-
Child Health & School meals: Nottingham 1906-1945
Historian article
Following Jamie Oliver’s devastating television series on the inadequacy of school meals the present government has been quick to be seen to address the situation. In September 2005, Ruth Kelly, the then Education Secretary, announced a war on junk food in schools.1 This was nothing new, because the history of...
Child Health & School meals: Nottingham 1906-1945
-
The Power of Context: using a visual source
Teaching History article
Drawing on her wealth of experience and expertise in using visual sources in the classroom, in this article Jane Card explores how a single painting, a portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray, might form the basis for a sequence of lessons.
Arguing that although highly...
The Power of Context: using a visual source
-
HA Young Voices
Listening to young people's voices about school history
As part of our strategy, the HA wants to establish mechanisms to listen to young people’s views about their experience of school history. So far we have gathered peer research from pupils in 15 different secondary schools across the country.
Students were asked to carry out research among their peers....
HA Young Voices
-
Cunning Plan 159: Was King John unlucky with his Barons?
Teaching History feature
Typical teaching of King John and Magna Carta focuses either on the weakness of John or the importance (as Whig historians would see it) of Magna Carta. The first question is a bit boring and the second discussion unhistorical. This enquiry sequence is designed for students aged 11 to 13. It...
Cunning Plan 159: Was King John unlucky with his Barons?
-
Triumphs Show 159: teaching paragraph construction
Teaching History feature
My adventures in dancing in the classroom started back in the autumn term. I was working with a group of Year 8 students looking at interpretations of King John and we were selecting and analysing quotations from historians as part of the enquiry question ‘Was King John really so bad?' My students were struggling with...
Triumphs Show 159: teaching paragraph construction
-
Using Lesson Study to make microimprovements in teaching Year 8 how to use sources
Teaching History article
A highly distinctive and structured approach to teacher development, Lesson Study emerged in Japan but has since been adopted much more widely and now sees growing interest in the UK. Tony McConnell, Davinia Daley, Rebecca Levy, Lisa Waddell and Richard Waddington describe the process by which their school first investigated...
Using Lesson Study to make microimprovements in teaching Year 8 how to use sources
-
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
-
Polychronicon 171: Policing in Nazi Germany
Teaching History feature
The nature of policing in Nazi Germany is a subject which continues to fascinate historians. The Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei) was an integral part of the Nazi terror system but historians have been and still are at odds as to how it actually functioned. Areas of debate have focused on the...
Polychronicon 171: Policing in Nazi Germany
-
Writing the First World War - Podcasts
Writing the First World War
The Writing the First World War event in partnership with the English Association and the British Library took place at the British Library in London on April 14th.
Over 80 teachers attended a wonderful day of stimulating professional development which was kicked off by a thought provoking take on how...
Writing the First World War - Podcasts
-
Polychronicon 158: Reinterpreting Napoleon
Teaching History feature
On 18 June 2015, the two-hundredth anniversary of the great battle of Waterloo will be commemorated in Britain and on the continent (though not in France). It will represent the climax of the Napoleonic bicentenary, which has been in full flow since the turn of the twenty-first century. Fresh biographies...
Polychronicon 158: Reinterpreting Napoleon
-
Challenging stereotypes and avoiding the superficial: a suggested approach to teaching the Holocaust
Teaching History article
Alison Kitson provides a rationale for a scheme of work for Year 9 (13-14 year-olds). She argues that teachers should analyse the kind of historical learning that is taking place when the Holocaust is studied. Critical of the assumption that learning will take place as a result of exposure, she...
Challenging stereotypes and avoiding the superficial: a suggested approach to teaching the Holocaust
-
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
-
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
-
Inverting the telescope: investigating sources from a different perspective
Teaching History article
As historians, we are dependent on evidence, which comes in many varieties. Rosalind Stirzaker here introduces a project which she ran two years ago to encourage her students to think about artefacts in a different way. They have examined randomly preserved artefacts such as those of Pompeii, and sets of...
