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From flight paths to spiders’ webs: developing a progression model for Key Stage 3
Teaching History journal article
The disapplication of level descriptions in the 2014 National Curriculum has spurred many history departments to rethink their approach not only to assessment but to their models of progression. In this article Rachael Cook builds on the recent work of history teachers such as Ford (TH157), Hawkey et al (TH161),...
From flight paths to spiders’ webs: developing a progression model for Key Stage 3
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‘This extract is no good, Miss!’
Journal article
Frustrated that her A-level students were being overly dismissive when asked to judge the convincingness of academic historians’ arguments, Paula Worth drew on previous history-teacher research and theories of history for inspiration. After noting that her students would unjustly reject esteemed historians’ accounts for lack of comprehensiveness, Worth explains here...
‘This extract is no good, Miss!’
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Reading? What reading?
Journal article
Discussions with sixth-form students about reading led Carolyn Massey and Paul Wiggin to start a sixth-formreading group. They describe here the series of themed sessions that they planned, and the student discussion and reflections that resulted. Listening to their students discuss their reading led Massey and Wiggin to reflect on what is meant by ‘reading around’ the subject, and its role in students’ intellectual...
Reading? What reading?
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Putting Catlin in his place?
Teaching History article
Jess Landy’s desire to introduce her pupils to a more complex narrative of the American West led her to the life story and work of a remarkable individual, George Catlin.
In this article she shows how she used this unusual micro-narrative in order to challenge pupils’ ideas not just about the bigger narrative of which it is a part, but about the...
Putting Catlin in his place?
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Triumphs Show 164: interpretations at A Level
Teaching History feature: celebrating and sharing success
Julia Huber and Katherine Turner found that their A-level students struggled to identify the line of argument in a passage of historical scholarship, an essential prerequisite for answering their coursework question. They devised an activity that helped students to unpick and visually contrast historians’ interpretations of the relative importance of...
Triumphs Show 164: interpretations at A Level
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How do you construct an historical claim?
Teaching History article
While preparing her Year 12 students for an International Baccalaureate paper on early Islam, Kirstie Murray became concerned that students' weaknesses in making claims would be particularly exposed by the challenging complexity of this topic's source record and its contested historiography.
Drawing on the practice of other history teachers, especially...
How do you construct an historical claim?
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Polychronicon 159: Interpreting Magna Carta
Teaching History feature
First some history: the question of how historiographic and public historical representations of Magna Carta have changed over the last 800 years is an important one. The ‘myth' of Magna Carta as a foundational document for modern democracy is still very powerful.
That tradition of understanding the legacy and history...
Polychronicon 159: Interpreting Magna Carta
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Polychronicon 157: Reinterpreting police-public relations in modern England
Teaching History feature
The relationship between the police and the public has long been a key subject in English social history. The formative work in this field was conducted between the 1970s and 1990s, but the past few years have witnessed something of a revival of research in the area. By focusing on...
Polychronicon 157: Reinterpreting police-public relations in modern England
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Move Me On 155: Historical Intepretation vs. Opinion
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem: Helena Swannick tends to treat differences between historical interpretations simply as matters of opinion.
Helena Swannick is a career changer who has decided to come into teaching after many years' working in human resources and some time at home caring for two young children. Her degree was a...
Move Me On 155: Historical Intepretation vs. Opinion
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Do we need another hero? Rorke's Drift
Teaching History article
Do we need another hero? Year 8 get to grips with the heroic myth of the Defence of Rorke's Drift in 1879
Mike Murray shares a lesson sequence in which his students examined changing interpretations of the Battle of Rorke's Drift in 1879. Building on earlier work on teaching interpretations...
Do we need another hero? Rorke's Drift
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Passive receivers or constructive readers?
Teaching History article
Rachel Foster reports here on research that she conducted into how students engage with academic texts. Unhappy with the usual range of texts that students encounter, often truncated and ‘simplified' in the name of accessibility, she designed a scheme of work which sought to find out how her students responded...
Passive receivers or constructive readers?
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What is Bias?
Article
There is a nice story about how Calvin Coolidge went to hear a clergyman preach on sin. "What did he say?" he was asked. 'He said he was against it', Coolidge replied. The history teacher or student, well used by now to the normal form of questions at GCSE, might...
What is Bias?
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Helping Year 8 to understand historians’ narrative decision-making
Teaching History article
While previous work on historical interpretations has focused students’ attention on the particular questions that historians have been asking or the context in which they have been posing those questions, less attention has been paid to the process of historical narration itself – the decisions that are made in telling...
Helping Year 8 to understand historians’ narrative decision-making
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Triumphs Show 182: A public lecture series
Teaching History feature
The history we present to students, however rigorous and challenging, and however full of integrity in eflecting history as a discipline, is a shiny show of our best resources. Peeling back this curtain and allowing students to see the real world of academic history was a major motivation in inviting some...
Triumphs Show 182: A public lecture series
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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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Year 12 write Zambia's history for Zambian students
Teaching History article
Peter Gray explains how his Year 12 students came to research and write a resource on the history of Zambia, for history teachers in Zambia. The construction of the resource stretched the Year 12 students in new ways: the Internet was useless and there were no easy digests in A-Level...
Year 12 write Zambia's history for Zambian students
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Substantial sculptures or sad little plaques? Making 'interpretations' matter to Year 9
Teaching History article
Andrew Wrenn builds upon current, popular and practical work on ‘interpretations of history' analysed in recent editions. Using the public's responses to the temporary exhibition on the slave trade housed at Bristol City Museum, he offers a range of fascinating practical activities for Year 9 pupils. Many of these could...
Substantial sculptures or sad little plaques? Making 'interpretations' matter to Year 9
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Putting life into history: how pupils can use oral history to become critical historians
Teaching History article
However imaginative and enquiring classroom history may be, the history itself is usually constructed by a historian, a textbook author or a teacher. It is rare that pupils gain the opportunity to construct original histories of their own. Oral history can offer this opportunity. Yet as a methodology, oral history...
Putting life into history: how pupils can use oral history to become critical historians
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Approaches to planning interpretations-focused enquiries.
Article
Michael Riley, member of the HA Secondary Committee and History PGCE Tutor at Bath Spa University. In recent years, teaching about different interpretations of history has been one of the most exciting and challenging aspects of Key Stage 3 history. Interpretations-focused enquiries allow pupils to see that argument and debate are...
Approaches to planning interpretations-focused enquiries.
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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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Myths and Monty Python: using the witch-hunts to introduce students to significance
Article
In this article Kerry Apps introduces students to the significance of the witch-hunts in the modern era, at the time when they occurred, and in the middle of the eighteenth century. She presents her rationale for choosing the witch-hunts as a focus for the study of significance, and shows how her thinking about her teaching has evolved through her evaluation of her students’...
Myths and Monty Python: using the witch-hunts to introduce students to significance
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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
