-
Fifties Britain through the senses: ‘never had it so good’?
Teaching History article
Maya Stiasny was faced with difficulties familiar to many of us. Her new Year 12 students were struggling to get to grips with a new period of history. They were not interrogating primary sources with sufficient vigour. Her solution, detailed here, was novel. Working on the rich social history of post-war...
Fifties Britain through the senses: ‘never had it so good’?
-
‘But they just sit there’: using objects as material culture with Year 8
Teaching History article
Having specialised in the history of material culture during her degree, Gabriella West was struck by the dismissive attitude of her pupils towards the study of material objects from the past. She therefore set out to find the perfect object through which to induct her Year 8 pupils into the history...
‘But they just sit there’: using objects as material culture with Year 8
-
The Historian 120: The calm before the storm? The World in 1913
The magazine of the Historical Association
5 Editorial
6 The Romanov Tercentenary: nostalgia versus history on the eve of the Great War - Catherine Merridale (Read Article)
12 The world in 1913: friendly societies - Daniel Weinbren (Read Article)
17 The President's Column
18 Franz Ferdinand - Ian F. W. Beckett (Read Article)
23 Round About A...
The Historian 120: The calm before the storm? The World in 1913
-
Choosing a topic
Primary History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Choosing a topic, creating teaching approaches and choosing resources for historical understanding
The Rose Report places history in the sphere of ‘Historical, Geographical and Social Understanding'. This allows for a more flexible approach to study, especially...
Choosing a topic
-
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
-
Teaching History 94: Raising the Standard
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Raising the Standard of History education. WW2 cemetries and twenty years of curriculum change, Ordinary pupils, extraordinary results: a structured approach to raising attainment at GCSE, Talk to your inspector: making the most of your history inspection, Stretching the very able student in the mixed ability classroom, Year 11 and...
Teaching History 94: Raising the Standard
-
"Is it the Tuarts and then the Studors or the other way round?" The importance of developing a usable big picture of the past
Teaching History article
What should pupils know and understand as a result of their historical studies? This question is much in the news currently and too often quickly posed and glibly answered. In this article, Jonathan Howson poses this problem in the light of an ongoing research tradition that has sought complex answers...
"Is it the Tuarts and then the Studors or the other way round?" The importance of developing a usable big picture of the past
-
History's big picture in three dimensions
Historian article
More and more historians, from diverse political viewpoints, are now expressing concern at the fragmentation of history, especially in the schools curriculum. The fragmentation of the subject has followed upon the collapse of sundry Grand Narratives, such as the ‘March of Progress', which once swept all of history into a...
History's big picture in three dimensions
-
Teaching with Meaning: Supporting Historical Understanding in the Primary Classroom
Primary History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
In essence, history is a record of human affairs. The problem in making this record is that events are past and gone and have to be reconstructed. Evidence may be uncertain and incomplete. Inevitably, several...
Teaching with Meaning: Supporting Historical Understanding in the Primary Classroom
-
Year 7 use musical language to think about King John
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
As an enthusiastic musician, Alison Meikle is always looking for ways to use music in the history classroom. While Teaching History has seen plenty of articles on using musical sources as evidence (e.g. Mastin in Teaching...
Year 7 use musical language to think about King John
-
Putting Catlin in his place?
Teaching History article
Jess Landy’s desire to introduce her pupils to a more complex narrative of the American West led her to the life story and work of a remarkable individual, George Catlin.
In this article she shows how she used this unusual micro-narrative in order to challenge pupils’ ideas not just about the bigger narrative of which it is a part, but about the...
Putting Catlin in his place?
-
Film: An Introduction to Lesson Planning (Parts 6-10)
Teaching History for Beginners webinar series
This film continues our Teaching History for Beginners filmed webinar series. In this two-part film, Rachel Foster (teaching associate and secondary PGCE lead at the university of Cambridge) explores the key principles and processes of lesson planning for new teachers. View the first part here.
This series is designed to support beginning...
Film: An Introduction to Lesson Planning (Parts 6-10)
-
Interpretations and history teaching
Teaching History article
Gary Howells offers us a challenge: are we sure that we are teaching the study of interpretations correctly? It is much criticised at GCSE, but do we really engage our students in the process of writing history, and in understanding how history works, from 11-14? Or do we use reductive...
