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Recorded webinar: History teachers as teachers of reading
Developing confident readers and writers in the history classroom and beyond
Students and teachers can perceive literacy, particularly the challenges of extended reading and writing, to be a barrier to enjoyment of and success in history. Repeated lockdowns over the past two years have, despite teachers’ most creative and dedicated responses to remote learning, made it even harder to help children...
Recorded webinar: History teachers as teachers of reading
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Thinking about the ethical dimension
Teaching History article
Responding to concerns about Dutch students’ citizenship education, Tim Huijgen, Paul Holthuis, Roel Nijmeijer and Iris van den Brand set out to design online materials to help students understand the decisions and dilemmas faced by past actors. They focused on the life and actions of Rosie Glaser (1914–2000), a Dutch Holocaust survivor,...
Thinking about the ethical dimension
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Anything but brief: Year 8 students encounter the longue durée
Article
Inspired by The History Manifesto, Suzanne Powell describes in this article her rationale for expanding her students’ horizons by asking them to think about change, similarity and difference on a grand scale. She sets ‘big history’ into its curricular context, and shows the way in which her students could, and...
Anything but brief: Year 8 students encounter the longue durée
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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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Introducing History Lab
A crowd-sourced history club
In 2021, teacher Richard Lewis founded History Lab as an idea for a history club that goes beyond the curriculum and enables students to think, form opinions and voice them as well as learning from one another's perspectives. The club can be led by a teacher, librarian or other knowledgeable...
Introducing History Lab
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... expanding the reach of the American Revolution
Teaching History feature
The Founding Fathers of the United States of America are never far from current political and cultural discussions. Whether prompted by the phenomenal success of Hamilton: the musical (2015), or the shocking scenes of riotous attack on the US Capitol in January 2021, the revolutionary intentions and legacy of such...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... expanding the reach of the American Revolution
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Recorded webinar: Survive and thrive in your initial teacher education
Article
In this open-access recorded webinar you’ll hear from teacher educators with advice and guidance to help you to make plans and get the most out of your history teacher training, whichever route you are taking.
Recorded webinar: Survive and thrive in your initial teacher education
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Recorded Webinar: Our Human Planet
Article
Meteorites, mega-volcanoes, plate tectonics and now human beings; the old forces of nature that transformed Earth many millions of years ago are joined by another: us. Our actions have driven Earth into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. For the first time in our home planet's 4.5-billion year history a...
Recorded Webinar: Our Human Planet
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Hosting teacher development at historical sites: the benefits for classroom teaching
Journal article
Many previous contributors to Teaching History have demonstrated the power of site visits to stimulate young people’s engagement and enrich their understanding of history. It is usually assumed, however, that the young people themselves will have the opportunity to visit the site in question – an assumption that cannot always...
Hosting teacher development at historical sites: the benefits for classroom teaching
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Move Me On: struggling with different emphases on teacher talk
Teaching History feature
Move Me On is designed to build critical, informed debate about the character of teacher training, teacher education and professional development. It is also designed to offer practical help to all involved in training new history teachers. Each issue presents a situation in initial teacher education/training with an emphasis upon...
Move Me On: struggling with different emphases on teacher talk
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HA Blog Watch
Selected history education blogs
We've collated some of the best history education blogs here. The list isn't exhaustive so if there is a great history education blog out there that is not on this list – let us know!
One Big History Department
HA Secondary Committee blog
One Big History Department (OBHD) has been...
HA Blog Watch
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(Un)exceptional women: queenship and power in medieval Europe
Historian article
How was the power of a Queen described and how far did It extend? In this article some of the most important queens of the Medieval period are examined for the authority they were able to wield.
When we think of queens, the idea that they are extraordinary women, elevated to the highest status...
(Un)exceptional women: queenship and power in medieval Europe
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Film: Making the most of your secondary membership as a trainee
A guide to key benefits for trainee secondary history teachers
Are you a trainee teacher, new to or interested in HA secondary membership and want some guidance on where to start? In this webinar we guide you through some key benefits included as part of your membership - from essential online resources and journal support for beginning teachers to available CPD and accreditation routes...
