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Move Me On 186: trainee provides little scope for students to use their knowledge in analysis/argument
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 186: trainee provides little scope for students to use their knowledge in analysis/argument
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Teaching about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and events happening there
Article
The events of the last few days appear to have come out of nowhere to many people, especially children. While tensions have existed in the region for some time Russia’s decision to attack Ukraine was without provocation.
To have war return in such a way to the edges of Europe...
Teaching about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and events happening there
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What’s The Wisdom On... history assessment?
Teaching History feature
Between 1991 and 1995, secondary history teachers in England and Wales had something of a collective awakening about assessment. It followed a huge policy shift in history education: history’s first National Curriculum, rolled out in 1991.
What's the Wisdom On... is a short guide providing new history teachers with an overview...
What’s The Wisdom On... history assessment?
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Lesson sequence: Eighteenth-century politics – taster lesson
Article
This series of lessons has been designed to enable students to learn about power and political change in Britain in the period 1688–1783. Through the unfolding narrative, students learn about key concepts, including monarchy, government and Parliament, identify causal factors and develop a sense of period. Finally, they assess how power...
Lesson sequence: Eighteenth-century politics – taster lesson
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Lesson sequence: Eighteenth-century politics
Lesson sequence
The first lesson of this sequence is available free to all secondary members here.
This series of lessons has been designed to enable students to learn about power and political change in Britain in the period 1688–1783. Through the unfolding narrative, students learn about key concepts, including monarchy, government and Parliament, identify causal...
Lesson sequence: Eighteenth-century politics
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Film: What's the wisdom on... Extended Reading
Your Virtual History Department Meeting
'What’s the wisdom on…' is a popular feature in our secondary journal Teaching History and provides the perfect stimulus for a department meeting. 'What’s the wisdom on…' provides history teachers with an overview of the ‘story so far’ of many years of practice-based professional thinking about a particular aspect of history teaching.
To...
Film: What's the wisdom on... Extended Reading
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Inventing race? Using primary sources to investigate the origins of racial thinking in the past
Teaching History article
Having been given some additional curriculum time, Kerry Apps and her department made decisions about what had been missing in the previous curriculum diet. Building on an existing enquiry (in TH 176), Apps decided to focus on how and when the idea of race in its modern sense developed in early modern...
Inventing race? Using primary sources to investigate the origins of racial thinking in the past
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Diversifying the curriculum: one department’s holistic approach
Teaching History article
In this article, Theo Woods shares the experience of one history department as they embarked on a substantial process of curriculum review and development. The department sought to address concerns that the range of history taught in their school, across the full seven years of students’ secondary experience, was too ‘traditional,...
Diversifying the curriculum: one department’s holistic approach
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In pursuit of shared histories: uncovering Islamic history in the secondary classroom
Teaching History article
In 2005, in a Teaching History article entitled, ‘A need to know’, Nicolas Kinloch built an argument for teaching the history of Islamic civilisations to all pupils. Afia Chaudhry returns to this theme, reflecting deeply on the needs of her own students – Muslim and non-Muslim alike – within a...
In pursuit of shared histories: uncovering Islamic history in the secondary classroom
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Film: What's the wisdom on... Consequence
Your Virtual History Department Meeting
'What’s the wisdom on…' is a popular feature in our secondary journal Teaching History and provides the perfect stimulus for a department meeting. 'What’s the wisdom on…' provides history teachers with an overview of the ‘story so far’ of many years of practice-based professional thinking about a particular aspect of history teaching.
To...
Film: What's the wisdom on... Consequence
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Film: 'Mayflower Lives: building a New Jerusalem in the New World'
Article
Historian and author Martyn Whittock recently gave a lecture for the HA Virtual Branch on 'Mayflower Lives: building a New Jerusalem in the New World'. In 1620, 102 ill-prepared asylum seekers landed two months later than planned, in the wrong place on the eastern coast of North America. By the next summer, half of...
Film: 'Mayflower Lives: building a New Jerusalem in the New World'
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Building St James's spire: Louth's guilds and popular piety in the later middle ages
Virtual Branch Lecture Recording
Medieval historian Dr Claire Kennan continued our Virtual Branch series with a local history talk on the building of St James's spire, Louth.
In her talk Kennan traces the important role that Louth's major guilds of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Holy Trinity played in the building of the St James’s spire. Throughout the...
Building St James's spire: Louth's guilds and popular piety in the later middle ages
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Monty’s school: the benign side of Viscount Montgomery of Alamein
Historian article
Field-Marshal Montgomery has a reputation as a strong-willed battle-hardened leader, with a touch of the impetuous. Few know of his charitable side and yet in his later years this side was just as important to his activities. In this article we find out a bit more of this often simplistically...
