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Year 9 face up to historical difference
Teaching History article
How many people does it take to make an Essex man? Year 9 face up to historical difference
Teaching her Key Stage 3 students in Essex, Catherine McCrory was struck by the stark contrast between their enthusiasm for studying diverse histories of Africa and the Americas and their reluctance to...
Year 9 face up to historical difference
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Move Me On 193: struggling with essential management issues
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 193: struggling with essential management issues
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Papal Election and Murder
Historian article
Before the smoke clears: The longest papal election in history was marred by a brutal murder
Papal elections never used to be so short or easy. In 1268 Pope Clement IV died and the cardinals, divided between French and Italian factions, would be deadlocked for the next three years over...
Papal Election and Murder
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Cathars and Castles in Medieval France
Historian article
Almost exactly 800 years ago, in September 1213, a decisive battle was fought at Muret, about ten miles south-west of Toulouse. King Peter II of Aragon, fighting with southern allies from Toulouse and elsewhere, faced an army largely made up of northern French crusaders who had invaded the region at the...
Cathars and Castles in Medieval France
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Music, blood and terror: making emotive and controversial history matter
Teaching History article
Lomas and Wrenn, co-authors and compilers of the Historical Association’s DfES-funded T.E.A.C.H 3-19 Report (Teaching Emotive and Controversial History), explore further ideas and examples of good practice from issues arising out of the report’s conclusions. Lomas and Wrenn propose five distinct categories of emotive and controversial history that further develop...
Music, blood and terror: making emotive and controversial history matter
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History, citizenship and controversy
Primary History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Y4 question their MP about nuclear waste policy; Y6 survey people in their community and school about a proposed casino in their town, and feed back the information to the local council; children decide to...
History, citizenship and controversy
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Move Me On 190: taking questions about historical significance
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 190: taking questions about historical significance
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Planning and teaching linear GCSE
Teaching History article
Planning and teaching linear GCSE: inspiring interest, maximising memory and practising productively
As proposed changes to the National Curriculum are furiously debated, and details of future changes to GCSE are anxiously awaited, history teachers in England are already wrestling with the implications of one change to the public examination system:...
Planning and teaching linear GCSE
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Ralph Sadleir: Hackney's Local Hero or Villain: Examples of learning opportunities in museums and historic sites at Key Stage 3
Teaching History article
The benefits of learning in historical sites and museums are well documented. De Silva, Smith and Tranter wrote in Teaching History 102, Inspiration and Motivation Edition, about exploring identity through the biography of a house, suggesting the possibility of teaching from the local to capture the national picture. However, students...
Ralph Sadleir: Hackney's Local Hero or Villain: Examples of learning opportunities in museums and historic sites at Key Stage 3
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Fighting a different war
Podcast
2012 Annual Conference LectureFighting a different war: contesting the place of the queer soldier in the mythology of the Second World WarEmma Vickers: Lecturer in Modern British History University of Reading In the mid-1990s, the queer soldier finally became visible. On the streets, gay rights campaigners led by Peter Tatchell...
Fighting a different war
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Hidden histories and heroism: post-14 course on multi-cultural Britain since 1945
Teaching History Article
A school-designed, post-14 course on multi-cultural Britain since 1945
Robin Whitburn and Sharon Yemoh describe the design of a school-generated GCSE course on the challenges that British people faced in forging a multicultural society in post-imperial Britain. Drawing on their own research into their students' experience, they build a discipline-based case...
Hidden histories and heroism: post-14 course on multi-cultural Britain since 1945
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Cunning Plan 147: Getting students to use classical texts
Teaching History feature
The following plan provides a more detailed practical example of the approaches discussed in the article on using ancient texts.
Having puzzled over what ancient texts actually are - carefully constructed interpretations? testimonies? (but testimonies to what?) myths? - I wanted my Ancient History GCSE class to engage in this...
Cunning Plan 147: Getting students to use classical texts
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Planning a more diverse and coherent Year 7 curriculum
Teaching History article
In this article, Jacob Olivey describes his department’s efforts to both diversify their Key Stage 3 curriculum and secure greater curricular coherence. Building on a large body of research and practice, Olivey sought new forms of curricular coherence through the selection and sequencing of substantive content across the curriculum. He...