Film: Making the most of your secondary membership as a trainee
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... Chinese history?
Teaching History feature
Teaching Chinese history in the UK runs up against some immediate obstacles. It lacks the familiar staging posts of European history: Chairman Mao is among the few well-known names, and terms such as Cultural Revolution and Opium War may attract recognition, but are often not understood in detail. The situation...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... Chinese history?
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Polychronicon 168: Interwar internationalisms
Teaching History feature
Research on the inter war years (1919-39) has exploded in recent years. Led by exciting studies of global and international institutions by Susan Pedersen, Patricia Clavin and Mark Mazower, historians have moved beyond narrowly political and diplomatic accounts of the leading personalities and agencies attached to key institutions such as...
Polychronicon 168: Interwar internationalisms
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Using metaphor to highlight causal processes with Year 13
Article
Alarmed by his students’ random use of causal language in their essays, James Edward Carroll resolved to help his students improve their understanding of causal processes. Carroll decided to introduce his students to the metaphors that historians use to describe causation in the historiography of the Salem witch trials. By modelling...
Using metaphor to highlight causal processes with Year 13
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Move Me On 165: Capturing student interest vs. sense of period
Teaching History feature
This issue’s problem: In her concern to capture students’ interest Jennet Preston tends to present people in the past as weird and wonderful aliens...
Jennet Preston has come into teaching as a second career, following a break to look after her young children. She is enthusiastic and full of ideas for...
Move Me On 165: Capturing student interest vs. sense of period
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The importance of subject specific training
HA Update
It is my passion for history and interest in young people that has sustained me both as a teacher and latterly as a PGCE history tutor.
Last term a number of seemingly unrelated issues began to coalesce in my mind. Over the summer I met a number of teachers that...
The importance of subject specific training
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Film: The use of educational talk in history learning and teaching
Teaching History for Beginners webinar series
This film continues our Teaching History for Beginners filmed webinar series. In this episode, David Ingledew, senior lecturer in history education and ITE lead at the University of Hertfordshire explores education talk as a follow up from his earlier film on questioning in the history classroom.
Film: The use of educational talk in history learning and teaching
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Polychronicon 152: Changing interpretations of the workhouse?
Teaching History feature
The workhouse has long held a negative reputation in the popular imagination as the dreaded destination of the destitute, an institution guaranteed to strike fear into the hearts of the Victorian poor. This is partly owing to its design under the New Poor Law of 1834 as an explicit punishment...
Polychronicon 152: Changing interpretations of the workhouse?
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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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From The Holocaust To Recent Mass Murders And Refugees
IJHLTR Article
International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research [IJHLTR], Volume 14, Number 2 – Spring/Summer 2017ISSN: 14472-9474
Abstract
Through studying cases of genocide and mass atrocities, students can come to realize that: democratic institutions and values are not automatically sustained but need to be appreciated, nurtured, and protected; silence and indifference to the...
From The Holocaust To Recent Mass Murders And Refugees
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History Abridged: Salt mines in Eastern Europe
Historian feature
History Abridged: This feature seeks to take a person, event or period and abridge, or focus on, an important event or detail that can get lost in the big picture. See all History Abridged articles
Towards the end of the Bronze Age, the climate across Europe began to warm. This...
History Abridged: Salt mines in Eastern Europe
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Creating a progression model for teaching historical perspectives in Key Stage 3
Teaching History article
Jacob Olivey set out to design enquiries which would enable his pupils to reconstruct, using evidence, the perspectives of people in the past. In this article he shares in detail the planning and outcomes of two enquiries: one for Year 7 and one for Year 8. Olivey offers a example...
Creating a progression model for teaching historical perspectives in Key Stage 3
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It’s just reading, right? Exploring how Year 12 students approach sources
Teaching History article
Frustrated by the generic statements that her Year 12 students were making about sources, Jacqueline Vyrnwy-Pierce resolved to undertake a research project into how her students were approaching sources about the French Revolution. Fascinated by the research of American educational psychologist Sam Wineburg, Vyrnwy-Pierce decided to use Wineburg’s methods to find...
It’s just reading, right? Exploring how Year 12 students approach sources
