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Developing students' thinking about change and continuity
Teaching History article
The more things change, the more they stay the same: developing students' thinking about change and continuity
Finding ways to characterise the nature of change and continuity is an important part of the historian's task, yet students find it particularly challenging to do. Building on her previous work on change, Rachel...
Developing students' thinking about change and continuity
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Cunning Plan… for using the story of Eunice Foote to bring environmental history into the curriculum
Teaching History feature
It was during a rainy Tuesday breaktime that I realised why I was so flippant about including environmental history in my curriculum. ‘The climate, you see,’ I said to my colleague Tamsin as I double-boiled the staffroom kettle, ‘can’t challenge you when you don’t include it.’
Kate Hawkey’s book History and the Climate...
Cunning Plan… for using the story of Eunice Foote to bring environmental history into the curriculum
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History, citizenship and Oliver Stone
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
When is a work of art a work of history? How can we get our students to appreciate the difference without ignoring the overlap? How should we ask our students to approach the historical film...
History, citizenship and Oliver Stone
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Move Me On 143: Trying to tackle everything at once
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem: Emily Hobhouse seems to feel obliged to implement all the new ideas she is learning about at once.
Emily Hobhouse has made an impressive start to her PGCE course. She switched to teaching after several years' work in legal practice which meant that she was already used to...
Move Me On 143: Trying to tackle everything at once
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Riots, railways and a Hampshire hill fort: Exploiting local history for rigorous evidential enquiry
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Rigorous historical enquiry is integral to effective history teaching. The 2008 National Curriculum has recognised its importance by giving it a broader definition as a key process to include not only the use of historical...
Riots, railways and a Hampshire hill fort: Exploiting local history for rigorous evidential enquiry
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Teaching students to argue for themselves - KS3
Teaching History article
Keeley Richards secured a fundamental shift in some of her Year 13 students' ability to argue. She did it by getting them to engage more fully with the practice of argument itself, as enacted by four historians. At the centre of her lesson sequence was an original activity: the historians'...
Teaching students to argue for themselves - KS3
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Having 'Great Expectations' of Year 9
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
What scope does studying a classic novel in both English and history provide for meaningful cross-curricular work and how might engaging with historical fiction help pupils engage more effectively with the realities of the past?...
Having 'Great Expectations' of Year 9
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Building meaningful models of progression
Teaching History article
Setting us free? Building meaningful models of progression for a ‘post-levels' world
Alex Ford was thrilled by the prospect of freedom offered to history departments in England by the abolition of level descriptions within the National Curriculum.
After analysing the range of competing purposes that the level descriptions were previously...
Building meaningful models of progression
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Rigorous, meaningful and robust: practical ways forward for assessment
Teaching History article
How do we know how good our students are at history? For that matter, how precisely do we really know what ‘good' at history even means? Even harder, how does our assessment of our students' attainment fit in with the National Curriculum Levels for Key Stage 3? Simon Harrison has...
Rigorous, meaningful and robust: practical ways forward for assessment
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The potential of secondary history to respond to the current ecological and climate crisis
Teaching History article
In this article Michael Riley and Alison Kitson seek to unlock the potential of the secondary history curriculum to educate young people about the current ecological and climate crisis in ways that might also inform their thinking about how to create a more sustainable future. The article (which mirrors a parallel...
The potential of secondary history to respond to the current ecological and climate crisis
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Polychronicon 112: The Angevin Empire
Teaching History feature
Polychronicon was a fourteenth-century chronicle that brought together much of the knowledge of its ownage. Our Polychronicon in Teaching History is a regular feature helping school history teachers to update their subject knowledge, with special emphasis on recent historiography and changing interpretation. This edition of the 'Polychronicon' concentrates on the...
Polychronicon 112: The Angevin Empire
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How history teachers can support their own and others' continued professional learning
Teaching History article
‘If I wasn't learning anything new about teaching I would have left it by now!' How history teachers can support their own and others' continued professional learning
Katharine Burn has a longstanding interest in history teachers' professional learning - not just the ways in which experienced teachers can support beginners,...
