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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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Historical scholarship, archaeology and evidence in Year 7
Teaching History article
The stimulus for this article came from two developmental tasks that Barbara Trapani was set during the course of her initial teacher education programme: planning her first historical enquiry and bringing the work of an historian into the classroom. Trapani chose to tackle the two tasks together, using Susan Whitfield’s...
Historical scholarship, archaeology and evidence in Year 7
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Teaching Year 8 pupils to take seriously the ideas of ordinary people from the past
Teaching History article
Jacob Olivey wanted Year 8 to know that ordinary people in the nineteenth century constructed their own identities. In this reflection on how his practice developed in his training year, Olivey illustrates the importance of using historical scholarship in choosing foundational knowledge to teach. He shows how he used that...
Teaching Year 8 pupils to take seriously the ideas of ordinary people from the past
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Harnessing the power of community to expand students’ historical horizons
Teaching History article
Many history teachers will already be familiar with ‘meanwhile, elsewhere...’, a website offering freely downloadable homework resources on individuals, events and developments in world history. In this article the website’s creators, Richard Kennett and Will Bailey-Watson, set out a curricular rationale for the project. They argue that using homework tasks...
Harnessing the power of community to expand students’ historical horizons
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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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The dialogic dimensions of knowing and understanding the Norman legacy in Chester
Teaching History article
Michael Bird and Thomas Wilson focus their attention directly on the voices of pupils, in dialogue with their teacher and with each other, as they draw inferences from differing sources about the Norman legacy in Chester. By carefully examining dialogue stimulated by these sources, Bird and Wilson demonstrate not only...
The dialogic dimensions of knowing and understanding the Norman legacy in Chester
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Using an anthology of substantial sources at GCSE
Teaching History article
Struck by his GCSE students’ bewildered expressions when studying source extracts, Liam McDonnell decided to adopt a new approach to source analysis. Inspired by the work of other history teachers, McDonnell decided to use an anthology of substantial sources when studying nineteenth-century Whitechapel in London. By revisiting the sources at...
Using an anthology of substantial sources at GCSE
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Polychronicon 175: Paris 1919 – a century on
Teaching History feature
The Paris peace conference resulted in five major treaties, each with one of the defeated Central Powers. Of these the most consequential was the Treaty of Versailles with Germany, signed on 28 June 1919, which was denounced by the young economist John Maynard Keynes in his bestselling polemic The Economic...
Polychronicon 175: Paris 1919 – a century on
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Move Me On 175: paying attention to why topics have been included in schemes of work
The problem page for history mentors
This issue's problem: Martha Partington doesn't pay enough attention to the reasons why particular topics or approaches to them have been included with her department’s schemes of work...
Move Me On 175: paying attention to why topics have been included in schemes of work
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Making history curious: Using Initial Stimulus Material (ISM) to promote enquiry, thinking and literacy
Teaching History article
The idea of gaining pupils’ attention, interest and curiosity at the start of the lesson with an intriguing image, story, analogy or puzzle has long been used by our best history teachers. Michael Riley, through writing and inset, popularised the term ‘hook’ and emphasised its special role at the start...
Making history curious: Using Initial Stimulus Material (ISM) to promote enquiry, thinking and literacy
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New, Novice or Nervous? 174: Building students' historical talk
The quick guide to the ‘no-quick-fix'
How do we get our students to talk more in lessons? No, not like that! How have history teachers engaged with the issue of students’ historical – and general – oracy? Talking about history is not the same skill as writing about it. It is more immediate, and more easily...
New, Novice or Nervous? 174: Building students' historical talk
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Beyond 'I speak, you listen boy!' Exploring diversity of attitudes and experiences through speaking and listening
Teaching History article
What is historical rigour in a speaking and listening activity? How do we make sure that a direct focus on improving the quality of pupils’ classroom talk is, at the same time, a focus upon strengthening historical knowledge, skill and understanding? For while it is possible to make a very...
Beyond 'I speak, you listen boy!' Exploring diversity of attitudes and experiences through speaking and listening
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Triumphs Show 173: Teaching Black Tudors
Teaching History journal feature
I am ashamed to admit that, until recently, my teaching of black history did not go beyond schemes of work on the transatlantic slave trade and the civil rights movement in the USA. This all changed in November 2017 when I heard Dr Miranda Kaufmann on the ‘BBC History Extra’...
