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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Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.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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Mudlarking in the Thames: evidence, ecology and enquiry
Teaching History article
Maryam Dorudi arrived at her second PGCE placement school to find many pupils receiving free school meals and speaking English as an additional language. Wanting her students to identify as Londoners and historians, she was drawn into the world of mudlarking and Lara Maiklem. Over the course of eight lessons, she...
Mudlarking in the Thames: evidence, ecology and enquiry
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Industrialisation, energy and the climate crisis
Teaching History article
This article, written mainly by Alison Kitson with reflections on classroom experience from Nebiat Michael, focuses on teaching about the industrial revolution. It offers new ways of framing the topic, both as a result of the ‘energy binge’ on which modern civilisation is built and as the third of four fundamental turning...
Industrialisation, energy and the climate crisis
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Rescuing assessment from ‘knowledge-rich gone wrong’
Teaching History article
Christine Counsell sets out her concerns about the effects on history teaching of recent trends in secondary assessment practice. Situating her analysis within a long-term story of interplay between government policy, classroom practice and school leadership responses to inspection, Counsell sees new distortions emerging in the name of knowledge. She argues...
Rescuing assessment from ‘knowledge-rich gone wrong’
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Redrawing the Renaissance - non verbal assessment in Year 7
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Matt Stanford is not exactly fed up of marking essays, but he could do with a change. His pupils, he realises, could too. History assessments have often been based on words - either the written...
Redrawing the Renaissance - non verbal assessment in Year 7
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Practical demonstration: powerful and rigorous history teaching for all
Teaching History article
In this article, Ian Luff returns to the theme of ‘practical demonstration’ which he developed in three articles twenty years ago. Luff restates his original rationale for the enduring power of the approach, advances some new reasons why history teachers should give serious attention to it and shares several practical examples...
Practical demonstration: powerful and rigorous history teaching for all
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Move Me On 186: trainee provides little scope for students to use their knowledge in analysis/argument
Teaching History feature
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 186: trainee provides little scope for students to use their knowledge in analysis/argument
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... Royal Studies
Teaching History feature
‘Royal Studies’ is much more than the study of kings and queens as individuals. It draws in their families, the institution of monarchy and monarchical government, court studies, relationships with the church, artistic and literary patronage, and more. While history ‘from below’ and studies of non-elite figures have enriched the...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... Royal Studies
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Move Me On 189: engendering students' curiosity
Teaching History feature
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 189: engendering students' curiosity
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Building a better past: plans to reform the curriculum
Teaching History article
David Nicholls summarises some of the problems facing history education and offers a commentary on various cases for reform. He argues that we need to look at provision holistically from 5 to 21 and urges collaboration across phases and sectors. By working more closely together, the history community as a...
Building a better past: plans to reform the curriculum
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Ensuring Gypsy, Roma and Traveller children do not feel unseen in the history classroom
Teaching History article
Richard Kerridge and Helen Snelson present a brief sequence of lessons using the life of the Gypsy woman Mary Squires as a way into the changes of industrialising Britain. More significantly, they also present a compelling rationale for why history teachers should be slotting in the stories of Gypsy, Roma...
Ensuring Gypsy, Roma and Traveller children do not feel unseen in the history classroom
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Move Me On 182: thinks that substantive knowledge is all that matters
Teaching History feature
Lina Power has interpreted an emphasis on knowledge organisers and factual knowledge tests to mean that substantive knowledge is all that matters.
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...
Move Me On 182: thinks that substantive knowledge is all that matters
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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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What’s The Wisdom On... Consequence
Teaching History feature
Consequence easily becomes ‘causation’s forgotten sibling’, as Fordham noted, in the title of a workshop presented at the 2012 Historical Association conference. The choice to treat consequence separately from causation in this series of articles is, therefore, a very deliberate one. Yet an emphasis on the importance of consequences should...
What’s The Wisdom On... Consequence
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Analysing Anne Frank: a case study in the teaching of thinking skills
Teaching History article
For those lucky history departments in and around Newcastle this article will not be news. Peter Fisher alludes to the quasi-religious atmosphere that is often discernible amongst history teachers who have been working with the Thinking Skills groups linked to University of Newcastle Department of Education. He is not exaggerating...
Analysing Anne Frank: a case study in the teaching of thinking skills
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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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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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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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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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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
