results make for interesting reading. What do...
Historiography from below: how undergraduates remember learning history at school
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What's your claim: Developing pupils' historical argument skills using asynchronous text based computer conferencing
Teaching History article
The potential that e-conferencing and message boarding have to engage pupils in historical debate and to enhance their ability and inclination to argue is increasingly well understood, as practice reported in these pages recently and the success and expansion of the Historical Association’s Centenary Debates initiative both demonstrate. In this...
What's your claim: Developing pupils' historical argument skills using asynchronous text based computer conferencing
