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Building Key Stage 5 students’ analysis of interpretations
Article
Students of A-level history are required to analyse and evaluate historical interpretations. Samuel Head found limitations in his Year 13 students’ understanding of how and why historians arrive at differing interpretations, which impeded their ability to analyse them. He set about tackling this with carefully sequenced planning and a processual model...
Building Key Stage 5 students’ analysis of interpretations
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Unpicking the threads of interpretations
Teaching History article
Determined to do justice to the complexity of the seventeenth century, as a messy but crucial period in British history, and to develop their pupils’ disciplinary understanding of how and why interpretations of the past are constructed, Dan Keates and his department set out to exploit the rich seam of...
Unpicking the threads of interpretations
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Moving Year 9 towards more complex causal explanations of Holocaust perpetration
Teaching History article
Building on research by the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education, Matthew Duncan was concerned that his students were drawn to simplistic explanations of Holocaust perpetrators’ actions. As well as the UCL Centre’s research, Duncan drew on history education research from Canada and history teachers’ theorisation in England for inspiration in...
Moving Year 9 towards more complex causal explanations of Holocaust perpetration
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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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What’s the wisdom on… Interpretations of the past
Teaching History feature
How often do your pupils actually look at the products of historians – their scholarly writing, their debates, their to-and-fro of argument?
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...
What’s the wisdom on… Interpretations of the past
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Confronting conflicts: history teachers’ reactions to spontaneous controversial remarks
Teaching History article
Sometimes, things don’t go to plan. Current events come into the classroom, especially the history classroom. How should students’ responses to current affairs be dealt with there? How should students’ desire to voice their opinions be handled if their opinion is unpopular. What if the student is simply wrong? How...
Confronting conflicts: history teachers’ reactions to spontaneous controversial remarks
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Structuring a history curriculum for powerful revelations
Teaching History article
When planning a Key Stage 3 curriculum with his department, Will Bailey-Watson began to question some of the commonsense orthodoxies regarding chronological sequencing and curriculum design. Drawing on pre-existing debates about curricular structuring in the history education community both in England and internationally, Bailey-Watson identified cognitive, motivational, and disciplinary justifications...
Structuring a history curriculum for powerful revelations
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‘I need to know…’: creating the conditions that make students want knowledge
Teaching History journal article
Chloe Bateman recognised the value to her Key Stage 3 pupils of developing rich subject knowledge, but wanted to find a way of encouraging them to value that knowledge for themselves. In this article she explains how she provided that inspiration by setting her Year 7 class the challenge of...
‘I need to know…’: creating the conditions that make students want knowledge
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Using sites for insights
Teaching History article
Working alongside local history teachers to prepare for the new GCSE specifications Steve Illingworth and Emma Manners were struck that many teachers were concerned about two issues in particular: the breadth and depth of knowledge demanded and new forms of assessment, especially the historic environment paper. In this article they...
Using sites for insights
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Polychronicon 168: Interwar internationalisms
Teaching History feature
Research on the inter war years (1919-39) has exploded in recent years. Led by exciting studies of global and international institutions by Susan Pedersen, Patricia Clavin and Mark Mazower, historians have moved beyond narrowly political and diplomatic accounts of the leading personalities and agencies attached to key institutions such as...
Polychronicon 168: Interwar internationalisms
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Designing end-of-year exams: trials and tribulations
Teaching History article
Since the decline of the National Curriculum Level Descriptions, schools in England have been asked to design their own forms of assessment at Key Stage 3. This had led to a great deal of creativity, but also a number of challenges. In this article Matt Stanford reflects on his department’s...
Designing end-of-year exams: trials and tribulations
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From ‘double vision’ to panorama: exploring interpretations of Nazi popularity
Teaching History article
Jim Carroll relished the opportunity, in the new A-level specification he was teaching, to find an effective way of teaching his students to analyse interpretations in their coursework essays. Reflecting on the difficulties he had faced as a trainee teacher teaching younger pupils about interpretations, and dissatisfied with examination board...
From ‘double vision’ to panorama: exploring interpretations of Nazi popularity
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... the impact of the English Reformation
Teaching History feature
Since the first stirrings of religious reform in the sixteenth century, people have been writing the history of the Reformation, debating what happened and why it happened. John Foxe arguably became the first historian of the English Reformation when he published Actes and Monuments in 1563. Better known as ‘The...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... the impact of the English Reformation
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Nurturing aspirations for Oxbridge
Teaching History article
An exploration of the impact of university preparation classes on sixth-form historians
Frustrated by the low numbers of students from her comprehensive state school who expressed any interest in applying to Oxford or Cambridge to study history, Lucy Hemsley set out to explore ways in which she might both inspire...
