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Evidential understanding, period knowledge and the development of literacy: a practical approach to 'layers of inference' for Key Stage 3
Teaching History article
Claire Riley explains how she developed and improved the ‘layers of inference' diagram-already a popular device since Hilary Cooper's work-as a way of getting pupils fascinated by challenging texts and pictures. Working with the whole ability range in Year 9 she analyses her successes and failures, offering many practical suggestions...
Evidential understanding, period knowledge and the development of literacy: a practical approach to 'layers of inference' for Key Stage 3
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Teaching pupils to analyse cartoons
Article
In this practical account of a key aspect of history departmental policy, Joseph O'Neill presents a rationale for the systematic teaching of analytical techniques. Alert to the dangers of mechanistic and formulaic examination responses, the author draws a distinction between the limiting rigidity of the learned response and the systematic...
Teaching pupils to analyse cartoons
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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'
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Film: What's the wisdom on... Evidence and sources
Your Virtual History Department Meeting
We’ve been talking to our secondary school members and we know how difficult life is for teachers in the current circumstances, so we wanted to lend a helping hand.
'What’s the wisdom on…' is a new and already popular feature in our secondary journal Teaching History and provides the perfect stimulus for a...
Film: What's the wisdom on... Evidence and sources
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Evidence: Theoretical
Links to HA resources for secondary teachers
Getting Year 10 beyond trivial judgements of ‘bias': towards victory in that battle ...
Let's play Supermarket ‘Evidential' Sweep: developing students' awareness of the need to select evidence
Assessment of students' uses of evidence: shifting the focus from processes to historical reasoning
How can students' use of historical evidence be...
Evidence: Theoretical
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The teaching and learning of history for 15-16 year olds: have the Japanese anything to learn from the English experience
Teaching History article
What would you expect the differences to be between Japan and England in how pupils learn history in the post-14 phase? Perhaps your guess would be: Japanese school students learn a lot of historical facts and focus upon their own identity and English school students talk a lot more in...
The teaching and learning of history for 15-16 year olds: have the Japanese anything to learn from the English experience
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'Please send socks': How much can Reg Wilkes tell us about the Great War?
Teaching History article
This was an opportunity all good historians dream about. A large box crammed with artefacts about a soldier who fought in the First World War, just begging to be read, studied, sorted and organised. Being faced with such a wealth of uncatalogued primary evidence could have proved daunting enough without...
'Please send socks': How much can Reg Wilkes tell us about the Great War?
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Broadening Year 7’s British history horizons with Welsh medieval sources
Teaching History article
Hiscox wanted to broaden her students’ understanding of the complexity of the British past, and developed an enquiry into the Norman Conquest of Wales to help achieve that aim. Hiscox reports her enquiry design and its outcomes, sharing how she broadened both content and the types of sources that students...
Broadening Year 7’s British history horizons with Welsh medieval sources
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‘But they just sit there’: using objects as material culture with Year 8
Teaching History article
Having specialised in the history of material culture during her degree, Gabriella West was struck by the dismissive attitude of her pupils towards the study of material objects from the past. She therefore set out to find the perfect object through which to induct her Year 8 pupils into the history...
‘But they just sit there’: using objects as material culture with Year 8
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Cunning Plan 191: diving deep into ‘history from below’ with Year 8
Article
Can the ‘subaltern’ speak, Year 8s?
When the Indian scholar and literary theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak asked this question in 1988, she wasn’t asking Year 8s on a Monday morning. What she wanted to explore was whether those marginalised people written out of the archive – ‘the subaltern’ – could...
Cunning Plan 191: diving deep into ‘history from below’ with Year 8
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Using Lesson Study to make microimprovements in teaching Year 8 how to use sources
Teaching History article
A highly distinctive and structured approach to teacher development, Lesson Study emerged in Japan but has since been adopted much more widely and now sees growing interest in the UK. Tony McConnell, Davinia Daley, Rebecca Levy, Lisa Waddell and Richard Waddington describe the process by which their school first investigated...