Monty’s school: the benign side of Viscount Montgomery of Alamein
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Using individuals’ stories to help GCSE students to explain change and causation
Article
Should we, and how do we, develop in our students a sense of period – or a series of senses of period – in a thematic study spanning a thousand years? This was the problem faced by Matthew Fearns-Davies in preparing for the GCSE ‘Health and the People’ paper. He shows...
Using individuals’ stories to help GCSE students to explain change and causation
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... medieval science and medicine?
A Polychronicon of the Past
The phrase ‘medieval science’ may seem nonsensical. ‘How can... a synonym for “backward”,’ the editors of The Cambridge History of Science Volume 2 ask rhetorically, ‘modify a noun that signifies the best available knowledge from the natural world?’ To answer their question, we must rethink our assumptions, both about the...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... medieval science and medicine?
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Deepening Year 9’s knowledge for better causation arguments
Teaching History article
Frustrated by her students’ glib use of catch-all terms such as ‘militarism’ in addressing causation, Alexia Michalaki wanted her Year 9 students to produce mature causal explanations of World War I. To encourage this to happen she went back into decades of pedagogical writing and research, teasing out the ways...
Deepening Year 9’s knowledge for better causation arguments
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What’s The Wisdom On... Consequence
Teaching History feature
Consequence easily becomes ‘causation’s forgotten sibling’, as Fordham noted, in the title of a workshop presented at the 2012 Historical Association conference. The choice to treat consequence separately from causation in this series of articles is, therefore, a very deliberate one. Yet an emphasis on the importance of consequences should...
What’s The Wisdom On... Consequence
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Film: What's the wisdom on... Historical Significance
Your Virtual History Department Meeting
'What’s the wisdom on…' is a popular feature in our secondary journal Teaching History and provides the perfect stimulus for a department meeting. 'What’s the wisdom on…' provides history teachers with an overview of the ‘story so far’ of many years of practice-based professional thinking about a particular aspect of history teaching.
To...
Film: What's the wisdom on... Historical Significance
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Triumphs Show: Making their historical writing explode
Teaching History feature
‘Who hates PEE paragraphs?’ A collective groan resounds around my classroom. ‘Today, Year 10 we are going to master PEE paragraphs, and make our written historical explanations explode.’
I always remember one deflated Year 10 student who said, ‘Miss, I just don’t get PEE paragraphs. I couldn’t do them in Year 7, and I still...
Triumphs Show: Making their historical writing explode
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Touching, feeling, smelling, and sensing history through objects
Teaching History article
Lots has been written in recent years about how history teachers can bring academic scholarship into the classroom. This article takes this interest in academic practice a step further, examining how pupils can engage directly with the kinds of sources to which historians are increasingly turning their attention: the ‘everyday’ objects of ordinary life. Building on...
Touching, feeling, smelling, and sensing history through objects
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Film: What's the wisdom on...Similarity and Difference
Your Virtual History Department Meeting
We’ve been talking to our secondary school members and we know how difficult life is for teachers in the current circumstances, so we wanted to lend a helping hand.
'What’s the wisdom on…' is a popular feature in our secondary journal Teaching History and provides the perfect stimulus for a virtual department meeting....
Film: What's the wisdom on...Similarity and Difference
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Transatlantic slavery – shaping the question, lengthening the narrative, broadening the meaning
Teaching History article
Nathanael Davies explains his radical rethink of how to teach transatlantic slavery. He explains how he came to question his earlier approach of focusing on the causation of ‘abolition’ and ‘emancipation’ and, instead, allowed scholarship, sources and his own students’ meaning-making to guide him to a different, and much more...
Transatlantic slavery – shaping the question, lengthening the narrative, broadening the meaning
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... the long-term impact of the Black Death on English towns
A Polychronicon of the Past
In the summer of 1348, the Chronicle of the Grey Friars at Lynn described how sailors had arrived in Melcombe (now Weymouth) bringing from Gascony ‘the seeds of the terrible pestilence’. The Black Death spread rapidly throughout England, killing approximately half the population. While the cause of the disease, the...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... the long-term impact of the Black Death on English towns
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Triumphs Show 180: From ‘most able’ to ‘mini’ historians
Teaching History feature
Finding ways to stretch and challenge the highest-attaining students has been a long-standing concern of many history teachers, and strategies for doing so have developed far beyond merely bolting on additional tasks. One way in which I have sought to challenge my own high-attaining students has been by setting them...
Triumphs Show 180: From ‘most able’ to ‘mini’ historians
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Film: What's the wisdom on... Change and continuity
Your Virtual History Department Meeting
We’ve been talking to our secondary school members and we know how difficult life is for teachers in the current circumstances, so we wanted to lend a helping hand.
'What’s the wisdom on…' is a new and already popular feature in our secondary journal Teaching History and provides the perfect stimulus for a...
Film: What's the wisdom on... Change and continuity
