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Polychronicon 147: Witchcraft, history and children
Teaching History feature
Witchcraft is serious history. 1612 marks the 400th anniversary of England's biggest peacetime witch trial, that of the Lancashire witches: 20 witches from the Forest of Pendle were imprisoned, ten were hanged in Lancaster, and another in York. As a result of some imaginative commemorative programmes, a number of schools...
Polychronicon 147: Witchcraft, history and children
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Interpretations and history teaching
Teaching History article
Gary Howells offers us a challenge: are we sure that we are teaching the study of interpretations correctly? It is much criticised at GCSE, but do we really engage our students in the process of writing history, and in understanding how history works, from 11-14? Or do we use reductive...
Interpretations and history teaching
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Key Concepts at Key Stage 3
Key Concepts
Please note: This unit was produced before the 2014 National Curriculum and therefore while much of the advice is still useful, there may be some out of date references or links. For more recent resources on key concepts, see our What's the Wisdom on series.
The key concepts can be divided into three...
Key Concepts at Key Stage 3
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Seeing double: how one period visualises another
Teaching History article
When pupils study interpretations or representations of the past which are neither from their own period nor from the period being interpreted/represented, they are having to employ sophisticated knowledge and skill. Jane Card describes this as ‘double vision’: the pupils must think about the period depicted (in this case the...
Seeing double: how one period visualises another
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Unpicking the threads of interpretations
Teaching History article
Determined to do justice to the complexity of the seventeenth century, as a messy but crucial period in British history, and to develop their pupils’ disciplinary understanding of how and why interpretations of the past are constructed, Dan Keates and his department set out to exploit the rich seam of...
Unpicking the threads of interpretations
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Polychronicon 151: Interpreting the Revolution of 1688
Teaching History feature
John Morrill, one of the foremost historians of the British civil wars, has described the events of 1688-9 as the ‘Sensible Revolution'. The phrase captures the essence of a long-standing scholarly consensus, that this was a very unrevolutionary revolution.
The origins of this interpretation go back to the late eighteenth...
Polychronicon 151: Interpreting the Revolution of 1688
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Tracing the popular memory of Rosa Parks with Year 9
Teaching History article
Inspired by Jeanne Theoharis’s biography of Rosa Parks, Ed Durbin initially planned to challenge the ‘fable’ that had been constructed around her life. He soon realised, however, that he wanted to take the opportunity to get ‘behind’ the fable and help his students understand how and why it had been constructed. Drawing...
Tracing the popular memory of Rosa Parks with Year 9
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Investigating students' prior understandings of the Holocaust
Teaching History article
Students make sense of new learning on the basis of their prior understandings: we cannot move our students' thinking on unless we understand what they already know. In this article, Edwards and O'Dowd report how they set out to scope a group of Y ear 8 students' prior learning and...
Investigating students' prior understandings of the Holocaust
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Polychronicon 167: The strange career of Richard Nixon
Teaching History feature
If you know just one thing about the career of the 37th President of the United States, it is likely to be this: Watergate. Nixon’s resignation in August 1974 was caused by his decision to cover up a burglary at the Democratic Party’s campaign headquarters for the 1972 election, which...
Polychronicon 167: The strange career of Richard Nixon
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Year 8 and interpretations of the First World War
Teaching History article
Dan Smith was concerned that his pupils were drawing on over-simplified generalisations about different periods of the past when they were considering why interpretations change over time. This led him to consider how pupils’ contextual knowledge and chronological fluency might be used more explicitly in order to avoid weak generalisations...
Year 8 and interpretations of the First World War
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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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Polychronicon 153: Re-interpreting Liberation: the end of the Holocaust?
Teaching History feature
In August 1945, Zalman Grinberg, a doctor from Kovno and spokesman for the Liberated Jews in the American Zone of Germany, addressed 1,700 Jewish survivors. ‘What is the logic of destiny to let these individuals remain alive?!' he asked them:
We are free now, but we do not know what...
