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Teaching about heritage through a cross-curricular enquiry
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
What should we do with our brightest and best? Neal Watkin and Johannes Ahrenfelt suggest an enquiry for a very high ability Year 8 group which is both challenging and genuinely historical. The enquiry itself...
Teaching about heritage through a cross-curricular enquiry
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Why we must change history GCSE
Teaching History article
A head of steam for change in GCSE history has been building for some time now amongst history teachers, heads of history, advisers, teacher-trainers, researchers, consultants and all who regularly engage in debate about history teaching and learning. All those who read widely, share their practice, experience many Key Stage...
Why we must change history GCSE
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Can we educate Year 9 in genocide prevention?
Teaching History article
Patterns of genocide: can we educate Year 9 in genocide prevention?
Alison Stephen, who has wrestled for many years with the challenges of teaching emotional and controversial history within a multiethnic school setting, relished the opportunity to link her school's teaching of the Holocaust with a comparative study of other genocides....
Can we educate Year 9 in genocide prevention?
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Historical reasoning in the classroom
Teaching History article
Historical reasoning in the classroom: What does it look like and how can we enhance it?
The history education community has long recognised that historical thinking depends on the interplay between substantive knowledge about the past and the procedural, or second-order, concepts that historians use to construct, shape and give...
Historical reasoning in the classroom
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Move Me On 103: Failing to improve pupils' understanding of evidence
Teaching History feature
This Issue's problem: Josie, PGCE history student, is finding that her use of the department's exercises on sources is not improving pupils' understanding of evidence.
Move Me On 103: Failing to improve pupils' understanding of evidence
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‘Miss, what’s the point of sources?’ Helping Year 11 to understand the discipline
Teaching History article
Clare Bartington noticed that her students’ focus on the specific kinds of question used in examinations appeared to have undermined their understanding of how historians actually use sources. Instead of approaching the traces or ‘leftovers’ of the past as potential sources of evidence in relation to a particular question, her students believed...
‘Miss, what’s the point of sources?’ Helping Year 11 to understand the discipline
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Using databases to explore the real depth in the data
Teaching History article
Is it a good thing to have a lot of evidence? Surely the historian would answer that yes, it is: the more evidence that can be used, the better. The problem with this approach, though, is that too much data can be overwhelming for the history student - and, in...
Using databases to explore the real depth in the data
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Teaching pupils to analyse cartoons
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
In this practical account of a key aspect of history departmental policy, Joseph O'Neill presents a rationale for the systematic teaching of analytical techniques. Alert to the dangers of mechanistic and formulaic examination responses, the...
Teaching pupils to analyse cartoons
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Reading and enquiring in Years 12 and 13
Teaching History article
Historical enquiry is blooming at Key Stage 3. Thanks to a rich array of source materials available on the web and in textbooks, superb history-specific training courses and genuinely innovative practice in schools, pupils can increasingly be found wrestling with demanding and often lengthy sources. They do this in order...
Reading and enquiring in Years 12 and 13
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Holistic assessment through speaking and listening
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Giles Fullard and Kate Dacey wanted to enrich their department's planning for progression across Key Stage 3 with a strong sequence of activities fostering argument. They wanted an opportunity for students to draw together their...
Holistic assessment through speaking and listening
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Stepping into the past: using images to travel through time
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Pupils are eternally curious about their teachers. Do they really have lives outside the classroom? Could Miss Jones have once been a child? Does she have parents and grandparents and a past of her own?...
Stepping into the past: using images to travel through time
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Carr, Evans, Oakshott and Rudge: the benefits of AEA history
Teaching History article
Sometimes the only way to go beyond the exam is to take another, more difficult, test. For the top—the very top—A2 students, there is such a test available. The Advanced Extension Award [AEA] is a history paper which encourages students finishing their school careers to think about history in a...
Carr, Evans, Oakshott and Rudge: the benefits of AEA history
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Tripping over the levels: experiences from Ontario
Teaching History article
Here in the United Kingdom, we are used to the idea of assessing pupils’ work against Levels. In fact, perhaps we are a little too used to it. Our familiarity with the Level Descriptions in the National Curriculum, and the ways they might inform our Key Stage 3 assessments, can...
