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Cunning Plan 107: the big idea of Freedom
Teaching History feature
Big ideas, making connections, citizenship, thinking skills. We were nothing if not ambitious in our planning for this unit for a lower attaining Year 8 group at Langley School in Solihull. Having identified the big ideas which could underpin a dialogue between history and citizenship and make the connections between...
Cunning Plan 107: the big idea of Freedom
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Cunning Plan 102.1: teaching decolonisation and the end of apartheid
Article
Cunning Plan for teaching decolonisation and the end of apartheid to 13 and 14 year-olds. The rationale behind this teaching unit is manifold: first, it takes away the idea in the children’s minds that all that happened in the twentieth century is world war. Second, it is designed to appeal...
Cunning Plan 102.1: teaching decolonisation and the end of apartheid
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An Intimate History of Your Home - Lucy Worsley
Historian Article
‘You've gone over to The Dark Side'.
These were the words of a well-respected historian to whom I'd been enthusing about the pleasures and perils of Dressing Up.
During 2009-10 I spent several months in historic costume, recreating the habits and rituals of domestic life in the past. It was...
An Intimate History of Your Home - Lucy Worsley
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The Vikings in Britain
Historian Article
Professor Henry Loyn provides an update on recent studies of the Viking Age. Interest in the activities of the Scandinavian people in Britain during the Viking Age, c 800-1100 A.D., has been strong in the last half-century or so, and it is good to pause and assess contributions to the...
The Vikings in Britain
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IOE national research into pupils' thinking about the Holocaust
Article
A new research project promises to have a significant impact not only on our teaching about the Holocaust but also on our understanding of how young people make sense of the past. Surveying up to 10,000 secondary students across the country and conducting a range of thematic and case studies...
IOE national research into pupils' thinking about the Holocaust
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John Wilkes 1725-1797: A Man of Principle
Historian article
For Lord North in 1775, one John Wilkes was enough, ‘though ... to do him justice, it was not easy to find many such'. The impact of Wilkes between 1760 and 1780 was profound, a cause as much as a person. For Philip Francis, thought to be the satirist ‘Junius',...
John Wilkes 1725-1797: A Man of Principle
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Sharing The Past: Northamptonshire's Black History
Book Review
Northamptonshire Black History Association Pub 2008; ISBN:978 0 9557139 1 0; £12.95 [+£2.30 p and p] from: NBHA, Doddridge Centre, 109 St James Road, Northampton, NN5 5LD.
How fortunate Northamptonshire history teachers are! With the current emphasis on community cohesion and diversity in the New Secondary Curriculum, they are presented...
Sharing The Past: Northamptonshire's Black History
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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 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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Role Play 1: The Society Game
Article
Applicable to Britain 1066-1500, Britain 1500-1750, Britain 1750-1900, and many aspects of GCSE and AS/A2 courses. The version given in full here is for use in a study of Victorian Britain.
This tackles the troublesome concept of relative status in a changing society. Exactly what is it that bestows status...
Role Play 1: The Society Game
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Communicating about the past: Resource E
Article
This folder contains three examples of the use of layers-of-inference frames, a now popular form of scaffolding in history teaching. They are taken from three different key stages and demonstrate how a form of scaffolding can be used across different age groups but needs to be adapted to take account...
Communicating about the past: Resource E
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Communicating about the past: Resource C
Article
Please note: this resource pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content and links may be outdated.
This resource describes the rationale for helping teachers to think about the range of real and creative end-products (outcomes) that can be used for different enquiries across key stage 3. They include a...
Communicating about the past: Resource C
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Communicating about the past: Resource A
Article
Please note: this resource pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content and links may be outdated.
Nine examples of outcomes or tasks are described, that model the 'variety of ways' in which pupils can communicate about the past, all but one taken from issues of Teaching History. These examples...
Communicating about the past: Resource A
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Communicating about the past: Resource F
Article
Dale Banham, 'Getting ready for the Grand Prix: learning how to build a substantiated argument in Year 7' in Teaching History 92: Explanation and Argument issue
This seminal article demonstrated how the author planned an enquiry to be taught over a long period blending in-depth study with overviews of history. ...
