-
Triumphs Show 133: Little Miss Cold War
Teaching History feature
Students can find it hard to understand and remember the differing schools of interpretation that they encounter at A2. The process of studying differing historiographic claims can also seem rather dry and tedious. It is crucial that they grasp differences in interpretation if they are to succeed in their examinations,...
Triumphs Show 133: Little Miss Cold War
-
Cunning Plan 137: making homework more exciting
Teaching History journal feature
Ever since I started teaching, homework has been something of a bugbear. Administration alone is a hassle: not only remembering when to set and collect it in, but keeping track of the various students who fail to deliver anything on time (except highly creative excuses) and of the follow-up action...
Cunning Plan 137: making homework more exciting
-
Move Me On 144: Defines GCSE teaching in terms of a diet of practice exam questions
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem: Roger Wendover has come to define GCSE teaching in terms of a diet of practice exam questions.
Roger is a few weeks into his second placement and his mentor, John, has been taken aback by the rigid approach that he has adopted in teaching Year 10. John was...
Move Me On 144: Defines GCSE teaching in terms of a diet of practice exam questions
-
Using ‘Assessment for Learning' to help students assume responsibility
Teaching History article
Robin Conway's interest in student led enquiry derived from a concern to encourage his students to take much more responsibility for their own learning. Here he explains how his department gradually learned to entrust students with defining the enquiry questions and planning the kinds of teaching and learning activities to be...
Using ‘Assessment for Learning' to help students assume responsibility
-
Strategies for A-Level marking to motivate and enable
Teaching History article
Jane Facey was unsatisfied with the way in which her A-Level students responded to typical assessment practice. This would normally involve their teacher marking their work and then providing them with written feedback. In looking to move beyond this, Facey drew upon a wide range of research and practice which...
Strategies for A-Level marking to motivate and enable
-
Polychronicon 144: Interpreting the 1930s in Britain
Teaching History feature
For students of my generation (born in 1954) the 1930s had a very clear identity; so, when the far-left Socialist Workers Party launched a campaign against unemployment, in 1975, with the slogan: ‘No Return to the Thirties', we all knew what they meant: unemployment, economic deprivation and the political betrayal...
Polychronicon 144: Interpreting the 1930s in Britain
-
The Spice of Life? Ensuring variety when teaching about the Treaty of Versailles
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Much has been said and written about different learning styles in recent years. Some people have responded with evangelical enthusiasm, others exercise a more cautious approach, whilst a few disregard it completely. Certainly, there are...
The Spice of Life? Ensuring variety when teaching about the Treaty of Versailles
-
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
-
Young Quills reviews 2025
The Young Quills Awards for best historical fiction for young people
The Young Quills books for each year must be published for the first time in English in the year preceding the competition – so 2024 for this year’s selection. Divided by age suitability the books are given to schools on the condition that the children and young people there write...
Young Quills reviews 2025
-
Building memory and meaning
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Sarah Gadd attempted to re-think her department's usual approach to the two-year Key Stage 3. Concerned that a thematic approach might not be securing the overview perspective it was designed to achieve, she decided instead...
Building memory and meaning
-
Recorded Webinar: New Approaches to Classical Sparta
Article
This webinar starts with a basic overview of the city-states of Classical Greece (roughly 500 to 350 BC) and Sparta’s place within their geography and history. It then looks at some common myths about the nature of Spartan society and politics, focusing on areas where recent research has transformed our...
Recorded Webinar: New Approaches to Classical Sparta
-
'Don't worry, Mr. Trimble. We can handle it' Balancing the rationale and the emotional in teaching of contentious topics
Teaching History article
A common line amongst teachers and policy-makers seeking to theorise a workable relationship between history and the new subject of citizenship is to say that there must be a link with the present. This is harder than it sounds. If the implication is that the study of the past should...
'Don't worry, Mr. Trimble. We can handle it' Balancing the rationale and the emotional in teaching of contentious topics
-
Lions of the Great War: How are Sikh soldiers of the First World War seen today?
