-
Pedagogical framework for stimulating historical contextualisation
Teaching History article
'Why am I accused of being a heretic?' A pedagogical framework for stimulating historical contextualisation
One of the challenges facing students who want to make sense of a source or an interpretation of the past is the need to place it in its context. Various research studies have shown that students...
Pedagogical framework for stimulating historical contextualisation
-
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
-
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
-
Evidence: Specific examples
Article
Evidence: Specific examples
-
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
-
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
-
Bob Dylan and the concept of evidence
Teaching History article
No edition of Teaching History devoted to creativity could be complete without returning to the riches that popular songs offer to historians and history teachers alike. The five Bob Dylan songs that Christopher Edwards explores here are chosen not merely for their ‘literary qualities' and ‘emotional charge'; they also provide...
Bob Dylan and the concept of evidence
-
Information and Evidence In a Nutshell
Article
Nutshell, what's the National Curriculum Attainment Target on about when it contrasts "information" and "evidence"? Aren't they the same thing?
They aren't really things. The contrast is between ways of thinking about knowledge rather than between things.
Pardon me?
One way of talking about knowledge involves ‘looking things up': we...
Information and Evidence In a Nutshell
-
How can students' use of historical evidence be enhanced?
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
What role does knowledge play in the interpretation of documentary materials? How do history students use what they know? What kind of knowledge really ‘makes the difference' and which ways of using knowledge make the...
How can students' use of historical evidence be enhanced?
-
Year 7 use oral traditions to make claims about the rise and fall of the Inka empire
Teaching History article
As part of her department’s effort to diversify the history curriculum, Paula Worth began a quest to research and then shape a lesson sequence around the Inkas. Her article shows how she allowed the new topic and its historiography to challenge and extend her own use of sources, particularly oral tradition....
Year 7 use oral traditions to make claims about the rise and fall of the Inka empire
-
‘Miss, what’s the point of sources?’ Helping Year 11 to understand the discipline
Teaching History article
Clare Bartington noticed that her students’ focus on the specific kinds of question used in examinations appeared to have undermined their understanding of how historians actually use sources. Instead of approaching the traces or ‘leftovers’ of the past as potential sources of evidence in relation to a particular question, her students believed...
‘Miss, what’s the point of sources?’ Helping Year 11 to understand the discipline
-
Frameworks for linking pupils' evidential understanding with growing skill in structured, written argument: the 'evidence sandwich'
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
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?...
Frameworks for linking pupils' evidential understanding with growing skill in structured, written argument: the 'evidence sandwich'
-
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
-
Using databases to explore the real depth in the data
Teaching History article
Is it a good thing to have a lot of evidence? Surely the historian would answer that yes, it is: the more evidence that can be used, the better. The problem with this approach, though, is that too much data can be overwhelming for the history student - and, in...
Using databases to explore the real depth in the data
-
Questions and answers about questions and answers
Teaching History article
Intrigued by the wide range of pupils’ responses to a sourcebased essay question, Jonathan Sellin decided to investigate why pupils were using sources in such different ways. Probing his own philosophical assumptions about history, and how they have changed over time, prompted Sellin to explore pupils’ assumptions about how historians use sources to make claims about the past. By asking pupils to...
Questions and answers about questions and answers
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
Building the Habit of Evidential Thinking
Teaching History article
Anna Aiken and her history colleagues had been reflecting on the stubborn problem of students failing to tackle GCSE questions about sources with adequate thought or understanding of evidence. Teaching them the typical requirements of the GCSE examination even appeared to make things worse, encouraging superficiality and failing to bring about secure responses. Aiken and her colleagues noted that the problems...
Building the Habit of Evidential Thinking
-
Time's arrows? Using a dartboard scaffold to understand historical action
Teaching History article
Arthur Chapman presents a task-specific scaffold - a ‘dart' board - designed to teach students how to interrogate sources of information so that these become sources of evidence for particular claims about past actions, beliefs and aims. Chapman also uses his ‘dart' board to foster students' reflection on the degrees of...
Time's arrows? Using a dartboard scaffold to understand historical action
-
Stepping into the past: using images to travel through time
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Pupils are eternally curious about their teachers. Do they really have lives outside the classroom? Could Miss Jones have once been a child? Does she have parents and grandparents and a past of her own?...
Stepping into the past: using images to travel through time
-
Using ancient texts to improve pupils' critical thinking
Teaching History article
Did Alexander really ask, ‘Do I appear to you to be a bastard?' Using ancient texts to improve pupils' critical thinking
Beth Baker and Steven Mastin make the case for teaching ancient history in the post-14 curriculum. Pointing out the damaging messages that could be conveyed by assuming that ancient...
Using ancient texts to improve pupils' critical thinking
-
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
-
Teaching Year 9 about historical theories and methods
Teaching History article
Kate Hammond sets out a rationale for linking the National Curriculum requirement to study interpretations of history with her pupils’ own evidence handling skills. She makes connections with history-teacher-led debates and innovations in both areas, but particularly the work of Howells (2005). She describes and evaluates a learning sequence that...
Teaching Year 9 about historical theories and methods
-
Teaching pupils to analyse cartoons
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
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...
Teaching pupils to analyse cartoons
