-
Picturing place: what you get may be more than what you see
Teaching History article
Pictures abound in history classrooms and teachers use them in many different ways. They add - often literally - some colour to the past, helping us to imagine what different worlds were like. Pictures can be used quite legitimately in this way to fire imagination and stimulate interest. But we...
Picturing place: what you get may be more than what you see
-
Move Me On 139: teaching about change and continuity
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem: Debbie Samson is finding it difficult to teach about change and continuity in meaningful ways.
Move Me On 139: teaching about change and continuity
-
Polychronicon 139: Civic denouncer: The lives of Pavlik Morozov
Teaching History feature
Germaine Greer (in the context of the Pirelli Calendar) once commented that the defining feature of a legend was that almost nothing said and believed about it was true. Pavlik Morozov, notorious both inside Russia and internationally for having denounced his father, almost certainly never did so. In September 1932, local...
Polychronicon 139: Civic denouncer: The lives of Pavlik Morozov
-
Do Mention the War' : the impact of a National Curriculum study unit upon pupils' perceptions of contemporary German people
Teaching History article
What preconceptions do your pupils hold about the Second World War and about German people? How far have these been influenced by home background, by personal experience, by film, by sport, by the Key Stage 2 history curriculum? Paul Coman argues that the last of these deserves greater attention, at...
Do Mention the War' : the impact of a National Curriculum study unit upon pupils' perceptions of contemporary German people
-
Move Me On 137: Regards PGCE assignments as unhelpful distractions
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem: Ellen Wilkinson regards her PGCE assignments as an unhelpful distraction from the real business of learning to teach.
Ellen has just had her first PGCE assignment returned to her by her tutor and is furious about the comments she has received and the indicative Masters level mark it...
Move Me On 137: Regards PGCE assignments as unhelpful distractions
-
'Please send socks': How much can Reg Wilkes tell us about the Great War?
Teaching History article
This was an opportunity all good historians dream about. A large box crammed with artefacts about a soldier who fought in the First World War, just begging to be read, studied, sorted and organised. Being faced with such a wealth of uncatalogued primary evidence could have proved daunting enough without...
'Please send socks': How much can Reg Wilkes tell us about the Great War?
-
Move Me On 136: Struggling to teach elite politics/international relations
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem: Ernest Briggs, who wants pupils to engage with the real lives of ordinary people in the past, is struggling to learn to teach courses that he thinks are too narrowly focused on elite politics and international relations.
Ernest, initially one of the most animated and enthusiastic trainees on...
Move Me On 136: Struggling to teach elite politics/international relations
-
Telling tales: Developing students' own thematic and synoptic understandings at Key Stage 3
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Ed Brooker is as concerned as the other authors within this edition that students should be able to see and make meaning out of ‘big pictures' of the past.
He is acutely aware, however, that...
Telling tales: Developing students' own thematic and synoptic understandings at Key Stage 3
-
Nutshell 135: The challenge of analysing 'difference'
Teaching History feature
Hello Nutshell. What's all this stuff in the NC Attainment Target about ‘nature', ‘extent' and ‘interplay' of diversity?
The trick is to look behind the word ‘diversity'. Then it all makes sense...
Nutshell 135: The challenge of analysing 'difference'
-
Triumphs Show 160: Prezi and propaganda
Teaching History feature: celebrating and sharing success
Laura Tilley recognised that her Year 9 students were finding it difficult to work out the intended message of visual propaganda. To help her students make better use of the substantive knowledge they already had, she devised an interactive activity using a presentation software, Prezi. This approach provided students with...
Triumphs Show 160: Prezi and propaganda
-
Role Play 1: The Society Game
Teaching History 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
-
International relations at GCSE... they just can't get enough of it
Teaching History article
There is no reason why pupils of so-called ‘average’ and ‘below-average ability’ cannot both understand and enjoy studying complicated international events. Indeed, in the interests of inclusion and raised standards, it is vital that they do. Our Letters Pages in the last two editions captured something of the history teaching...
International relations at GCSE... they just can't get enough of it
-
Queen Anne
18th Century British History
In this podcast Lady Anne Somerset looks at the life, reputation and legacy of Queen Anne – the last of the Stuart monarchs, and the first sovereign of Great Britain.
Anne was born on 6 February 1665 in London, the second daughter of James, Duke of York, brother of Charles II. Like many...
