-
From human-scale to abstract analysis: Year 7. Henry II & Becket
Teaching History article
Tim Jenner was working on a causation enquiry with his Year 7 students when he noticed that weak conceptions of change were limiting their ability to produce powerful and period-sensitive arguments. He therefore decided to digress into a temporary but explicit focus on analysing historical change. He created a deceptively...
From human-scale to abstract analysis: Year 7. Henry II & Becket
-
Dealing with the consequences
Teaching History journal article
Do GCSE and A-level questions that purport to be about consequences actually reward reasoning about historical consequences at all? Molly-Ann Navey concluded that they do not and that they fail to encourage the kind of argument that academic historians engage in when reaching judgements about consequences. Navey decided that it...
Dealing with the consequences
-
Inverting the telescope: investigating sources from a different perspective
Teaching History article
As historians, we are dependent on evidence, which comes in many varieties. Rosalind Stirzaker here introduces a project which she ran two years ago to encourage her students to think about artefacts in a different way. They have examined randomly preserved artefacts such as those of Pompeii, and sets of...
Inverting the telescope: investigating sources from a different perspective
-
Why are you wearing a watch? Complicating narratives of economic and social progress
Teaching History article
Frustrated by the traditional narrative of the industrial revolution as a steady march of progress, and disappointed by her students’ dull and deterministic statements about historical change, Hannah Sibona decided to complicate the tidy narrative of continual improvement.
Inspired by an article by E.P. Thompson, Sibona reflected that introducing her...
Why are you wearing a watch? Complicating narratives of economic and social progress
-
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
-
Placing history: territory, story, identity - and historical consciousness
Teaching History article
How do we relate to the past? Does it tell us who we are? Is it a source of examples to follow and mistakes to avoid? Or can we go beyond that to something genuinely historical? Arthur Chapman and Jane Facey argue that as history teachers we have a responsibility...
Placing history: territory, story, identity - and historical consciousness
-
How did changing conceptions of place lead to conflict in the American West? Reflecting on revision methods for GCSE
Teaching History article
Mary Woolley decided to make four revision sheets for her lower-band Year 11 set. Each was to help them view their American West study through a different lens. She was rather uncertain, however (and so were the pupils) about her fourth sheet on places. Her reflections on the revision sheet...
How did changing conceptions of place lead to conflict in the American West? Reflecting on revision methods for GCSE
