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Family stories and global (hi)stories
Teaching History article
Teaching in Greece, a country with extensive recent experience of immigration, Maria Vlachaki and Georgia Kouseri were interested to examine how they might use family history as a means of exploring the historical dimensions of this potentially sensitive topic. They hoped that encouraging pupils to explore their relatives’ stories would...
Family stories and global (hi)stories
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Move Me On 178: trainee sees all observation as assessment
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 178: trainee sees all observation as assessment
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Move Me On 133: Relying too much on teacher talk and alienating students
Teaching History feature
This Issue's problem: Margaret Cooper has struggled hard to realise her ambition to train to be a teacher but, now that she is taking responsibility for whole-class teaching, she is finding that her assumptions are being challenged and she is losing confidence...
Move Me On 133: Relying too much on teacher talk and alienating students
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Anatomy of enquiry: deconstructing an approach to history curriculum planning
Teaching History article
It is almost 20 years since Michael Riley first invited Key Stage 3 history teachers to ‘choose and plant’ their enquiry questions. Many members of the history education community have taken up that invitation, making use of overarching enquiry questions to structure students’ learning. But what is meant by enquiry...
Anatomy of enquiry: deconstructing an approach to history curriculum planning
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Cunning Plan 177: teaching about life in Elizabethan England by looking at death
Teaching History feature
‘We already did the Tudors in primary school’ was the most frequent comment made by students about our Year 7 scheme of learning in our annual review. Students reported covering the Tudors at least once, sometimes twice, before reaching secondary school and they had clearly not faced extensive further study...
Cunning Plan 177: teaching about life in Elizabethan England by looking at death
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Move Me on 177: using questioning effectively
The problem page for history mentors
This issue’s problem: Christine Pizan is struggling to use questioning effectively.
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...
Move Me on 177: using questioning effectively
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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
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Widening the early modern world to create a more connected KS3 curriculum
Teaching History article
Readers of this journal will be familiar with a number of ways of approaching the Tudors. Kerry Apps provides here an article detailing her concerns about the differences between what she had been delivering at Key Stage 3 and the broader, connected experience she had as an undergraduate historian. How...
Widening the early modern world to create a more connected KS3 curriculum
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Thinking beyond boundaries
HA Update
In October of last year, the Royal Historical Society (RHS) published an important report highlighting the racial and ethnic inequalities in the teaching and practice of history in the UK (RHS, 2018). Focused on history teaching at university, it nevertheless highlighted the need for thinking to occur at all levels...
Thinking beyond boundaries
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Triumphs Show 176: Using material culture as a means to generate an enquiry on the British Empire
Teaching History feature
Triumphs Show is a regular feature which offers a quick way for teachers to celebrate their successes and share inspirational ideas with one another. While the ideas are always explained in sufficient depth for others to be able to take them forward in their own practice, the simple format allows...
Triumphs Show 176: Using material culture as a means to generate an enquiry on the British Empire
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What’s the wisdom on… Evidence and sources
Teaching History feature
The year 1910 saw the publication of a remarkable book on history teaching by M.W.Keatinge.
The purpose of this guide. What's the Wisdom On... is a short guide providing new history teachers with an overview of the ‘story so far’ of practice-based professional thinking about a particular aspect of history teaching....
What’s the wisdom on… Evidence and sources
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Using historical discourse to find narrative coherence in the GCSE period study
Teaching History article
When planning a GCSE period study on the American West, Alex Ford wrestled with reconciling the content demands of the examination specifications with the need to provide his students with a memorable narrative. In this article, Ford shows how he drew on the latest academic scholarship to construct a rigorous,...
Using historical discourse to find narrative coherence in the GCSE period study
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What’s the wisdom on… Causation
Teaching History feature
What's the Wisdom On... is a short guide providing new history teachers with an overview of the ‘story so far’ of practice-based professional thinking about a particular aspect of history teaching. It draws on tried and tested approaches arising from teachers with years of experimenting, researching, practising, writing and debating their...
What’s the wisdom on… Causation
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Teaching Year 9 to take on the challenge of structure in narrative
Teaching History article
Reflecting on challenges that had surfaced in their own and others’ efforts to get pupils to write historical narratives, Rachel Foster and Kath Goudie went back to the drawing board to consider the disciplinary purposes of narrative. They used both historical scholarship and theoretical works by historians on narrative construction....