Communicating about the past: Resource F
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A question of attribution: working with ghetto photographs
Teaching History article
Holocaust imagery is very familiar, clichéd even. How can we get pupils thinking about it in novel ways and seeing differently? Phillips reports work completed with his PGCE students, proposes a scaffold of questions with which to deconstruct images and applies it to archive images and to Hollywood representations. Images...
A question of attribution: working with ghetto photographs
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Communicating about the past: Resource B
Article
Please note: this resource pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content and links may be outdated.
This repeats the nine examples of outcomes or tasks described in Resource A. It also includes additional notes, summarising the preparation that led up to the outcome or task and its place in...
Communicating about the past: Resource B
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Communicating about the past: Resource G
Article
James Woodcock, 'Does the linguistic release the conceptual? Helping Year 10 to improve their causal reasoning' in Teaching History 119: Language issue (June, 2005)
In this subtle article, James Woodcock experiments with introducing new vocabulary to a mixed-ability year 10 class working towards the enquiry question '"Hitler was not to...
Communicating about the past: Resource G
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The National Insurance Act 1911: three perspectives, one policy
Historian article
Background
Sandwiched between the Parliament Act and the Home Rule Act, the National Insurance Act 1911 is easily overlooked and often forgotten. Yet, as Gilbert has pointed out, it was critical both of itself and as the foundation for social legislation up to current times. It came into force on...
The National Insurance Act 1911: three perspectives, one policy
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We Also Served: British Asian Veterans of WW2
We Also Served
In search of the story of British Asian Veterans of World War Two.‘We also served' is a moving short film, which follows pupils from Beardwood and St Bede's high schools as they research why the contribution of these soldiers is not more widely recognised.
We Also Served: British Asian Veterans of WW2
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The how of history: using old and new textbooks in the classroom to develop disciplinary knowledge
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
What are textbooks for and how do we think of them? As inevitably partial views of the past that reflect their purpose and moment of construction and their authors' location in physical and ideological time...
The how of history: using old and new textbooks in the classroom to develop disciplinary knowledge
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Thinking across time: planning and teaching the story of power and democracy at Key Stage 3
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Ian Dawson's seminal work on developing chronological understanding - in Teaching History 117, on the website thinkinghistory.co.uk and elsewhere - will be familiar to readers. In this article Dawson considers the question, very much on...
Thinking across time: planning and teaching the story of power and democracy at Key Stage 3
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The Bloody Code - Early Modern Crime and Punishment
Podcast
Between circa 1690 and 1820 the number of crimes punishable by the death penalty grew from 50 to over 200. This short podcast will help to explain why this trend developed.
The Bloody Code - Early Modern Crime and Punishment
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Recorded Webinar: Britain's eighteenth-century tradition of popular riot and protest
Article
Eighteenth-century Britons were ruled by a restricted oligarchy of landowners and plutocrats. Yet the wider population had a proud tradition of assertiveness and readiness to protest. ‘Britons never will be slaves!’ as the chorus of 'Rule Britannia' (1740) announced pointedly (if somewhat ironically, in view of Britain’s role in the...
Recorded Webinar: Britain's eighteenth-century tradition of popular riot and protest
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Disraeli, Peel and the Corn Laws: the making of a conservative reputation
Historian article
125 years after his death, Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, still provides the political lode-star for generations of Conservatives. Lately, for the first time in 30 years, Disraeli's name and example has been enthusiastically evoked by the party leadership and David Cameron has projected himself as a Disraeli for the...
Disraeli, Peel and the Corn Laws: the making of a conservative reputation
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What sort of history should school history be? Debate Podcast
Debate Podcast
On July 18 2011 the Historical Association hosted a public debate chaired by Professor Simon Schama at the Institute of Education, Bedford Way, London.
With the history curriculum being the focus of intense interest the following series of podcasts from the debate examine what that curriculum might look like. Joining Simon Schama was five...
What sort of history should school history be? Debate Podcast
