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Film: Interpretations at GCSE
Film: Secondary History Workshop Annual Conference 2019
This secondary workshop took place at at the Historical Association Annual Conference, Chester, May 2019.
To teach successfully at GCSE, should you focus your work on practice exam questions? Is boosting grades about re-writing mark-schemes in pupil-friendly language and showing model answers? Success at GCSE involves teaching interpretations properly, not just...
Film: Interpretations at GCSE
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Enquiry questions that both chime and resonate
Article
Ruth Lingard (@YorkCLIO) has a lovely way of thinking about enquiry questions. She describes them in terms of church bells. There are those that chime, reverberate and resonate by building intrigue and a lasting impression. However, there are also those that thud and clunk, not quite hitting the mark and...
Enquiry questions that both chime and resonate
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Teaching History 153 Supplement: Curriculum Evolution
Secondary journal supplement
A special supplement to Teaching History to support the 2014 National Curriculum.
1) Thinking about how the HA can support your department
2) Jamie Byrom: Alive ... and kicking? Personal reflections on the revised National Curriculum and what we might do with it
3) Michael Fordham: O Brave New World,...
Teaching History 153 Supplement: Curriculum Evolution
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From ‘double vision’ to panorama: exploring interpretations of Nazi popularity
Teaching History article
Jim Carroll relished the opportunity, in the new A-level specification he was teaching, to find an effective way of teaching his students to analyse interpretations in their coursework essays. Reflecting on the difficulties he had faced as a trainee teacher teaching younger pupils about interpretations, and dissatisfied with examination board...
From ‘double vision’ to panorama: exploring interpretations of Nazi popularity
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Liverpool's revolutionary Old Dock
Visit
If you want to get up close to history, Liverpool's revolutionary Old Dock – the world's first commercial enclosed wet dock – opened in May 2010 as the city's latest historic attraction, with free ticketed tours for schools and members of the public starting from Merseyside Maritime Museum. For the first time...
Liverpool's revolutionary Old Dock
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Film: What's the wisdom on... Historical Interpretations
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... Historical Interpretations
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Year 8 and interpretations of the First World War
Teaching History article
Dan Smith was concerned that his pupils were drawing on over-simplified generalisations about different periods of the past when they were considering why interpretations change over time. This led him to consider how pupils’ contextual knowledge and chronological fluency might be used more explicitly in order to avoid weak generalisations...
Year 8 and interpretations of the First World War
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On-demand webinar: Interpretations: complexity without confusions
Embracing messiness: teaching disciplinary thinking in history
Embracing messiness: teaching disciplinary thinking in history
Session 3: Interpretations: complexity without confusions
This session delves into interpretations. It analyses how we can be both too simplistic and too complex with our approach. It will explore a different approach to interpretations and give practical approaches to exemplify what this could...
On-demand webinar: Interpretations: complexity without confusions
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Film: Stalin - Interpretations and Legacy
Film Series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
In this film, Professor James Harris (University of Leeds) reflects upon how historical interpretations of Stalin have changed over time. Stalin’s legacy and influence continues to materialise in all subsequent Soviet and Russian administrations. The Man of Steel is used by politicians when they are looking for arguments to open...
Film: Stalin - Interpretations and Legacy
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Film: Gorbachev - Foreign Relations
Film Series: Power and authority in Russia and the USSR
Professor Archie Brown discusses how Gorbachev fundamentally reformed Soviet foreign policy, redefined relations with the West, fostered closer personal relationships with former adversaries and how he transformed the Cold War world.
He examines Gorbachev's policy towards Eastern Europe and the fall of the Iron Curtain, and looks at how his new foreign...
Film: Gorbachev - Foreign Relations
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Recorded webinar: Exploring representations and attitudes to disability across history
Webinar
This webinar was presented by Richard Rieser, who is a campaigner and champion for disability rights and the coordinator of UK Disability History Month.
His presentation is part of our ongoing work to explore disability history and the arguments and representations of it and ensure that people from disability groups...
Recorded webinar: Exploring representations and attitudes to disability across history
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Tackling A-level students’ misconceptions about historical interpretations and the historiography of Scottish witchcraft
Teaching History article
Maya Stiasny was troubled by a stubbornly persistent flaw in her A-level students’ conception of historical interpretations. Students were seeing historians’ arguments as snapshots in time, emerging magically and unproblematically out of personal views, rather than crafted as a process. Stiasny wanted her students to understand that process as an academically rigorous...
