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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... Modern British LGBTQ+ history
Teaching History feature
While academic historians began to make important contributions to our understanding of British LGBTQ+ history in the 1970s (and, indeed, this built on historical scholarship from as early as the 1880s), the field of British queer history became properly established within university history departments and mainstream academic scholarship from the...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... Modern British LGBTQ+ history
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Making learning drive assessment: Joan of Arc - saint, witch or warrior?
Teaching History article
Andrew Wrenn describes his work with Barry Williams and the teachers of the history department at Ailwyn School (11-14 comprehensive), Ramsey in Cambridgeshire. Devoting equal attention to the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of history assessment, he shows how this group of teachers developed a fresh approach to assessment out of...
Making learning drive assessment: Joan of Arc - saint, witch or warrior?
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Who wants to fight? Who wants to flee? Teaching history from a 'thinking skills' perspective
Teaching History article
Whatever shape the National Curriculum of the 21st century takes, history will have to show its relevance to major curricular areas and themes such as literacy, citizenship education and thinking skills. This ought to be easy: the critical, informed decision-making required by the modern citizen is practised in virtually every...
Who wants to fight? Who wants to flee? Teaching history from a 'thinking skills' perspective
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Guidance Pack: Building a Local Teacher Network
Information
We know that it is difficult for teachers to get to events too far from school. As a national charity, the HA recognises the importance and need to build strong regional networks for the history teaching community. Many of these are already existing or organically growing across the country at...
Guidance Pack: Building a Local Teacher Network
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An Investigation into Finding Effective Ways of Presenting a Written Source to Students
IJHLTR Article
International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research [IJHLTR], Volume 15, Number 1 – Autumn/Winter 2017ISSN: 14472-9474
Abstract
Written historical sources can be quite challenging for students to analyse in secondary school. They are sometimes long and tedious to read as well as containing difficult and awkward text. The presentation of...
An Investigation into Finding Effective Ways of Presenting a Written Source to Students
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Academic Critical Thinking, Research Literacy and Undergraduate History
Article
International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research [IJHLTR], Volume 15, Number 1 – Autumn/Winter 2017ISSN: 14472-9474
Abstract
The concept of critical thinking is pivotal in academia. Many see it as the very core of intellectual thought and the primary learning outcome of higher education. In addition to its universal merits,...
Academic Critical Thinking, Research Literacy and Undergraduate History
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Using eighteenth-century material culture to develop evidential thinking in Year 8
Teaching History article
It seems that teapots really can talk. Eleanor Dimond took her undergraduate experience of studying material culture into the classroom, with startling results. Historians of material culture have developed distinctive evidential methods which, in stark contrast to typical GCSE and A-Level approaches, see a strong interplay between analysis of the physical attributes...
Using eighteenth-century material culture to develop evidential thinking in Year 8
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Exploring the relationship between historical significance and historical interpretation
Teaching History article
Jane Card’s previous work on the power of images in conveying particular interpretations and her advice about how to use visual material effectively in classrooms will be familiar to readers of Teaching History. In this article she focuses specifically on the capacity of visual representations to convey a compelling message about the...
Exploring the relationship between historical significance and historical interpretation
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Cunning Plan 190: Using art to make A-level history more accessible
Teaching History feature
Many pupils love the Horrible Histories books, television programmes and songs. Over the years a number of A-level pupils have proudly told me that it was Horrible Histories that sparked their love of the subject, and they are quick to recite the songs word for word! But it is also the...
Cunning Plan 190: Using art to make A-level history more accessible
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Decolonising sources: helping Year 9 pupils critically evaluate colonial sources
Teaching History article
Danielle Donaldson’s history department was already working within a professional culture that sought opportunities for making the history curriculum diverse and representative. Responding to wider debates within and beyond the history education community, however, the department began to ask fresh questions about what it meant to decolonise a curriculum. Donaldson...
Decolonising sources: helping Year 9 pupils critically evaluate colonial sources
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Cunning Plan 178: How far did Anglo-Saxon England survive the Norman Conquest?
Teaching History feature
Cunning Plan for using the metaphor of a tree to help students characterise the process of change and engage with a historian’s argument.
In this Cunning Plan, Eve Hackett sets out how she used a recent work of history about the Norman Conquest as inspiration for her teaching of Year...
Cunning Plan 178: How far did Anglo-Saxon England survive the Norman Conquest?