Queen Anne
-
Polychronicon 128: The Death of Captain Cook
Teaching History feature
In popular perception, anthropologists and historians cut very different figures. The anthropologist, a hybrid of Indiana Jones and a Kiplingesque colonial official, wears a bush hat or pith helmet and tirelessly trudges up mountains or hacks through jungle in search of lost tribes and ancient, unchanging, folklore. The historian, a...
Polychronicon 128: The Death of Captain Cook
-
Move Me On 133: Relying too much on teacher talk and alienating students
Teaching History feature
This Issue's problem: Margaret Cooper has struggled hard to realise her ambition to train to be a teacher but, now that she is taking responsibility for whole-class teaching, she is finding that her assumptions are being challenged and she is losing confidence...
Move Me On 133: Relying too much on teacher talk and alienating students
-
You are members of a United Nations Commission...' Recent world crises simulations
Teaching History article
David Ghere presents a teaching and learning rationale for simulations where the location is not identified. This creates a deliberately artificial situation where the student can tackle the problems and carry out the decision-making and problem-solving exercise without preconceptions. The author does not recommend leaving the activity at this stage,...
You are members of a United Nations Commission...' Recent world crises simulations
-
Move Me On 129: Feels out of his depth teaching controversial issues
Teaching History feature
This Issue's Problem: Ajmal Khan has recently started his second school placement. Although he is very pleased to be working now in an ethnically diverse urban school (after a first placement in a largely white suburban setting), he is feeling somewhat overawed at the prospect of teaching Year 9 about...
Move Me On 129: Feels out of his depth teaching controversial issues
-
Working as a team to teach the Holocaust well: a language-centred approach
Teaching History article
Clear themes run through the work of the history department at Huntington School. A remarkably consistent emphasis on language and literacy, including work on speaking and listening of many types, is a hallmark of this sequence of six Year 9 lessons on the Holocaust, described in detail by head of...
Working as a team to teach the Holocaust well: a language-centred approach
-
Polychronicon 127: The Crusades
Teaching History feature
Modern research on the crusades has concentrated on three basic questions. What were they? How were they justified? What motivated the crusaders? The first of these questions became controversial twenty-five years ago, when historians with a traditional approach to the subject, who took into consideration only those expeditions launched to...
Polychronicon 127: The Crusades
-
Structuring learning for beginning teachers
Multipage Article
This section focuses on the topic of structuring learning for beginning history teachers. That is, organising training so that beginning teachers can make good progress in their professional development. Within the section, there is advice and guidance about working with adult learners (as opposed to children) and about building a...
Structuring learning for beginning teachers
-
Polychronicon 132: Roman Emperors
Teaching History feature
Everyone has seen a Roman emperor. Whether at the British Museum's current Hadrian exhibition, or in Derek Jacobi's stuttering Claudius, or in Joachim Phoenix's psychotic Commodus, most people are aware of Roman emperors to some extent or other.1 They can be semi-legendary, or have been entirely ignored by posterity. Some...
Polychronicon 132: Roman Emperors
-
Cunning Plan 132: Year 7 and the new National Curriculum
Teaching History feature
How can we plan for a coherent Year 7 that makes the most of the new National Curriculum freedom and its almost limitless possible content? Answer: borders, boundaries (and books)
Please note: this article was published before the current 2014 National Curriculum.
Cunning Plan 132: Year 7 and the new National Curriculum
-
Cultivating curiosity about complexity
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
A great deal has been written recently about the importance of encouraging and enabling all students to read beyond their comfort zones, beyond the textbook and certainly beyond the obvious requirements of an examination specification....
Cultivating curiosity about complexity
-
Plotting maps and mapping minds: what can maps tell us about the people who made them
Teaching History article
As historians, we know that ‘factual’ information should never be uncritically accepted. And yet, too often, that is exactly what we do with the maps we use to locate ourselves and our students. Evelyn Sweerts and Marie-Claire Cavanagh, who now work in a European School in Brussels but until recently...
Plotting maps and mapping minds: what can maps tell us about the people who made them
-
Medieval 'Signs and Marvels'
Historian article
Medieval ‘Signs and Marvels': insights into medieval ideas about nature and the cosmic order.
Many aspects of life in the Middle Ages puzzle the modern reader but some are stranger than others. What can possibly explain an event reported from Orford Castle, in Suffolk? This is an amazing tale and...
Medieval 'Signs and Marvels'
