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Developing Citizenship in Schools
Article
The HA would like to thank the Association for Citizenship Teaching for allowing us to reproduce this article on the HA Website!
In a novel and revealing 'dialogue', Scott Harrison HMI, specialist adviser for history and citizenship at Ofsterd, and Liz Craft, lead consultant for citizenship at QCA, discuss the...
Developing Citizenship in Schools
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Polychronicon 133: The Crusader States in the Levant
Teaching History feature
In my first Polychronicon article on ‘The Crusades' I pointed out that research historians are increasingly specialising either on the crusades themselves or on the crusader states. There are good reasons for this, but in my opinion it makes little sense for school or university teachers to treat these topics...
Polychronicon 133: The Crusader States in the Levant
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Triumphs Show 133: Getting more pupils choosing History at GCSE
Teaching History feature
It is often remarked that history is under pressure nationally at GCSE. Our history numbers have never been enormous, and we have recently gone down from 2 sets to one set. The crunch came in 2007 when we collapsed to a dismal 12 students. A variety of factors may have...
Triumphs Show 133: Getting more pupils choosing History at GCSE
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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
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Raising the bar: developing meaningful historical consciousness at Key Stage 3
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
How can we help pupils make sense of the history that they learn so that the whole adds up to more than the sum of its parts? How can we help pupils develop and sophisticate...
Raising the bar: developing meaningful historical consciousness at Key Stage 3
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Nutshell 133
Article
Did we really need a new Attainment Target?
Yes. The first one, developed in 1995, was a best effort to craft the old 1991 ‘statements of attainment' into holistic, ‘best fit' Level Descriptions. Since then, the history education community has learned a lot and some of the goals for pupils'...
Nutshell 133
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Using remote voting to involve everyone in classroom thinking at AS and A2
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Diana Laffin shares her findings on an action research project into the use of remote voting systems in the AS and A2 classroom. She was particularly interested in examining the impact of such devices on...
Using remote voting to involve everyone in classroom thinking at AS and A2
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Stories and their sources: the need for historical thinking in an information age
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Information technology is of no value in itself or by itself: it needs questions to drive it and disciplined forms of thinking to make sense of the answers that it can provide. Inspired by the...
Stories and their sources: the need for historical thinking in an information age
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What is Bias?
Article
There is a nice story about how Calvin Coolidge went to hear a clergyman preach on sin. "What did he say?" he was asked. 'He said he was against it', Coolidge replied. The history teacher or student, well used by now to the normal form of questions at GCSE, might...
What is Bias?
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The American Diplomatic Tradition
Classic Pamphlet
Indisputably, the United States of America has been and continues to be the leading power of the twentieth century. No country or people, however large or small, has been immune from American influence. A succession of American presidents have become international celebrities whose personal strengths and weaknesses are discussed and disssected...
The American Diplomatic Tradition
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British Defence and Appeasement Between the Wars 1919-1939
Classic Pamphlet
Armed forces never exist in isolation, but always operate against a background of political, economic, social, cultural, intellectual and ideological conditions and attitudes, as well as in relation to diplomatic and strategic factors. Some governments regards their military forces especially their armies, more as instruments for maintaining internal order than...
British Defence and Appeasement Between the Wars 1919-1939
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The Enlightenment
Classic Pamphlet
Can a movement as varied and diffuse as the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century be contained within the covers of a short pamphlet? The problem would certainly have appealed to the intellectuals of that time. Generalists rather than specialists, citizens of the whole world of knowledge, they relished the challenge...
The Enlightenment
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Nazism and Stalinism
Classic Pamphlet
Is it legitimate to compare the Nazi and Stalinist regimes? There might seem little room for doubt. It is often taken as self-evident that the two regimes were variations of a common type. They are bracketed together in school and university courses, as well as text books, under labels such...
Nazism and Stalinism
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Analytic and Discursive Writing at Key Stage 3
HA Guide
Christine Counsell's core message is that, because analytical and discursive writing is seen as difficult, it is often considered impossible. Instead, those very difficulties should be the focus of continuous professional analysis by all history teachers. Counsell argues that only a thorough analysis of those difficulties will yield suitable creative...
Analytic and Discursive Writing at Key Stage 3
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Does scaffolding make them fall? Reflecting on strategies for developing causal argument in Years 8 and 11
Teaching History article
Jennifer Evans and Gemma Pate, history teachers in two Essex schools, had noticed that sometimes a writing frame did the opposite of what was intended. Sometimes a card sort fostered rich discussion and ownership; sometimes it led the students down a reductive rather than mind-opening path. Sometimes modelling of paragraphs...
Does scaffolding make them fall? Reflecting on strategies for developing causal argument in Years 8 and 11
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Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime: using external support, local history and a group project to challenge the most able
Teaching History article
The most able can be challenged in a variety of ways and at a number of levels, from the extension question for the individual child to the extended enquiry for the most able class. In a Leading Edge History project, Guy Woolnough and his colleagues took the concept of challenge...
Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime: using external support, local history and a group project to challenge the most able
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Steering your OFSTED inspector into the long-term reasons for classroom success
Teaching History article
Sue Dove describes a short but action-packed activity sequence that was designed explicitly to show the OFSTED inspector the impact of the department's professional thinking and long-term planning. An integrated approach to thinking and writing at Key Stage 3 and much training of pupils to adopt a disciplined and creative...
Steering your OFSTED inspector into the long-term reasons for classroom success
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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
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Three lessons about a funeral: Second World War cemeteries and twenty years of curriculum change
Article
Mike Murray analyses the way in which curriculum development has broadened and strengthened our conceptions of high standards in historical learning for school students. He pays tribute to ground-breaking new theoretical principles from the Schools History Project and from new emphases upon contextual knowledge and ‘interpretations' in the first National...
Three lessons about a funeral: Second World War cemeteries and twenty years of curriculum change
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Direct teaching of paragraph cohesion
Teaching History article
How do we help pupils to write better paragraphs without actually doing it for them? How do we break down the process of essay writing into smaller steps without taking away pupils’ sense of the essay as a whole? How do we give lower-attaining pupils models, structures and frames without...
Direct teaching of paragraph cohesion
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Why Gerry likes history now: the power of the word processor
Article
Ben Walsh argues that many teachers of history completely miss the point of the word processor. Criticising those who use it merely for 'typing up' he reminds us that the purpose of the word processor, as with any other resource, is to teach good history. He analyses the types of...
Why Gerry likes history now: the power of the word processor
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Move Me On 93: Not making progress in use of ICT
The problem page for history mentors
Millie Marvel, PGCE Student is not making use of ICT to teach history in the classroom
Problem:
Millie Marvel, student history teacher, is in Term 2 of her PGCE year. She enjoys using ICT and is highly competent in her use of several applications. However, lessons in which she has chosen...
Move Me On 93: Not making progress in use of ICT
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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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Cunning Plan 93: Study Unit 3: 'The Making of the United Kingdom 1500-1750'
Article
This unit contains complex concepts. It is distant from twentieth century life. The challenge is to understand power struggles between King and Parliament, a changing society and a religious upheaval. How do we interest students in religion when they live in a society in which religion takes a back seat?
Cunning Plan 93: Study Unit 3: 'The Making of the United Kingdom 1500-1750'
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Being ambitious with the causes of the First World War: interrogating inevitability
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated
Gary Howells asks hard questions about typical teaching and assessment of historical causation at Key Stage 3. Popular activities that may be helpful in addressing particular learning areas, or in teaching pupils to use the...
Being ambitious with the causes of the First World War: interrogating inevitability
