Deborah Robbins charts a story of her own learning during the PGCE year. She explains how she identified a point of interest in her own practice - the use of modern-day examples. Turning this into a focus for testing her own hypotheses, she theorised from her own lessons to produce guiding principles to improve her teaching. For example, she suggests that pupils need to distance themselves from the modern analogy itself before they can apply it to the past situation. Her conclusion is that engagement is all and that temporary detours from historical precision are justified by the need to help pupils use ‘what they already know about the human and emotional world they bring with them’.