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Maybe they haven't decided yet what is right: English and Spanish perspectives on teaching historical significance
Teaching History article
Historians and history teachers understand well that students, when they ‘answer’ questions, are creating their own interpretation. We take account of this in our teaching too: we do not pretend that, beyond the level of the simplest closed questioning, there is ever a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer approach to history....
Maybe they haven't decided yet what is right: English and Spanish perspectives on teaching historical significance
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Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime: using external support, local history and a group project to challenge the most able
Teaching History article
The most able can be challenged in a variety of ways and at a number of levels, from the extension question for the individual child to the extended enquiry for the most able class. In a Leading Edge History project, Guy Woolnough and his colleagues took the concept of challenge...
Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime: using external support, local history and a group project to challenge the most able
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When computers don't give you a headache: the most able lead a debate on medicine through time
Teaching History article
Dan Moorhouse begins with a complaint about ICT. It is not the clichéd teacher-complaint – that the computers keep crashing, and the students are messing around on the Internet (and how, exactly, do you turn the things on?) Instead, he observes that the use of ICT in the classroom is...
When computers don't give you a headache: the most able lead a debate on medicine through time
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Mussolini's missing marbles: simulating history at GCSE
Teaching History article
Arthur Chapman and James Woodcock have collaborated before: Woodcock extended Chapman’s familiar casual metaphor of the final straw breaking a poor abused camel’s back. Here, they collaborate more explicitly to suggest a means of teaching students to produce adequately nuanced historical explanation. Their two central ideas are to produce a...
Mussolini's missing marbles: simulating history at GCSE
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Move Me On 145: Uncomfortable with Storytelling
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem: Claudia Jones is very uncomfortable with any kind of sustained story-telling.
Claudia Jones is a quietly spoken and rather nervous trainee. She struggled from the beginning of the PGCE to establish a strong presence in the classroom, and although she has become more assertive about insisting on basic...
Move Me On 145: Uncomfortable with Storytelling
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Passive receivers or constructive readers?
Teaching History article
Rachel Foster reports here on research that she conducted into how students engage with academic texts. Unhappy with the usual range of texts that students encounter, often truncated and ‘simplified' in the name of accessibility, she designed a scheme of work which sought to find out how her students responded...
Passive receivers or constructive readers?
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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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Assessment of students' uses of evidence
Teaching History article
Drawing on her research into students' evidential reasoning, Elisabeth Pickles explores the possibilities for how such reasoning might be assessed. Existing exam mark schemes focus too heavily on generic processes involved in the analysis of source material and insufficiently on the historical validity of reasoning and conclusions produced. Approaching the...
Assessment of students' uses of evidence
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Should empathy come out of the closet?
Teaching History article
What is historical empathy and why is it important? What has gone wrong and what had gone right in past attempts to develop students' empathetic understanding? What does progression look like in this area of historical thinking and what are the preconceptions that can act as barriers to progression? Lee...
Should empathy come out of the closet?
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Using visual sources to understand the arguments for women's suffrage
Teaching History article
Visual sources, Jane Card argues, are a powerful resource for historical learning but using them in the classroom requires careful thought and planning. Card here shares how she has used visual source material in order to teach her students about the women's suffrage movement. In particular, Card shows how a...
Using visual sources to understand the arguments for women's suffrage
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Causation maps: emphasising chronology in causation exercises
Teaching History article
Analogies for teaching about causation abound. Rick Rogers is alert, however, to the risks inherent in drawing on everyday ideas to explain historical processes.
What most often gets lost is the importance of the chronological dimension; both the length of time during which some contributory causes may have been present,...
Causation maps: emphasising chronology in causation exercises
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Developing sixth-form students' thinking about historical interpretation
Teaching History article
Understanding historical interpretation involves understanding how historical knowledge is constructed. How do sixth formers model historical epistemology? In this article Arthur Chapman examines a small sample of data relating to sixth form students' ideas about why historians construct differing interpretations of the past. He argues that understanding interpretation requires students to...
Developing sixth-form students' thinking about historical interpretation
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Why go on a pilgrimage? Using a concluding enquiry to reinforce and assess earlier learning
Teaching History article
Jamie Byrom describes the learning activities within a final enquiry for a National Curriculum area of study - Britain 1066-1500. The strong message in this article is that the learning in each enquiry is only as good as the planning and teaching of the enquiries that precede it. Byrom's model...