Tackling A-level students’ misconceptions about historical interpretations and the historiography of Scottish witchcraft
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Films: Mikhail Gorbachev – Interpretations
Film series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
How much of what Russia is today, how its people behave, and how they are perceived is dependent on its history and those that have led it? Was it the first melting pot of the world? Do its broad range of cultural traditions and diversity play a part in its...
Films: Mikhail Gorbachev – Interpretations
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Exploring the relationship between historical significance and historical interpretation
Teaching History article
Jane Card’s previous work on the power of images in conveying particular interpretations and her advice about how to use visual material effectively in classrooms will be familiar to readers of Teaching History. In this article she focuses specifically on the capacity of visual representations to convey a compelling message about the...
Exploring the relationship between historical significance and historical interpretation
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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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Recorded webinar: Making history accessible: context and considerations
Webinar series: Making history accessible
Session 1: Making history accessible
This webinar provides an overview of recent key developments in SEND, including statutory guidance and regulations from Ofsted’s latest Education Inspection Framework and the SEND improvement plan. Drawing on SEND toolkits, we reflect on how to embed inclusive practice. This is explored in the context...
Recorded webinar: Making history accessible: context and considerations
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On-demand webinar: Assessing pupils’ answers to enquiry questions
Meaningful and useable assessment in the secondary history classroom
Webinar series: Meaningful and useable assessment in the secondary history classroom
Session 3: Assessing pupils’ answers to enquiry questions
This session will consider how history teachers can go about ‘marking’ pupils’ answers to enquiry questions in a way that values the pupils’ own voice and independent thinking, and avoids restricting...
On-demand webinar: Assessing pupils’ answers to enquiry questions
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Communities of inquiry: creating the conditions for meaningful collaboration
Teaching History article
When Will Bailey-Watson (a history ITE tutor) and Charlie Crouch (a history PhD student) worked together to improve a history undergraduate course at their university, they realised that the benefits of collaboration between teachers and historians can flow both ways. In this article they offer an account of how they sought...
Communities of inquiry: creating the conditions for meaningful collaboration
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Magna Carta and the development of the British constitution
Historian article
Robert Blackburn explains why, 800 years on, Magna Carta still has relevance and meaning to us in Britain today.
Magna Carta established the crucial idea that our rulers may not do whatever they like, but are subject to the law as agreed with the society over which they govern. In...
Magna Carta and the development of the British constitution
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Cunning Plan 142: Why do historical interpretations change over time?
Teaching History feature
History teachers have been talking about the need to teach broad narratives, overview and chronology for a long time. They have also recognised how essential it is for students to have an opportunity to study the ways in which the past has been interpreted, and the reasons why these interpretations...
Cunning Plan 142: Why do historical interpretations change over time?
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Film: The Partitions of Poland-Lithuania (1772-1795)
Repercussions for German-Polish Relations and their Legacy.
Karin Friedrich recently joined the Virtual Branch to discuss aspects of its complex history in her talk on the partitions of Poland, their repercussions for German-Polish relations and their legacy. Professor Friedrich is chair in Early Modern European History at the University of Aberdeen, co-director of the Centre for Early Modern...
Film: The Partitions of Poland-Lithuania (1772-1795)
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Polychronicon 157: Reinterpreting police-public relations in modern England
Teaching History feature
The relationship between the police and the public has long been a key subject in English social history. The formative work in this field was conducted between the 1970s and 1990s, but the past few years have witnessed something of a revival of research in the area. By focusing on...
Polychronicon 157: Reinterpreting police-public relations in modern England
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Why did the prosecution of witches cease in England?
Pamphlet
This lucid survey of the history of witch trials in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth century focuses on the question of ‘why did the formal prosecution of witches cease?' Accusations of witchcraft can be found throughout the nineteenth century yet the last conviction was in 1712. Clive Holmes explores...
Why did the prosecution of witches cease in England?
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New, Novice or Nervous? 156: Analysing interpretations
Teaching History feature
This page is for those new to the published writings of history teachers. Every problem you wrestle with, other teachers have wrestled with too. Quick fixes don't exist. But if you discover others' writing, you'll soon find - and want to join - something better: an international conversation in which others...
New, Novice or Nervous? 156: Analysing interpretations
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'But why then?' Chronological context and historical interpretations
Teaching History article
When Michael Fordham was introduced to Dr Seuss's Butter Battle Book he immediately recognised its potential value in the classroom as a popular interpretation of the Cold War.
Wanting his Year 9 pupils to explain how and why the past has been interpreted in different ways he shows the potential pitfalls...
'But why then?' Chronological context and historical interpretations