Teaching Year 9 to take on the challenge of structure in narrative
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What kinds of feedback help students produce better historical narratives of the interwar years?
Teaching History article
Narrative has begun to take its place alongside the essay, for so long the stereotypical currency of the history teacher and student. In this work, based on his experiences as a PGCE student, Alex Rodker argues powerfully that it is time now to consider how to help students to produce...
What kinds of feedback help students produce better historical narratives of the interwar years?
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Cunning Plan 174: creating a narrative of the interwar years
Teaching History feature
The major aim of this sequence of lessons was to teach Year 8 how to create and refine a narrative. I chose a period I was substantively confident on, which lent itself well to the narrative form, had a number of prominent academic narratives published about it and followed neatly...
Cunning Plan 174: creating a narrative of the interwar years
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Exploring the importance of local visits in developing wider narratives of change and continuity
Rethinking religious rollercoasters
The authors of this article take a well-known structural framework for students’ thinking about the Reformation and give it a twist. Their Tudor religious rollercoaster is informed by local visits in their setting in Guernsey – an area where the local picture was not quite the same as the national...
Exploring the importance of local visits in developing wider narratives of change and continuity
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Allowing A-level students to choose their own coursework focus
Teaching History article
Faced with the introduction of the new A-levels in 2015 and with a move to a new school, Eleanor Thomas took the opportunity to embrace yet another challenge: giving her students a complete free choice about the focus of their non-examined assessment (NEA). This article presents the rationale for her...
Allowing A-level students to choose their own coursework focus
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Polychronicon 174: Votes for Women
Teaching History feature
The beginnings of the nationally organised campaign for women’s suffrage began with suffragists’ orchestration of the petition to Parliament in favour of female suffrage in 1866. The petition contained almost 1,500 names from across the country and was presented to parliament by the Liberal MP John Stuart Mill; it was...
Polychronicon 174: Votes for Women
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Move Me On 174: Not doing all the thinking for the students
The problem page for history mentors
This issue’s problem: Alex Spotswood finds that the activities that he devises tend to involve him, rather than his students, doing all the real thinking and processing of information.
Alex Spotswood is well established in his main placement and has taken responsibility for regular GCSE and Key Stage 3 teaching. He is highly...
Move Me On 174: Not doing all the thinking for the students
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International relations at GCSE... they just can't get enough of it
Teaching History article
There is no reason why pupils of so-called ‘average’ and ‘below-average ability’ cannot both understand and enjoy studying complicated international events. Indeed, in the interests of inclusion and raised standards, it is vital that they do. Our Letters Pages in the last two editions captured something of the history teaching...
International relations at GCSE... they just can't get enough of it
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New, Novice or Nervous? 173: including BME history in the curriculum
The quick guide to the ‘no-quick-fix’
This page is for those new to the published writings of history teachers. Each problem you wrestle with, other teachers have wrestled with too. Quick fixes don’t exist. But in others’ writing, you’ll find something better: conversations in which history teachers have debated or tackled your problems – conversations which any history teacher...
New, Novice or Nervous? 173: including BME history in the curriculum
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Identity in history: why it matters and must be addressed!
Teaching History journal article
Sophia Nzeribe Nascimento, a mixed-race teacher working in a diverse London school, set out to explore her students’ assumptions about who historians are. While her own ethnicity and gender may have convinced at least some of her students that history is not exclusively the preserve of old white men, she...
Identity in history: why it matters and must be addressed!
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Here ends the lesson: shaping lesson conclusions
Teaching History journal article
Reflecting on her efforts to improve her trainee’s lesson conclusions, Paula Worth decided to brush up her own. A journey of self-evaluation led her to revisit the Cambridge Conclusions Project. Through its lens, she judged her own lesson conclusions wanting. Worth examines the way in which the final episode of...
Here ends the lesson: shaping lesson conclusions
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Cunning Plan 173: using Black Tudors as a window into Tudor England
Teaching History journal feature
On 29 September 2018 I was fortunate enough to get involved with a collaborative project with Dr Miranda Kaufmann, the Historical Association, Schools History Project, and a brilliant group of people from different backgrounds all committed to teaching about black Tudors. In this short piece, I will share how I...
Cunning Plan 173: using Black Tudors as a window into Tudor England