Why go on a pilgrimage? Using a concluding enquiry to reinforce and assess earlier learning
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How can I improve my use of ICT? Put history first!
Teaching History article
What is the difference between using lots of ICT and using it well? Dave Atkin draws upon work in his own department and with other Gloucestershire teachers in order to identify criteria for effective ICT use. These boil down to ‘putting history first' and getting maximum value out of the...
How can I improve my use of ICT? Put history first!
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Making pupils want to explain: using Movie Maker to foster thoroughness and self-monitoring
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Sally Burnham shares her practice and reflections on the value of the software, ‘Movie Maker', for developing particular aspects of historical thinking and learning. In Teaching History 130, in the context of her Key Stage...
Making pupils want to explain: using Movie Maker to foster thoroughness and self-monitoring
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What do you think? Using online forums to improve students' historical knowledge and understanding
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
In Teaching History 126, the Open University's Arguing in History project team demonstrated the power that discussion fora can have to develop pupil thinking. In this article, Dave Martin revisits this theme through a discussion...
What do you think? Using online forums to improve students' historical knowledge and understanding
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Raising the bar: developing meaningful historical consciousness at Key Stage 3
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
How can we help pupils make sense of the history that they learn so that the whole adds up to more than the sum of its parts? How can we help pupils develop and sophisticate...
Raising the bar: developing meaningful historical consciousness at Key Stage 3
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Stories and their sources: the need for historical thinking in an information age
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Information technology is of no value in itself or by itself: it needs questions to drive it and disciplined forms of thinking to make sense of the answers that it can provide. Inspired by the...
Stories and their sources: the need for historical thinking in an information age
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Beyond bias: making source evaluation meaningful to year 7
Teaching History article
In this article, Heidi Le Cocq demonstrates how to introduce Year 7 pupils to sophisticated techniques for evaluating sources. Taking up Seán Lang's criticism of the inappropriate use of the term ‘bias', she shows how even very young pupils can be encouraged to move beyond this wearisome response to questions...
Beyond bias: making source evaluation meaningful to year 7
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What is progress in history?
Teaching History article
Evelyn Vermeulen argues that in order for teachers to identify outcomes for the learning of history, they must think clearly about the different attributes of the discipline - its ideas, structures and processes - and the relationship between them. Here, she takes us on her own professional thinking journey. She...
What is progress in history?
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Steering your OFSTED inspector into the long-term reasons for classroom success
Teaching History article
Sue Dove describes a short but action-packed activity sequence that was designed explicitly to show the OFSTED inspector the impact of the department's professional thinking and long-term planning. An integrated approach to thinking and writing at Key Stage 3 and much training of pupils to adopt a disciplined and creative...
Steering your OFSTED inspector into the long-term reasons for classroom success
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The Evacuee Letter Exchange Project: using audience-centred writing to improve progression from Key Stage 2 to Key Stage 3
Teaching History article
Jenny Parsons' work in primary-secondary liaison in history is nationally acclaimed. She is often asked to share her department's practice at courses and conferences. Readers of Teaching History are already familiar with her work in another area: in the ‘Triumphs Show' of Teaching History 93 (the ICT edition in November...
The Evacuee Letter Exchange Project: using audience-centred writing to improve progression from Key Stage 2 to Key Stage 3
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My essays could go on forever: using Key Stage 3 to improve performance at GCSE
Teaching History article
History teachers are waking up to the fact that you cannot raise standards in GCSE by very much if you leave this work until Year 10. To leave it that late is to resort to surface, tactical moves rather than to address the deep reasons why so many pupils find...
My essays could go on forever: using Key Stage 3 to improve performance at GCSE
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Cunning Plan 98: Britain 1750-1900
Teaching History feature
Isaac Newton: ‘For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction'. Learning that results from action and reaction deepens pupils' understanding of historical content and use of key study skills. It forces them to understand, to wrestle, to articulate, to challenge, to question. Getting pupils to act and react...
Cunning Plan 98: Britain 1750-1900
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Achieving progression from the GCSE to AS
Teaching History article
As the new specifications [as we must all learn to call them] arrive in schools and colleges, we must all grapple with the concept of a new qualification - a new AS representing an intermediate standard. What does AS involve? In what ways does it represent progression from GCSE? Angela...
Achieving progression from the GCSE to AS
