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Lesson sequence: Life in a Medieval Village
Article
The first lesson of this sequence is available free to all secondary members here.
This series of lessons has been designed to make gaining knowledge of medieval rural life engaging for students and to teach them how good historical fiction is constructed. Students learn how to write a story about life in...
Lesson sequence: Life in a Medieval Village
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Lesson sequence: Life in a Medieval Village - taster lesson
Article
This series of lessons has been designed to make gaining knowledge of medieval rural life engaging for students and to teach them how good historical fiction is constructed. Students learn how to write a story about life in the fourteenth-century Suffolk village of Walsham and to do so successfully they...
Lesson sequence: Life in a Medieval Village - taster lesson
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Period, place and mental space
Teaching History article
Period, place and mental space: using historical scholarship to develop Year 7 pupils' sense of period
What is a sense of period? And how can pupils' sense of period be developed? Questions such as these have troubled history teachers for many years, often revolving around debates over the role played by...
Period, place and mental space
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Teaching History 107: Little Stories, Big Pictures
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
This edition deals with the complex relationship between depth work and overview work. Revealing the big picture: patterns, shapes and images at Key Stage 3, Slavery, Learning and teaching about the history of Europe in the 20th Century, Teaching the history of 20th women in Europe, Using Ethel and Ernest...
Teaching History 107: Little Stories, Big Pictures
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Local Authority Housing
Classic Pamphlet
Local authority housing has been a distinctive feature of the British housing system throughout the twentieth century. This pamphlet outlines the development of local authority housing in Britain from its origins in the late nineteenth century to the present day, focusing on the ways in which policy changes have affected...
Local Authority Housing
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Continuity in the treatment of mental health through time
Teaching History article
Where's the other ‘c'? Year 9 examine continuity in the treatment of mental health through time
Helen Murray, Rachel Burney and Andrew Stacey-Chapman show how they strengthened three goals of their practice - secure knowledge, narrative shapes and conceptual analysis - by securing strong connection between them. The curricular focus...
Continuity in the treatment of mental health through time
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Change and Continuity
Key Concepts
Please note: these links were compiled in 2009. For a more recent resource, please see: What's the Wisdom on: Change and Continuity.
This selection of useful Teaching History articles on Change and Continuity are highly recommended reading to those who would like to get to grip with these key concepts:
1. Michael Riley: Big Stories and...
Change and Continuity
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Recorded webinar: Revisiting the witch trials
Article
The East Anglian witch hunt under Matthew Hopkins, self-appointed Witchfinder General, has garnered a great deal of popular and historical interest over the years. An image has developed of a zealous, misogynistic young man serving crazed 'justice' against supposed witches, whipping up panic and turning neighbours against each other in...
Recorded webinar: Revisiting the witch trials
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Professional wrestling in the history department: a case study in planning the teaching of the British Empire at key stage 3
Teaching History article
Three years ago (TH 99, Curriculum Planning Edition), Michael Riley illustrated ways in which history departments could exploit the increased flexibility of the revised National Curriculum. He showed that precisely-worded enquiry questions, positioned thoughtfully across the Key Stage, help to ensure progression, challenge and coherence. His picturesque image for this...
Professional wrestling in the history department: a case study in planning the teaching of the British Empire at key stage 3
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Developing meaningful cross-curricular approaches
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Some history departments find themselves under pressure to incorporate skills and competences from alternative curricula. Others find that with the pressure to ease transition issues in Year 7, history can almost disappear into an amalgam...
Developing meaningful cross-curricular approaches
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Move Me On 147: Making Analogies Meaningful
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem: Emma Norman finds the analogies that she's using to make historical ideas meaningful end up distracting or confusing the students.
Emma has come into history teaching after a number of years at home looking after children. Her previous work was as a fundraiser for an environmental campaign group,...
Move Me On 147: Making Analogies Meaningful
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On-demand webinar: A year in assessment
Meaningful and useable assessment in the secondary history classroom
Webinar series: Meaningful and useable assessment in the secondary history classroom
Session 5: A year in assessment
This session will put forward a couple of examples of what meaningful and useable assessment could look like across a school year at Key Stage 3. The session will explore the range of...