Inverting the telescope: investigating sources from a different perspective
-
England Arise! The General Election of 1945
Historian article
‘The past week will live in history for two things’, announced the Sunday Times of 29 July 1945, ‘first the return of a Labour majority to Parliament and the end of Churchill's great war Premiership.’ Most other newspapers concurred. The Daily Mirror, of 27 July, proclaimed that the 1945 general election...
England Arise! The General Election of 1945
-
Engaging with each other: how interactions between teachers inform professional practice
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
What kinds of interaction take place in a history department? What might be their value? Between 1999 and 2003, Simon Letman, then history teacher and Director of Studies at The Royal Hospital School in Ipswich,...
Engaging with each other: how interactions between teachers inform professional practice
-
Polychronicon 165: The 1917 revolutions in 2017: 100 years on
Teaching History feature
The interpretive and empirical frameworks utilised by scholars in their quest to understand the Russian revolutions have evolved and transformed over 100 years. The opening of archives after the collapse of the Soviet Union enabled access to a swathe of new primary sources, some of which have had a transformative...
Polychronicon 165: The 1917 revolutions in 2017: 100 years on
-
Deepening Year 9’s knowledge for better causation arguments
Teaching History article
Frustrated by her students’ glib use of catch-all terms such as ‘militarism’ in addressing causation, Alexia Michalaki wanted her Year 9 students to produce mature causal explanations of World War I. To encourage this to happen she went back into decades of pedagogical writing and research, teasing out the ways...
Deepening Year 9’s knowledge for better causation arguments
-
Low-stakes testing
Teaching History article
The emphasis on the power of secure substantive knowledge reflected in recent curriculum reforms has prompted considerable interest in strategies to help students retain and deploy such knowledge effectively. One strategy that has been strongly endorsed by some cognitive psychologists is regular testing; an idea that Nick Dennis set out...
Low-stakes testing
-
Polychronicon 163: Europe: the longest debate
Teaching History feature
On 23 June, electors in the United Kingdom will vote on whether they wish to remain part of the European Union. The passionate debate around the question has seen the spectre of Hitler and the example of Churchill invoked, with varying plausibility, by both sides. It has also drawn on the...
Polychronicon 163: Europe: the longest debate
-
Why does anyone do anything? Attempts to improve agentive explanations with Year 12
Teaching History article
In this article Sophie Harley-McKeown identifies and addresses her Year 12 students’ blind spot over agentive explanation. Noticing that the examination board to which she teaches uses ‘motivations’ rather than ‘aims’ prompted her to consider whether her students really knew what that meant. Finding that her students’ causal explanations tended...
Why does anyone do anything? Attempts to improve agentive explanations with Year 12
-
Recorded webinar: Invisible assessment within an enquiry
Webinar series: Meaningful and useable assessment in the secondary history classroom
Webinar series: Meaningful and useable assessment in the secondary history classroom
Session 1: Invisible assessment within an enquiry
This session explores the constant, routine assessment that goes on throughout the history lessons that make up a single enquiry – assessment that forms such a natural part of history teaching that it’s sometimes...
Recorded webinar: Invisible assessment within an enquiry
-
Polychronicon 153: Re-interpreting Liberation: the end of the Holocaust?
Teaching History feature
In August 1945, Zalman Grinberg, a doctor from Kovno and spokesman for the Liberated Jews in the American Zone of Germany, addressed 1,700 Jewish survivors. ‘What is the logic of destiny to let these individuals remain alive?!' he asked them:
We are free now, but we do not know what...
Polychronicon 153: Re-interpreting Liberation: the end of the Holocaust?
-
An authentic voice: perspectives on the value of listening to survivors of genocide
Teaching History article
It is common practice to invite survivors of the Holocaust to speak about their experiences to pupils in schools and colleges. Systematic reflection on the value of working with survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides and on how to make the most of doing so is rarer, however. In...
An authentic voice: perspectives on the value of listening to survivors of genocide
-
Move Me On 162: Reading
Teaching History feature
This issue’s problem: James Connolly is finding it difficult to judge how much or what kind of reading he should expect of his students.
James Connolly, an eager and knowledgeable historian, has frequently struggled to pitch things appropriately for students. This applies particularly to his expectations of their reading, but also...
Move Me On 162: Reading