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Helping Year 9 evaluate explanations for the Holocaust
Teaching History article
‘It made my brain hurt, but in a good way': helping Year 9 learn to make and to evaluate explanations for the Holocaust
Why genocides occur is a perplexing and complex question. Leanne Judson reports a strategy designed to help students think about perpetration and evaluate and propose explanations for...
Helping Year 9 evaluate explanations for the Holocaust
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Polychronicon 175: Paris 1919 – a century on
Teaching History feature
The Paris peace conference resulted in five major treaties, each with one of the defeated Central Powers. Of these the most consequential was the Treaty of Versailles with Germany, signed on 28 June 1919, which was denounced by the young economist John Maynard Keynes in his bestselling polemic The Economic...
Polychronicon 175: Paris 1919 – a century on
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Developing pupil explanation through web debates
Teaching History article
Kathryn Greenfield became dissatisfied with her pupils' written responses, particularly the rather limited explanations that they were giving in support of points that they made. Drawing here on recent work in using Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) to develop pupil historical argument and reasoning, Greenfield explains how she used web debates...
Developing pupil explanation through web debates
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Modelling the discipline
Teaching History article
David Hibbert and Zaiba Patel decided to work together after becoming concerned that school history curricula might not enable students to interrogate popular British mythologising about World War II. Building on these pre-existing concerns, their collaboration with the historian Yasmin Khan yielded an Interpretations enquiry which asked students to consider...
Modelling the discipline
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Telling difficult stories about the creation of Bangladesh
Teaching History article
Nathanael Davies recognised that previous efforts to diversify the history taught at his school by weaving new stories into the curriculum had made little impression on his students’ assumptions about what really counted as history. Planning a new enquiry on the creation of Bangladesh was intended both to bridge a...
Telling difficult stories about the creation of Bangladesh
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The Evacuee Letter Exchange Project: using audience-centred writing to improve progression from Key Stage 2 to Key Stage 3
Teaching History article
Jenny Parsons' work in primary-secondary liaison in history is nationally acclaimed. She is often asked to share her department's practice at courses and conferences. Readers of Teaching History are already familiar with her work in another area: in the ‘Triumphs Show' of Teaching History 93 (the ICT edition in November...
The Evacuee Letter Exchange Project: using audience-centred writing to improve progression from Key Stage 2 to Key Stage 3
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Disciplining cross-curricularity?
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Why should we think in inter-disciplinary rather than cross-curricular terms when planning collaborative work with colleagues in other subjects? What scope is there for working in inter-disciplinary ways and what is the value of such...
Disciplining cross-curricularity?
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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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Virtual Branch recording: Empires of the Normans
Virtual Branch Film
How did descendants of Viking marauders come to dominate Western Europe and the Mediterranean, from the British Isles to North Africa, and Lisbon to the Holy Land and the Middle East?
In this Virtual Branch talk Levi Roach, author of Empires of the Normans, tells a tale of ambitious adventures...
Virtual Branch recording: Empires of the Normans
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Strategies for A-Level marking to motivate and enable
Teaching History article
Jane Facey was unsatisfied with the way in which her A-Level students responded to typical assessment practice. This would normally involve their teacher marking their work and then providing them with written feedback. In looking to move beyond this, Facey drew upon a wide range of research and practice which...
Strategies for A-Level marking to motivate and enable
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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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Triumphs Show 148.1: collaborating to commemorate Olaudah Equiano
Teaching History feature
How a drink in the bar at the SHP conference - and discovery of a shared interest in ICT - led to the campaign for a Blue Plaque for an eighteenth-century abolitionist.
What do the 1970 Brazil World Cup-winning team, Charles Darwin and Vanilla Ice all have in common? This...
Triumphs Show 148.1: collaborating to commemorate Olaudah Equiano
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Enrichment Opportunities
Briefing Pack
Background
History can be used to enrich students' experience of education in many ways. Everything has a history and links can be made with, and support given to most other subjects. Opportunities can be provided to classes, whole year groups, across year groups, or to individuals. Enrichment can be as...
Enrichment Opportunities
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Attempting to reach the heart of the matter
Journal article
Michael McIntyre and Vanessa Hull explain the work of Facing History and Ourselves, an education organisation based in the United States and working internationally.
Facing History aims to engage students in reflection on why violence occurred in the past, on what this teaches us about the world today and on...
Attempting to reach the heart of the matter