Polychronicon 153: Re-interpreting Liberation: the end of the Holocaust?
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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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‘One big cake’: substantive knowledge of the mid-Tudor crisis in Year 7 students’ writing
Teaching History article
While looking to revamp his department’s Year 7 enquiry on the Tudors, Jack Mills turned to historiographical debates regarding the ‘mid-Tudor crisis’ to inform his curricular decision making. In doing so, Mills noted that the debate hinged on interpretations of substantive concepts such as ‘crisis’. He therefore also drew on previous...
‘One big cake’: substantive knowledge of the mid-Tudor crisis in Year 7 students’ writing
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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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Polychronicon 118: interpretations of Henry VII
Teaching History feature
Polychronicon was a fourteenth-century chronicle that brought together much of the knowledge of its own age. Our Polychronicon in Teaching History is a regular feature helping school history teachers to update their subject knowledge, with special emphasis on recent historiography and changing interpretation. This edition of 'Polychronicon' explores the historical...
Polychronicon 118: interpretations of Henry VII
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Polychronicon 114: interpretations of Oliver Cromwell
Teaching History feature
Polychronicon was a fourteenth-century chronicle that brought together much of the knowledge of its own age. Our Polychronicon in Teaching History is a regular feature helping school history teachers to update their subject knowledge, with special emphasis on recent historiography and changing interpretation. This edition of 'Polychronicon' investigates the differing...
Polychronicon 114: interpretations of Oliver Cromwell
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Polychronicon 155: Interpreting the Origins of of the First World War
Teaching History feature
As I write this article I have before me my grandfather's Victory Medal from the First World War. It has inscribed on the reverse side, ‘The Great War for Civilisation 1914-1919'. The absolute certainty of such a justification for Britain's entry into the war seems somewhat hollow as we approach...
Polychronicon 155: Interpreting the Origins of of the First World War
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Getting Year 7 to vocalise responses to the murder of Thomas Becket
Teaching History article
Mary Partridge wanted her pupils not only to become more aware of competing and contrasting voices in the past, but to understand how historians orchestrate those voices. Using Edward Grim's eye-witness account of Thomas Becket's murder, her Year 7 pupils explored nuances in the word ‘shocking' as a way of...
Getting Year 7 to vocalise responses to the murder of Thomas Becket
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History and the perils of multiculturalism in 1990s Britain
Teaching History article
Ian Grosvenor's article points both to dangers and to positive potential in the National Curriculum for history. Critical of the published proposals for history in the current curriculum review, he points not only at the continuing narrowness of the perspectives enshrined by the proposed curriculum but at the reasons why...
History and the perils of multiculturalism in 1990s Britain
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Using the Attainment Target in Key Stage 3: Interpretations of History
Article
An individual's knowledge of history is dependent not only on the events of the past but also on the way such events are presented. These presentations of the past come in a variety of forms and an educated person should be able to reflect purposefully on their worth...
Using the Attainment Target in Key Stage 3: Interpretations of History
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'Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?'
Teaching History article
How can the Holocaust be represented? In this article, Andrew Wrenn takes as his example the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He helps teachers encourage pupils to get beneath the surface, and look analytically at the Museum itself as an interpretation of the Holocaust. Such an investigation provides pupils and...
'Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?'
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Polychronicon 122: The Gunpowder Plot
Teaching History feature
Our Polychronicon in Teaching History is a regular feature helping school history teachers to update their subject knowledge, with special emphasis on recent historiography and changing interpretation. This edition of 'Polychronicon' focuses on interpretations of the Gunpowder Plot.
Polychronicon 122: The Gunpowder Plot
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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
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New, Novice or Nervous? 156: Analysing interpretations
Teaching History feature
This page is for those new to the published writings of history teachers. Every problem you wrestle with, other teachers have wrestled with too. Quick fixes don't exist. But if you discover others' writing, you'll soon find - and want to join - something better: an international conversation in which others...
New, Novice or Nervous? 156: Analysing interpretations