Key Stage Three History scheme of work
This Key Stage Three History scheme of work focuses in depth on the contribution of Sikh soldiers from the Indian subcontinent fighting on behalf of the UK between 1914 and 1918. It is designed to follow on from a focus on the First World War, probably in Year Nine and...
Lions of the Great War: How are Sikh soldiers of the First World War seen today?
-
Move Me On 141: Teaching the Holocaust
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem: Marion Hartog is wondering how to approach teaching the Holocaust, especially with her ‘difficult' Year 9.
Move Me On 141: Teaching the Holocaust
-
Nutshell 141 - HEDP
Teaching History feature
Why has the Institute of Education in London set up their ‘Holocaust Education Development Programme': isn't there already an awful lot of attention given to the Holocaust in schools?
It is true that the Holocaust has become ‘probably the most talked about and oft-represented event of the twentieth century' and...
Nutshell 141 - HEDP
-
Polychronicon 141: Adolf Eichmann
Teaching History feature
Almost 60 years ago Adolf Eichmann went on trial for crimes committed against the Jews while he was in the service of the Nazi regime. His capture by the Israeli secret service and his abduction from Argentina triggered a number of journalistic books that portrayed him as a pathological monster...
Polychronicon 141: Adolf Eichmann
-
Investigating students' prior understandings of the Holocaust
Teaching History article
Students make sense of new learning on the basis of their prior understandings: we cannot move our students' thinking on unless we understand what they already know. In this article, Edwards and O'Dowd report how they set out to scope a group of Y ear 8 students' prior learning and...
Investigating students' prior understandings of the Holocaust
-
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
-
Camels, diamonds and counterfactuals: a model for teaching causal reasoning
Teaching History article
In the last edition of Teaching History, Arthur Chapman described how he uses ICT to develop sixth form students’ conceptual understanding of interpretations, significance and change. In this article, he turns his attention to causal reasoning and analysis. Drawing on the work of historians such as Evans and Carr, he...
Camels, diamonds and counterfactuals: a model for teaching causal reasoning
-
Young Quills winners and reviews 2024
The Young Quills Awards for best historical fiction for young people
The Young Quills winners and highly commended have been announced for his year. This competition for historical fiction for children is a way of celebrating and recognising those authors who are continuing the long tradition of creative writing about the past for children.
All of the books are reviewed by...
Young Quills winners and reviews 2024
-
Thinking from the inside: je suis le roi
Teaching History article
Dale Banham and Ian Dawson show how active learning deepens students’ understanding of attitudes and reactions to the Norman Conquest. At the same time they build a bold argument for active learning, including a direct strike at the two most common objections to it. Many teachers still see it as...
Thinking from the inside: je suis le roi
-
Seeing double: how one period visualises another
Teaching History article
When pupils study interpretations or representations of the past which are neither from their own period nor from the period being interpreted/represented, they are having to employ sophisticated knowledge and skill. Jane Card describes this as ‘double vision’: the pupils must think about the period depicted (in this case the...
Seeing double: how one period visualises another
-
The Life & Significance of Alan Turing
The History of Science
In this podcast, Dr Tommy Dickinson of the University of Manchester, discusses the life and significance of Alan Turing.
The Life & Significance of Alan Turing
-
'If Jesus Christ were amongst them, they would deceive Him'
Teaching History article
During discussions about planning, Tim Kemp and Charlotte Bickmore recently concluded that despite the name they give to their major Year 8 unit (The Making of the United Kingdom), they tend mainly to focus on England, and even more especially, on London. They have a good point. Ask an average...
'If Jesus Christ were amongst them, they would deceive Him'
-
Young Quills winners and reviews 2023
The Young Quills Awards for best historical fiction for young people
It is with great pleasure that the HA is able to announce the winners of the Young Quills for Historical Fiction for 2023:
Young readers category
Winner: Tony Bradman for Bruno and Frida (Barrington Stoke)Highly Commended: Judith Eagle for Accidental Stowaway (Faber)
Intermediate category
Winner: Tom Palmer for Resist (Barrington Stoke)Highly Commended: Lesley Parr for When the...
Young Quills winners and reviews 2023
