-
Improving Year 12's extended writing
Teaching History article
From Muddleton Manor to Clarity Cathedral: improving Year 12's extended writing through an enhanced sense of the reader
Mary Brown recognised that her A-level students were finding extended writing difficult, particularly in terms of guiding the reader through the argument with appropriate ‘signposting'. To help her students manage this, Brown...
Improving Year 12's extended writing
-
Move Me On 149: how to provide appropriate support for particular students
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem: Helen Troy is uncertain how to provide appropriate support for certain students without restricting what they can achieve.
Helen showed considerable determination in securing her teacher training place. Her own education had been within a highly selective school system and her first application was unsuccessful because of...
Move Me On 149: how to provide appropriate support for particular students
-
New, Novice or Nervous? 149: Getting pupils to argue about causes
Teaching History feature
Every problem you're wrestling with in the history classroom, other history teachers have wrestled with too. This page is for all those new to the published writings of history teachers in Teaching History. It shows how to make a start in understanding how others have explored and discussed common and...
New, Novice or Nervous? 149: Getting pupils to argue about causes
-
Competition and counterfactuals without confusion
Teaching History article
Paula Worth was searching not only for a rigorous question, capable of engendering genuine debate, but also for an engaging and enjoyable activity that would secure GCSE students' substantive knowledge. The answer - or rather the question - lay in counterfactual thinking: a carefully crafted game that she devised, based...
Competition and counterfactuals without confusion
-
Lord Palmerston
Historian article
Lord Palmerston (1784-1865) has long interested (and confused) historians. A man of contradictions and paradoxes, he seemed both to embody modern Victorian Britain, and yet at the same time stand as a potent symbol of what had been lost.
Lord Palmerston
-
Cunning Plan 139: Victorian debates about progress
Teaching History feature
How can we interest students in the world of ideas? How can we help them to see how important ideas were in shaping and reflecting the world of the Victorians? Working with the overarching enquiry question, ‘Why did some Victorians believe in progress in the nineteenth century and others did not?’ I devised...
Cunning Plan 139: Victorian debates about progress
-
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
-
Was Richard II Mad? An evening with Terry Jones
Event Podcast
On 19th June Terry Jones, 'Python', historian, broadcaster, actor, director and comedian called King Richard II a victim of spin at the annual Historical Association/English Association lecture at the Bishopsgate Institute. Here he sets out to rescue his reputation and lift the lid on the turbulent world of 14th century...
Was Richard II Mad? An evening with Terry Jones
-
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
-
Roman Britain
Classic Pamphlet
This classic pamphlet provides an introduction to Roman Britain, examines the political history, the institutions of Roman Britain, the economic background and the end of Roman Britain. IntroductionThe Roman conquest and occupation of Britain has long been taken as the conventional starting point of English History, and there is a conventional...
Roman Britain
-
Driving Your Discussion
Article
Welcome to Driving Your Discussion – a new resource from the Historical Association's Secondary Committee.
The resource takes the form of a series of discussion cards to support teacher collaboration by guiding critical reflection on topical themes such as curriculum design, assessment, inclusion, and pedagogy. Each discussion card offers structured prompts,...
Driving Your Discussion
-
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... transnational history
Teaching History feature
Until the beginning of the twenty-first century, historians’ aversion to sweeping generalisations meant that they typically conducted their research within the boundaries of the nation state. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of globalisation and the birth of the internet, new political, intellectual, and practical developments began...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... transnational history
-
A knowledge-rich approach to introducing China’s history to Year 9
Teaching History article
Freya George was wondering how best to integrate more Asian histories into her school’s curriculum when a conversation among history teachers on social media led her to Jung Chang’s Wild Swans: three daughters of China. George then planned two enquiries, one introducing twentieth-century China, and one focusing entirely on Chang’s work. George styles...
