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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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What’s The Wisdom On... Extended writing
Teaching History feature
Writing history is hard! But the things that make it challenging are the things that make it worth doing. They are also the key to enabling all students to write, to embrace the challenge and to enjoy its rewards enough to keep going. A big mistake is to kid ourselves...
What’s The Wisdom On... Extended writing
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Talk to your inspector: making the most of your history inspection
Teaching History article
Scott Harrison gives the official view on what history teachers can expect from an OFSTED inspection. He emphasises the need to communicate, as fully as possible, the department's rationale underlying all professional practice. This is essential if the inspector is to analyse the reasons why standards are as they are....
Talk to your inspector: making the most of your history inspection
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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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HA Update: History for all – a wider view
Teaching History feature
In this update, I plan to share ideas and practice from colleagues who lead and teach history in special schools in the northeast of England. Ten years have passed since the publication of History for All and this therefore seems a good moment for reflection. By 2011, in many of England’s schools,...
HA Update: History for all – a wider view
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Decolonise, don’t diversify: enabling a paradigm shift in the KS3 history curriculum
Teaching History article
In this article, Dan Lyndon-Cohen makes the case that history departments should move from diversifying the curriculum to decolonising it. After reflecting on some examples of how he made the content of his lessons more representative, he explores how the influence of writers such as Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Emma Dabiri...
Decolonise, don’t diversify: enabling a paradigm shift in the KS3 history curriculum
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Subject exemplification of the Initial Teacher Training National Curriculum for ICT: how the history examples were developed
Article
David Linsell describes how the Teacher Training Agency's history working group provided history-specific examples for the new ICT initial teacher training National Curriculum. He stresses the group's ‘history first' thinking. The aim was to provide realistic examples of ICT use, through which trainee teachers might develop and ultimately demonstrate their...
Subject exemplification of the Initial Teacher Training National Curriculum for ICT: how the history examples were developed
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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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What’s The Wisdom On... Historical significance
Teaching History feature
The idea of historical significance eludes tidy answers. It doesn’t thrive on the quick fix. Yet we do not need to be confused by it. It just requires some clear thinking about what it distinctively offers. In other words, we need to clarify overall curricular aims, and think big about...
What’s The Wisdom On... Historical significance
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Triumphs Show: Making their historical writing explode
Teaching History feature
‘Who hates PEE paragraphs?’ A collective groan resounds around my classroom. ‘Today, Year 10 we are going to master PEE paragraphs, and make our written historical explanations explode.’
I always remember one deflated Year 10 student who said, ‘Miss, I just don’t get PEE paragraphs. I couldn’t do them in Year 7, and I still...
Triumphs Show: Making their historical writing explode
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Ants and the Tet Offensive: teaching Year 11 to tell the difference
Article
The history department at Morpeth School in East London has improved performance at GCSE. The department has also done something unusual: it has abandoned coursework. This might seem a surprising decision but the rationale is interesting and clear. Arguably, the fundamental examination skills are identical to those needed for coursework...
Ants and the Tet Offensive: teaching Year 11 to tell the difference
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Triumphs Show 180: From ‘most able’ to ‘mini’ historians
Teaching History feature
Finding ways to stretch and challenge the highest-attaining students has been a long-standing concern of many history teachers, and strategies for doing so have developed far beyond merely bolting on additional tasks. One way in which I have sought to challenge my own high-attaining students has been by setting them...
Triumphs Show 180: From ‘most able’ to ‘mini’ historians
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Does scaffolding make them fall? Reflecting on strategies for developing causal argument in Years 8 and 11
Teaching History article
Jennifer Evans and Gemma Pate, history teachers in two Essex schools, had noticed that sometimes a writing frame did the opposite of what was intended. Sometimes a card sort fostered rich discussion and ownership; sometimes it led the students down a reductive rather than mind-opening path. Sometimes modelling of paragraphs...
Does scaffolding make them fall? Reflecting on strategies for developing causal argument in Years 8 and 11
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Transatlantic slavery – shaping the question, lengthening the narrative, broadening the meaning
Teaching History article
Nathanael Davies explains his radical rethink of how to teach transatlantic slavery. He explains how he came to question his earlier approach of focusing on the causation of ‘abolition’ and ‘emancipation’ and, instead, allowed scholarship, sources and his own students’ meaning-making to guide him to a different, and much more...
Transatlantic slavery – shaping the question, lengthening the narrative, broadening the meaning
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Using extra-curricular opportunities to broaden students’ encounters with history
Teaching History article
In this article, Jess Angell shows how her department seeks to make extra-curricular activities accessible to all. There is a strong focus on involving professional historians, since so many students seem not to understand who historians are, or what they do. But the audience is wider than just history students:...
Using extra-curricular opportunities to broaden students’ encounters with history
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What’s The Wisdom On... Similarity and difference?
Teaching History feature
How often have you found yourself challenging a pupil’s use of ‘they’ or ‘people’? How often have you teased them with, ‘Really? All of them?!’ Every time we do this, we are pushing our pupils to respect the complexity of the past. We are pressing them to use their knowledge...
What’s The Wisdom On... Similarity and difference?
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How introducing cultural and intellectual history improves critical analysis in the classroom
Teaching History article
In his article in this journal just over a year ago, Steven Driver set out his vision for a less myopic range of topics in A-level coursework. In this edition, Driver demonstrates how he has built student enthusiasm for, and knowledge of, a topic which he had previously identified as...
How introducing cultural and intellectual history improves critical analysis in the classroom
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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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What’s the wisdom on… enquiry questions
Teaching History feature
One way of explaining what is meant by an enquiry question is to start with what it is not.
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...
What’s the wisdom on… enquiry questions
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Polychronicon 127: The Crusades
Teaching History feature
Modern research on the crusades has concentrated on three basic questions. What were they? How were they justified? What motivated the crusaders? The first of these questions became controversial twenty-five years ago, when historians with a traditional approach to the subject, who took into consideration only those expeditions launched to...
Polychronicon 127: The Crusades
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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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Polychronicon 176: Peterloo, 1819–2019
Teaching History feature
Polychronicon is a regular feature in Teaching History helping school history teachers to update their subject knowledge, with special emphasis on recent historiography and changing interpretations. See all Polychronicons
On Monday 16 August 1819 troops under the authority of the Lancashire and Cheshire magistrates attacked and dispersed a rally of some...
Polychronicon 176: Peterloo, 1819–2019
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Getting Year 7 to vocalise responses to the murder of Thomas Becket
Teaching History article
Mary Partridge wanted her pupils not only to become more aware of competing and contrasting voices in the past, but to understand how historians orchestrate those voices. Using Edward Grim's eye-witness account of Thomas Becket's murder, her Year 7 pupils explored nuances in the word ‘shocking' as a way of...
Getting Year 7 to vocalise responses to the murder of Thomas Becket
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‘Its ultimate pattern was greater than its parts’
Teaching History journal article
Identifying the challenges his students faced both with recall and analysis of the content they had learned for their GCSE course, Ed Durbin devised a solution which focused not on exam skills and revision lessons, but on using Key Stage 3 to build the ‘hinterland’ of contextual knowledge and causal...
‘Its ultimate pattern was greater than its parts’
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Climate change: greening the curriculum?
Teaching History article
Inspired by the news that Bristol had become the UK’s first Green Capital, Kate Hawkey, Jon James and Celia Tidmarsh set out to explore what a ‘Green Capital’ School Curriculum might look like. They explain how they created a cross-curricular project to deliver in-school workshops focused on the teaching of...
Climate change: greening the curriculum?