Triumphs Show 173: Teaching Black Tudors
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Polychronicon 173: From American Indians to Native Americans
Teaching History journal feature
Few sub-fields of American history have undergone as many changes over time as the study of Native Americans/American Indians. While nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians portrayed Native Americans as savage barbarians or ignored them entirely, late twentieth-century historians portrayed them as victims of circumstance and aggressive European conquest. Today, modern...
Polychronicon 173: From American Indians to Native Americans
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Move Me On 173: teaching the GCSE thematic study
The problem page for history mentors
This feature of Teaching History 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...
Move Me On 173: teaching the GCSE thematic study
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Hidden in plain sight: the history of people with disabilities
Teaching History journal article
Recognising the duty placed on all teachers by the 2010 Equality Act to nurture the development of a society in which equality and human rights are deeply rooted, Helen Snelson and Ruth Lingard were prompted to ask whether their history curricula really reflected the diverse pasts of all people in...
Hidden in plain sight: the history of people with disabilities
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Acquainted or intimate? Background knowledge and subsequent learning
Teaching History journal article
Heather Fearn was intrigued by the factors that might have led her higher-performing students to talk in historically mature ways about unseen sources without any prior knowledge of the topic in hand. She began to wonder if what she was hearing was not best accounted for by a content-free disciplinary...
Acquainted or intimate? Background knowledge and subsequent learning
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Triumphs Show 172: The history classroom lending library
Teaching History feature: celebrating and sharing success
Tim Jenner and Jessica Angell share how the History Department Lending Library at Cambourne Village College began and developed, and the positive impact it has had on both students and staff.
Triumphs Show 172: The history classroom lending library
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Polychronicon 172: Health in the Middle Ages
Teaching History feature
The history of medicine, health, and illness between c. 500 AD and 1500 has received a great deal of scholarly attention in recent decades. It’s a fascinating field that can tell us a great deal about medieval people’s everyday lives and their day-to-day worries: after all, everyone is ill or...
Polychronicon 172: Health in the Middle Ages
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Triumphs Show 171: preparatory reading for A-level essays
Teaching History feature: celebrating and sharing success
The first question my A-level students always used to ask when receiving back an essay was, ‘What mark did I get?’ The second question I used to hope they would ask was ‘How could I improve my work?’
I stress ‘used to’ because increasingly I do not give marks when...
Triumphs Show 171: preparatory reading for A-level essays
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'Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?'
Teaching History article
How can the Holocaust be represented? In this article, Andrew Wrenn takes as his example the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He helps teachers encourage pupils to get beneath the surface, and look analytically at the Museum itself as an interpretation of the Holocaust. Such an investigation provides pupils and...
'Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?'
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‘It’s kind of like the geography part of history, isn’t it, Miss?’
Teaching History article
Verity Morgan took an unusual approach to the challenge of teaching the Holocaust, coming to it through the lens of environmental history. She shares here the practical means and resources she used to engage pupils with this current trend in historiography, and its associated concepts.
Reflecting on her pupils’ responses,...
‘It’s kind of like the geography part of history, isn’t it, Miss?’
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Move Me On 168: teaching exam classes
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.
This issue’s problem: Robert Nivelle is nearing the end of his first (relatively long)...
Move Me On 168: teaching exam classes
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From road map to thought map: helping students theorise the nature of change
Teaching History article
Warren Valentine was dissatisfied with his Year 7 students’ accounts of change across the Tudor period. Fixated with Henry VIII’s wives, they failed to reflect on or analyse the bigger picture of the whole Tudor narrative.
In order to overcome this problem, his department created a ‘thought-map’ exercise in which...
From road map to thought map: helping students theorise the nature of change
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Polychronicon 167: The strange career of Richard Nixon
Teaching History feature
If you know just one thing about the career of the 37th President of the United States, it is likely to be this: Watergate. Nixon’s resignation in August 1974 was caused by his decision to cover up a burglary at the Democratic Party’s campaign headquarters for the 1972 election, which...
Polychronicon 167: The strange career of Richard Nixon