A knowledge-rich approach to introducing China’s history to Year 9
-
Virtual Branch: Birds and British History
Article
In his recent book The Cuckoo's Lea Michael J Warren provides a exploration of how birds are entwined with British history, particularly in our place names.
Join us for an exclusive Q&A with the author to weave together literature, history and ornithology and discover a fascinating heritage that matters deeply now when so...
Virtual Branch: Birds and British History
-
Crime and Punishment Selected Articles
Selected Articles
Crime and Punishment - selected HA articles:
Wanted, The Elusive Charlie Peace': A Sheffield Killer Of The 1870s As Popular Hero
The 'Penny Dreadful'
Occult and Witches
Kett's Rebellion 1549
The Great Revolt of 1381
Crime and Punishment Selected Articles
-
Move Me On 145: Uncomfortable with Storytelling
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem: Claudia Jones is very uncomfortable with any kind of sustained story-telling.
Claudia Jones is a quietly spoken and rather nervous trainee. She struggled from the beginning of the PGCE to establish a strong presence in the classroom, and although she has become more assertive about insisting on basic...
Move Me On 145: Uncomfortable with Storytelling
-
Establishing a dialogue with Year 9 about why environmental history matters
Teaching History article
The enquiry sequence on which Alex Benger reports in this article was inspired by two specific concerns: a sense that history education must have more to contribute to young people’s understanding of and ability to confront the climate crisis; and a desire to help pupils to engage more broadly with...
Establishing a dialogue with Year 9 about why environmental history matters
-
No more mark schemes: manageable and meaningful assessment for Years 7–9
Teaching History article
In seeking to answer the question of how to make valid, reliable, and meaningful judgements about students’ work in history, Elizabeth Carr’s department abandoned criteria-based mark schemes and replaced them with a form of comparative judgement conducted in relation to a series of exemplars. In this article, Carr explains the...
No more mark schemes: manageable and meaningful assessment for Years 7–9
-
Integrating heritage education and public history at school
Teaching History article
As a busy teacher of history and part-time doctoral student exploring history, heritage and identity, Joris thought a lot about heritage, students’ understanding of heritage and how such ideas could best be brought into the history classroom. Meanwhile, he discovered that the buildings next to his school were about to...
Integrating heritage education and public history at school
-
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
-
Teaching Years 8 and 9 to write analytically about similarity and difference
Teaching History article
Reflecting on the quality of her pupils’ analyses of past diversity and complexity, Molly-Ann Navey was struck by the contrast with their writing geared to other types of disciplinary problem. Navey therefore set out to develop entirely new sequences of lessons which would teach pupils to shape arguments about similarity...
Teaching Years 8 and 9 to write analytically about similarity and difference
-
Lenses, mirrors and bridges: one department’s holistic approach to diversifying and decolonising local history
Teaching History article
As was the case for many heads of history, Jack Brown was prompted by the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 to reflect afresh on the content and questions asked within his school’s history curriculum, paying particular attention to local history. In this article he sets out the principles and...
Lenses, mirrors and bridges: one department’s holistic approach to diversifying and decolonising local history
-
What Have Historians Been Arguing About… climate history
Teaching History feature
Although some historians object to ‘presentism’ – studies of the past that are explicitly driven by present-day concerns – climate history as a field would probably not exist otherwise. Expensive technology is required to gather the raw data for research into past climates. Interdisciplinary collaboration is needed to develop robust...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About… climate history
-
Polychronicon 113: slavery in 20th-century America
Teaching History feature
Polychronicon was a fourteenth-century chronicle that brought together much of the knowledge of its own age. 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' is on 'Interpreting...
Polychronicon 113: slavery in 20th-century America
-
Move Me On 143: Trying to tackle everything at once
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem: Emily Hobhouse seems to feel obliged to implement all the new ideas she is learning about at once.
Emily Hobhouse has made an impressive start to her PGCE course. She switched to teaching after several years' work in legal practice which meant that she was already used to...
Move Me On 143: Trying to tackle everything at once