On-demand webinar: A year in assessment
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The use and abuse of a history researcher in residence
Article
The Researcher in Residence scheme, funded through the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), brings together researchers and teachers by getting doctoral students into schools. Will Pettigrew, an expert on the Atlantic Slave trade and DPhil student at Lincoln College, Oxford worked with students and staff from the History Department...
The use and abuse of a history researcher in residence
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Having 'Great Expectations' of Year 9
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
What scope does studying a classic novel in both English and history provide for meaningful cross-curricular work and how might engaging with historical fiction help pupils engage more effectively with the realities of the past?...
Having 'Great Expectations' of Year 9
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Delve deeper with The Historian magazine
The perfect support material for teachers and students
The Historian magazine offers the perfect support material for teachers. It’s an opportunity to learn more about those bits of history you may need a greater knowledge of for teaching, just have an interest in or to support your A-level and GCSE students with their studies. It’s also an ideal...
Delve deeper with The Historian magazine
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Virtual Branch Recording: Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife
Lives of medieval women
What was life really like for women in the medieval period? How did they think about sex, death and God? Could they live independent lives?
Few women had the luxury of writing down their thoughts and feelings during medieval times. But remarkably, there are at least four who did: Marie de France,...
Virtual Branch Recording: Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife
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Bringing psychology into history: why do some stories disappear?
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
History is always a relationship between the present and the past and the meaning of the past shifts as values and events change in the present. In this article Anne Llewellyn and Helen Snelson use...
Bringing psychology into history: why do some stories disappear?
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Nutshell 129: Arguing the case for keeping history at Key Stage 3
Article
Nutshell, HELP. My head wants to abandon separate subjects at Key Stage 3 and do projects linked only by content, such as ‘India', ‘Industry' or ‘Indigo' instead. SMT already stop 50% of pupils from choosing history at 13 as apparently they can't ‘achieve' in it (or can't achieve a C),...
Nutshell 129: Arguing the case for keeping history at Key Stage 3
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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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Cunning Plan 114: building overview understanding of 19th-century social history
Teaching History feature
This five-lesson sequence gradually builds overview understanding of aspects of 19th century social history through a depth study of the campaigner and reformer, Josephine Butler. Through the sequence, pupils build on earlier work on historical significance, first, by reviewing their understanding of the huge range of reasons why things get...
Cunning Plan 114: building overview understanding of 19th-century social history
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Maybe they haven't decided yet what is right: English and Spanish perspectives on teaching historical significance
Teaching History article
Historians and history teachers understand well that students, when they ‘answer’ questions, are creating their own interpretation. We take account of this in our teaching too: we do not pretend that, beyond the level of the simplest closed questioning, there is ever a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer approach to history....
Maybe they haven't decided yet what is right: English and Spanish perspectives on teaching historical significance
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Move Me On 91: work with historical sources lacks focus
The problem page for history mentors
Problem: Mike Jones, student history teacher, is half-way through his PGCE year. He is making unusually good progress in his knowledge, understanding and practice with regard to the use of sources in history. He also appears to have no difficulty with classroom management and relationships with pupils. He easily creates...
Move Me On 91: work with historical sources lacks focus
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Lengthening Year 9’s narrative of the American civil rights movement
Teaching History article
Inspired by reading the work of Stephen Tuck, Ellie Osborne set out to design a new sequence of lessons that would help her students adopt a longer lens on the American civil rights movement. At the same time, Osborne wanted to put more emphasis on the agency and campaigns of activists,...
Lengthening Year 9’s narrative of the American civil rights movement
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Polychronicon 136: Interpreting the Beatles
Teaching History feature
‘The Beatles were history-makers from the start,' proclaimed the liner notes for the band's first LP in March 1963. It was a bold claim to make on behalf of a beat combo with one charttopping single, but the Beatles' subsequent impact on 1960s culture put their historical importance (if not...
Polychronicon 136: Interpreting the Beatles
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Prehistoric Scotland
Classic Pamphlet
Prehistory is an attempt to reconstruct the story of human societies inhabiting a given region before the full historical record opens there. Its data, furnished by archaeology, are the constructions members of such societies erected and the durable objects they made. The events which should form its subject matter naturally...
Prehistoric Scotland