Tripping over the levels: experiences from Ontario
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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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Illuminating the shadow: making progress happen in casual thinking through speaking and listening
Teaching History article
Here is another breath of fresh air from the Thomas Tallis history department. In TH 103, Head of Department Tony Hier showed how he developed a rigorous framework for implementing government initiatives and improving departmental professional discourse at the same time. This time, from history teacher Vaughan Clark, we get...
Illuminating the shadow: making progress happen in casual thinking through speaking and listening
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Creating a progression model for teaching historical perspectives in Key Stage 3
Teaching History article
Jacob Olivey set out to design enquiries which would enable his pupils to reconstruct, using evidence, the perspectives of people in the past. In this article he shares in detail the planning and outcomes of two enquiries: one for Year 7 and one for Year 8. Olivey offers a example...
Creating a progression model for teaching historical perspectives in Key Stage 3
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Year 7 use oral traditions to make claims about the rise and fall of the Inka empire
Teaching History article
As part of her department’s effort to diversify the history curriculum, Paula Worth began a quest to research and then shape a lesson sequence around the Inkas. Her article shows how she allowed the new topic and its historiography to challenge and extend her own use of sources, particularly oral tradition....
Year 7 use oral traditions to make claims about the rise and fall of the Inka empire
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New, Novice or Nervous? 167: Confidence with substantive knowledge
Teaching History feature
This page is for those new to the published writings of history teachers. Each problem you wrestle with, other teachers have wrestled with too...
History is a complex enterprise. In order to produce sophisticated arguments, pupils need firm foundations. One foundation is knowledge of the argumentative structures that historians...
New, Novice or Nervous? 167: Confidence with substantive knowledge
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History in England’s primary schools: What do secondary history teachers need to know?
HA Update
What’s been happening in primary history lately? Invited to write an update on this, I decided to identify some themes that might be helpful to secondary teachers.
As a senior lecturer in primary education with responsibility for history and as a member of the HA Primary Committee, I was able...
History in England’s primary schools: What do secondary history teachers need to know?
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Historical scholarship and feedback
Teaching History article
In her introduction to this piece, Carolyn Massey describes history teachers as professionals who pride themselves on ‘a sophisticated understanding of change and continuity’. How often, though, do we bemoan change when it comes, as it so often has recently? Massey’s article provides an example of how to embrace change,...
Historical scholarship and feedback
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On the frontlines of teaching the history of the First World War
Teaching History article
It is very common for people in politics and the media to make assumptions about what happens in history classrooms. Too often these preconceptions are based on little more than anecdote, examples from the Internet or memories of what someone experienced at school themselves.
In this article, Catriona Pennell reports...
On the frontlines of teaching the history of the First World War
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Using narratives and big pictures to address the challenges of a 2-year KS3 curriculum
Teaching History article
Faced with cutting her Key Stage 3 curriculum to two years, Natalie Kesterton and her department were determined to do more with less. Not only did they want to ensure that their pupils developed a secure, wide-ranging knowledge of British and world history, they also wanted to address deficits in pupils’...
Using narratives and big pictures to address the challenges of a 2-year KS3 curriculum
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Teaching History 182: Out now
Article
Read Teaching History 182
The editorial in the previous edition of Teaching History began by recognising that 2020 would go down in history as the year of the coronavirus pandemic. The words you are reading now were written in the aftermath of another long period of partial school closure in...
Teaching History 182: Out now
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Polychronicon 177: The New Deal in American history
Teaching History feature
Over 50 years ago I read my first serious book on American history. I can still remember the excitement of reading William E. Leuchtenburg’s Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940. His description of FDR and American politics in the 1930s seemed so much more colourful and dramatic than...
Polychronicon 177: The New Deal in American history
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Triumphs Show 137: Assessing through reflection
Teaching History feature
Assessing through reflection:
How one history department has found a way to satisfy the Senior Leadership Team, parents and pupils through tightly focused self-assessment Teachers are caught between a rock and hard place when it comes to assessment. Senior leaders want to see evidence of regular ‘levelling' while (most) pupils...
Triumphs Show 137: Assessing through reflection