How history teachers can support their own and others' continued professional learning
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Fifties Britain through the senses: ‘never had it so good’?
Teaching History article
Maya Stiasny was faced with difficulties familiar to many of us. Her new Year 12 students were struggling to get to grips with a new period of history. They were not interrogating primary sources with sufficient vigour. Her solution, detailed here, was novel. Working on the rich social history of post-war...
Fifties Britain through the senses: ‘never had it so good’?
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Using the concept of place to help Year 9 students to visualise the complexities of the Holocaust
Teaching History article
Inspired by the work of the social and cultural historian Tim Cole, Stuart Farley decided to look again at the way he teaches the Holocaust. He wanted to focus on the geographical concept of place as a way of enabling his Year 9 students to build far more diverse narratives,...
Using the concept of place to help Year 9 students to visualise the complexities of the Holocaust
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Exploring pupils' difficulties when arguing about a diverse past
Teaching History article
Wrestling with diversity: exploring pupils' difficulties when arguing about a diverse past
How can we develop students' ability to argue about diversity? Sarah Black explores this question through classroom research that set out to help students think in complex ways about diversity, drawing on Burbules' work on conceptualising difference and...
Exploring pupils' difficulties when arguing about a diverse past
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Triumphs Show 136: how one history department changed pupils' and parents' perceptions of homework
Teaching History feature
Devising worthwhile and engaging homework tasks, week in week out, can prove both demanding and frustrating - particularly in contexts where we know students will have be chased to complete them.
How can we make homework planning easier and more effective - and cut down the time spent chasing recalcitrant...
Triumphs Show 136: how one history department changed pupils' and parents' perceptions of homework
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Teaching History 193: Out now
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Read Teaching History 193: Mediating History
David Lowenthal writes that history is both less than and more than the past. It is less because ‘only a tiny fraction of all that has happened can ever be recovered and recounted’.1 Yet it is also more because ‘it is a new and...
Teaching History 193: Out now
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A question of attribution: working with ghetto photographs
Teaching History article
Holocaust imagery is very familiar, clichéd even. How can we get pupils thinking about it in novel ways and seeing differently? Phillips reports work completed with his PGCE students, proposes a scaffold of questions with which to deconstruct images and applies it to archive images and to Hollywood representations. Images...
A question of attribution: working with ghetto photographs
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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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Teaching History 192: Out now
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Read Teaching History 192: Breadth
If the length of a curriculum relates to how long it lasts – to its duration in classroom time and to the volume of historical time it covers – then curricular breadth refers us to the number and the variety of the dimensions of human...
Teaching History 192: Out now
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Cunning Plan 185… for building difference into GCSE curriculum design
Teaching History feature
Many history teachers have been busy making space in their curriculum plans for different sorts of histories. This process, as Priyamavda Gopal has argued (in response to claims that moves to decolonise the curriculum constitute an attempt to censor history by editing out those bits viewed as ‘stains’ on the nation’s...
Cunning Plan 185… for building difference into GCSE curriculum design
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Emotional response or objective enquiry? Using shared stories and a sense of place
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
In this article, Andrew Wrenn explores some issues that teachers might consider when supporting 14 and 15 year olds in their study of war memorials as historical interpretations. Tony McAleavy has argued that ‘popular' and...
Emotional response or objective enquiry? Using shared stories and a sense of place
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Cunning Plan 152.2: using Gillray’s cartoons with Year 8
Teaching History feature
The past 30 years have seen a general revival in scholarly activity relating to ‘all aspects of 18th-century British history'. However, this increase in academic study, which has broadly coincided with the introduction and development of the National Curriculum in England, has not resulted in the period being studied in great...
Cunning Plan 152.2: using Gillray’s cartoons with Year 8
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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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Move Me On 176: worried about how to deal with his own dyslexia in the classroom
The problem page for history mentors
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 176: worried about how to deal with his own dyslexia in the classroom