Nurturing aspirations for Oxbridge
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Cunning Plan 165: Helping lower-attaining students
Teaching History feature
My GCSE students were about to embark on their controlled assessment, which asked them to weigh up conflicting views on the British military’s contribution to the D-Day landings. Students were asked to engage with a range of historians’ views and textbooks as well as some contemporary source material to assess...
Cunning Plan 165: Helping lower-attaining students
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'Victims of history': Challenging students’ perceptions of women in history
Teaching History article
As postgraduate historians with teaching responsibilities at the University of York, Bridget Lockyer and Abigail Tazzyman were concerned to tackle some of the challenges reported by their students who had generally only encountered women’s history in a disconnected way through stand-alone topics or modules. Their response was to create a...
'Victims of history': Challenging students’ perceptions of women in history
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How foundational concepts, supporting concepts and concrete examples can help untangle the past at Key Stage 3
Teaching History article
A central organising principle of any curriculum is the substantive concepts that underpin it. They provide a secure structure and enable students to develop deep understanding through multiple encounters with essential abstract ideas that are given concrete form in different historical contexts. Identifying the different levels or tiers to which different...
How foundational concepts, supporting concepts and concrete examples can help untangle the past at Key Stage 3
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Making substantive concepts (do the) work
Teaching History article
Several years back, Alistair Dickins and Tommy-James Alexander realised they wanted to incorporate explicit consideration of substantive concepts into their Key Stage 3 teaching, to enable students to make sense of and order information about the past and to offer students a usable language that would support their historical reasoning. In reality,...
Making substantive concepts (do the) work
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Cunning Plan 202: interdisciplinary teaching of landscape through time
Teaching History feature
From a young age I have been fascinated by the history of the landscape. Family holidays in the Lake District offered early encounters with the past that did not come mediated through textbooks, but through place. Driving over Dunmail Raise, my father would point out that the ancient ruler, Dunmail...
Cunning Plan 202: interdisciplinary teaching of landscape through time
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Using turning points in anti-racist history to explore historical significance at Key Stage 3
Teaching History article
In this article, Joel Sharples explains the organising principles that underpinned his planning for a new enquiry sequence inspired by a local photography exhibition. The exhibition’s title ‘Brick Lane 1978: The Turning Point’ prompted him to think afresh about the idea of ‘a turning point’ – a concept that he...
Using turning points in anti-racist history to explore historical significance at Key Stage 3
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Exploring a logical conceptualisation of continuity with Year 9 pupils
Teaching History article
As a PGCE student, Miles Eades confronted the challenge of teaching about change and continuity. Reflecting on scientific, mathematical and sociological conceptualisations of change as a constantly occurring process led him to reconsider the common characterisation of continuity in history as the opposite of or absence of change. Eades set...
Exploring a logical conceptualisation of continuity with Year 9 pupils
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... piracy and empire in the early modern world
Teaching History feature
The topic of early modern global piracy has attracted increasing scholarly attention in recent decades, partly due to its own intrinsic interest and, it must be said, its entertainment value. However, historians have also explored its connections with broader themes such as empire and colonisation, social history, global economic networks,...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... piracy and empire in the early modern world
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Reshaping students’ understanding of empire
Teaching History article
In interviews with GCSE students across a range of school contexts, Abigail Branford found that many young people regarded Africa as an economic ‘dead zone’ prior to colonial intervention. This conception, as Branford briefly illustrates, is at profound odds with current historical scholarship; yet it persists. In seeking to support history...
Reshaping students’ understanding of empire
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Move Me On 202: trainee is struggling to make history accessible...
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 202: trainee is struggling to make history accessible...
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Triumphs Show 164: interpretations at A Level
Teaching History feature: celebrating and sharing success
Julia Huber and Katherine Turner found that their A-level students struggled to identify the line of argument in a passage of historical scholarship, an essential prerequisite for answering their coursework question. They devised an activity that helped students to unpick and visually contrast historians’ interpretations of the relative importance of...
Triumphs Show 164: interpretations at A Level