Planning a more diverse and coherent Year 7 curriculum
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Making history meaningful: helping students see why history matters
Teaching History article
October 17 saw thousands of people writing a blog of a normal Tuesday as part of the ‘History Matters’ campaign. There was great media interest in the event and the papers were full of the blogs of the famous and not so famous; people were keen to write up their...
Making history meaningful: helping students see why history matters
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Broadening and deepening narratives of Benin for Year 8
Teaching History article
Josh Garry describes his effort to refresh his approach to teaching the British transatlantic slave trade. Drawing on reading, lectures and discussions during an Historical Association Teacher Fellowship programme, Garry built a sequence of lessons designed to contextualise the trade while showing African agency and complexity. The result was a sequence...
Broadening and deepening narratives of Benin for Year 8
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1066 and all what?
Article
Over dinner on 14 October a friend challenged me: ‘You’re a history teacher. How come everyone knows about the Battle of Hastings? There must have been loads of battles. Why that one?’ The year 1066 had an iconic role in English historical thought long before Sellar and Yeatman immortalised it...
1066 and all what?
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High achievement in history in a nutshell
Article
History is a discipline that attempts to understand human beings, the civilisations, cultures, nations and communities that they make and that make them. History is about time because everything human has its time and time runs out: it is about change, development, coming into being and passing away and about...
High achievement in history in a nutshell
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Christopher Hill: Marxism and Methodism
Historian article
Christopher Hill, the eminent historian of seventeenth century England, was a convinced Marxist throughout most of his long and productive life (1912-2003). He embraced this secular world-view when he was a young History student at Oxford in the polemical 1930s and never lost his ideological commitment, even though he resigned...
Christopher Hill: Marxism and Methodism
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Developing a history department intranet as a resource for students and staff
Article
Four years ago, as an academic historian with a recently-acquired Secondary History PGCE, I was striving to satisfactorily deal with the many challenges faced by all NQTs in their first appointment. Among many other things, it was the sheer pace of the school day and the practical issues of lesson...
Developing a history department intranet as a resource for students and staff
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Year 12 write Zambia's history for Zambian students
Teaching History article
Peter Gray explains how his Year 12 students came to research and write a resource on the history of Zambia, for history teachers in Zambia. The construction of the resource stretched the Year 12 students in new ways: the Internet was useless and there were no easy digests in A-Level...
Year 12 write Zambia's history for Zambian students
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Debates: Narratives - what matters most in school history education?
Teaching History article
In England, a curriculum review is imminent. Following a recent ‘call for evidence' by the government, further consultation on the future shape of history in schools will follow. The HA is currently consulting its membership and will be publishing discussion papers in January 2012. At such a time, everyone in...
Debates: Narratives - what matters most in school history education?
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Using family history to provoke rigorous enquiry
Teaching History article
The idea of using ‘little stories' to illuminate the ‘big pictures' of the past was creatively explored in Teaching History 107, which offered teachers a wealth of detailed vignettes with which to kindle young people's interest and illuminate major historical events. Paul Barrett builds on the ideas explored in that...
Using family history to provoke rigorous enquiry
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Building Key Stage 5 students’ analysis of interpretations
Article
Students of A-level history are required to analyse and evaluate historical interpretations. Samuel Head found limitations in his Year 13 students’ understanding of how and why historians arrive at differing interpretations, which impeded their ability to analyse them. He set about tackling this with carefully sequenced planning and a processual model...
Building Key Stage 5 students’ analysis of interpretations
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Lloyd George & Gladstone
Article
Lloyd George, who died sixty years ago on 26 March 1945, grew up and began his Parliamentary career in Queen Victoria's reign. In taking up a major Welsh issue, disestablishment of the Church of Wales, he memorably clashed with William Ewart Gladstone, perhaps the greatest of all Liberal Prime Ministers....
Lloyd George & Gladstone
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Cunning Plan 144: promoting independent student enquiry
Teaching History feature
Getting students to generate their own questions can seem like a formidable challenge, even for experienced teachers with extensive subject knowledge developed over years of teaching. Imagine how much more alarming it appeared to a student-teacher being encouraged to take risks by handing more responsibility to the students. Could it...
Cunning Plan 144: promoting independent student enquiry