Using Lesson Study to make microimprovements in teaching Year 8 how to use sources
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Learning from a pandemic
Teaching History article
In order to contextualise and make sense of the Covid-19 pandemic, Verity Morgan worked with her school’s long-standing partner school in Ghana to devise an innovative project combining history and science, past and present. In this article, Morgan sets out the rationale for the project, her detailed adaptation of a British Council...
Learning from a pandemic
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Creating a progression model for teaching historical perspectives in Key Stage 3
Teaching History article
Jacob Olivey set out to design enquiries which would enable his pupils to reconstruct, using evidence, the perspectives of people in the past. In this article he shares in detail the planning and outcomes of two enquiries: one for Year 7 and one for Year 8. Olivey offers a example...
Creating a progression model for teaching historical perspectives in Key Stage 3
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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 scholarship, archaeology and evidence in Year 7
Teaching History article
The stimulus for this article came from two developmental tasks that Barbara Trapani was set during the course of her initial teacher education programme: planning her first historical enquiry and bringing the work of an historian into the classroom. Trapani chose to tackle the two tasks together, using Susan Whitfield’s...
Historical scholarship, archaeology and evidence in Year 7
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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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Using an anthology of substantial sources at GCSE
Teaching History article
Struck by his GCSE students’ bewildered expressions when studying source extracts, Liam McDonnell decided to adopt a new approach to source analysis. Inspired by the work of other history teachers, McDonnell decided to use an anthology of substantial sources when studying nineteenth-century Whitechapel in London. By revisiting the sources at...
Using an anthology of substantial sources at GCSE
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Teaching the very recent past
Teaching History article
‘Miriam's Vision' is an educational project developed by the Miriam Hyman Memorial Trust, an organisation set up in memory of Miriam Hyman, one of the 52 victims of the London bombings of 2005. The project has developed a number of subject-based modules, including history, which are provided free to schools...
Teaching the very recent past
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The Power of Context: using a visual source
Teaching History article
Drawing on her wealth of experience and expertise in using visual sources in the classroom, in this article Jane Card explores how a single painting, a portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray, might form the basis for a sequence of lessons.
Arguing that although highly...
The Power of Context: using a visual source
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New, Novice or Nervous? 160: Progression in evidential understanding
Teaching History feature
You have a wealth of fascinating sources you would love to explore with students but despair at their seeming inability to connect ‘source work' with the construction of historical claims. Year 7 get stuck in the ‘it's biased so we can never know' trap again and again. Year 9 students...
New, Novice or Nervous? 160: Progression in evidential understanding
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Triumphs Show 157: What makes art history?
Teaching History feature: celebrating and sharing success
What do 14 Year 7 students, an art teacher, a history teacher and the Victoria and Albert Museum have in common? They are all part of the ‘Stronger Together' Museum Champion project run by The Langley Academy and the River & Rowing Museum and supported by Arts Council England, designed to...
Triumphs Show 157: What makes art history?
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Triumphs Show 156: Fresh perspectives on the First World War
Teaching History feature: celebrating and sharing success
Year 9 think they know a lot about the First World War. After all, they read Michael Morpurgo's novel Private Peaceful in their English lessons all the way back in Year 7, they've seen Blackadder so many times they can recite it, and in the centenary year of the war's...
Triumphs Show 156: Fresh perspectives on the First World War
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Triumphs Show 155: beyond trivial judgements of 'bias'
Teaching History feature: celebrating and sharing success
Towards victory in that battle...
10A were nearly a term into their GCSE history course, working on an 1890-1918 British history ‘depth study'. They had already completed work on the Liberal welfare reforms and on the women's suffrage movement, and they had been practising a range of source evaluation approaches....
Triumphs Show 155: beyond trivial judgements of 'bias'
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An authentic voice: perspectives on the value of listening to survivors of genocide
Teaching History article
It is common practice to invite survivors of the Holocaust to speak about their experiences to pupils in schools and colleges. Systematic reflection on the value of working with survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides and on how to make the most of doing so is rarer, however. In...
An authentic voice: perspectives on the value of listening to survivors of genocide