Interpretations and history teaching
-
Beyond the boundaries of the Lake District
Historian article
This article responds to recent changes in the size and status of the Lake District National Park by considering the historical interconnectedness of the Lake District with the region that surrounds it. Drawing on visual and verbal responses to the landscape of the Lakes region, Christopher Donaldson reveals how historical...
Beyond the boundaries of the Lake District
-
The hidden crisis in GCSE History
Teaching History article
Joining the debate launched in the last edition, John Dixon argues that in relation to competing subjects, history has become harder. He believes that this could be reviewed without loss of standards. He highlights what he sees as a perverse situation of conflicting trends: on the one hand, practice in...
The hidden crisis in GCSE History
-
Film: An Introduction to Lesson Planning (Parts 1-5)
Teaching History for Beginners webinar series
This film continues our Teaching History for Beginners filmed webinar series. In this two part film, Rachel Foster (teaching associate and secondary PGCE lead at the university of Cambridge) explores the key principles and processes of lesson planning for new teachers. View the second part here.
This series is designed to support beginning history...
Film: An Introduction to Lesson Planning (Parts 1-5)
-
Scheme of Work: Brunel
Primary Scheme of Work, Key Stage 1 History (unresourced)
At Key Stage 1, pupils are asked to examine the lives of significant individuals who have also contributed to national achievements. A study of Isambard Kingdom Brunel provides a fascinating example of an individual whose technological and engineering advances have helped to shape the face of Britain.
Children can identify...
Scheme of Work: Brunel
-
Your Primary CPD calendar Summer 2025
News Item
We know that it's not easy for teachers to get out of school or have budgets to afford a plentiful supply of CPD. We know how essential your CPD is to you and that is why we have worked to provide a wide range of face to face, online learning...
Your Primary CPD calendar Summer 2025
-
Archaeology on the edge
Historian article
Major archaeological projects can be complex affairs, in terms of their funding, governance and the wide range of historical and technological expertise they require. Here National Trust archaeologist Kathy Laws describes the intricacies and successes of a multi-organisational project at an Iron Age site in north Wales. The challenges of the...
Archaeology on the edge
-
Connecting poetry, philosophy and landscapes in Ancient China
Historian article
It is unusual for historians to focus primarily on poetry to provide insights into the past societies they are studying. Here Nicholas Tyldesley explains the value of poetry to help us understand the ideas, values and some important historical events in Ancient China, with a particular focus on poets Li...
Connecting poetry, philosophy and landscapes in Ancient China
-
Scott's 5-stage model for progression in conceptual understanding of causation
Model
The following model examines progression in learning within a particular domain - cause and consequence. The Teaching History Research Group produced a series of stage descriptions which they tell us were based on a mixture of "personal experience, observation in many schools, discussions with teacher and research findings". It is...
Scott's 5-stage model for progression in conceptual understanding of causation
-
‘Compressing and rendering’: using biography to teach big stories
Teaching History article
In principle, Rachel Foster had long been aware of the value of creating an interplay between depth and overview across the history curriculum. But in practice, as she acknowledges here, she had tended to shy away from telling outline stories that encompassed a big chronological or geographical range. Recognising the...
‘Compressing and rendering’: using biography to teach big stories
-
Teaching the Historic Environment
Guidance for teaching the Historic Environment in new GCSE courses
The GCSE History criteria specify that the courses should cover three geographical contexts: local, British and European/wider world. The requirement to include some local history has been developed into the study of a locality in its Historic Environment. This has been developed in four different ways by the Awarding bodies...
Teaching the Historic Environment
-
Triumphs Show 144: Active learning to engage ‘challenging students'
Teaching History feature
Active learning to engage and challenge ‘challenging students'
Historical significance may have been the ‘forgotten element' in 2002 when Rob Phillips first offered us the acronym ‘GREAT', but it has been seized upon with enthusiasm by the history education community. Christine Counsell's now famous five ‘R's (remarkable, remembered, resonant, resulting...
Triumphs Show 144: Active learning to engage ‘challenging students'
-
Hampstead & North West London Branch Programme
Article
All enquiries to Mandy Caller mandycaller@gmail.com or telephone 07818 063594
Meetings are held at 8pm on the third Thursday of the month September to April (excluding December) at Fellowship House, 136a Willifield Way, London NW11 6YD.
Some lectures are also on Zoom. See below for details.
The cost of local...
Hampstead & North West London Branch Programme
