Vice President of the HA provides a presentation on how to ensure effective practice within the Key Stage 3 history classroom. Click the link below>>>

Please note: this resource pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content and links may be outdated. Nine examples of outcomes or tasks are described, that model the 'variety of ways' in which pupils can communicate about the past, all but one taken from issues of Teaching History. These examples...

Please note: this resource pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content and links may be outdated. This resource describes the rationale for helping teachers to think about the range of real and creative end-products (outcomes) that can be used for different enquiries across key stage 3. They include a...

Please note: this resource pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content and links may be outdated. This repeats the nine examples of outcomes or tasks described in Resource A. It also includes additional notes, summarising the preparation that led up to the outcome or task and its place in...

Dale Banham, 'Getting ready for the Grand Prix: learning how to build a substantiated argument in Year 7' in Teaching History 92: Explanation and Argument issue This seminal article demonstrated how the author planned an enquiry to be taught over a long period blending in-depth study with overviews of history. ...

This folder contains three examples of the use of layers-of-inference frames, a now popular form of scaffolding in history teaching.  They are taken from three different key stages and demonstrate how a form of scaffolding can be used across different age groups but needs to be adapted to take account...

James Woodcock, 'Does the linguistic release the conceptual? Helping Year 10 to improve their causal reasoning' in Teaching History 119: Language issue (June, 2005) In this subtle article, James Woodcock experiments with introducing new vocabulary to a mixed-ability year 10 class working towards the enquiry question '"Hitler was not to...

Essay writing is at the very heart of school history, yet despite the wide range of developments in this area over the past decade, pupils still struggle. Alex Scott and his department decided to investigate a variety of methods to see what methods worked in enabling pupils to construct essays...

Nathan Cole and Denise Thompson have really thought about Key Stage 3. They have been forced to; they now teach it in only two years. The switch to a two-year Key Stage 3 has made them re-evaluate their entire programme of study, and their rationale for teaching history. The result...

Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. Does new vocabulary help students to express existing ideas for which they do not yet have words or does it actually give them new ideas which they did not previously hold? James Woodcock asks whether...

Three years ago ( TH 99, Curriculum Planning Edition), Michael Riley illustrated ways in which history departments could exploit the increased flexibility of the revised National Curriculum.1 He showed that precisely-worded enquiry questions, positioned thoughtfully across the Key Stage, help to ensure progression, challenge and coherence. His picturesque image for...

How do we help pupils to write better paragraphs without actually doing it for them? How do we break down the process of essay writing into smaller steps without taking away pupils’ sense of the essay as a whole? How do we give lower-attaining pupils models, structures and frames without...

As history teachers, we talk about concepts all the time. We know that pupils need to understand them in order to make sense of the past. Precisely what we mean when we talk about concepts is less clear, however. Research into how history teachers talk about their practice suggests that,...

In this detailed account of the first stages of a lesson sequence for Year 9 (13-14 year-olds), Kate Hammond sets out the tensions that must be examined and resolved when planning and teaching this most demanding of topics. How can young teenagers be helped to develop a mature response to...

Thomas Tallis history department have an interesting approach to planning. Whereas, all too often, this most time-consuming and intellectually demanding of teachers’ tasks is rendered invisible, and is supposed to happen by magic in the middle of the night, this department chose to make the planning process genuinely collaborative, pivotal...

Trainee teachers Suzie Bunyan and Anna Marshall explain why they decided to devise an activity in which they made a big fuss of a just one visual source. As beginning teachers they were also focusing on aspects of their own professional learning. They had decided to extend their skills in...

In the last edition of Teaching History Jayne Prior and Peter John presented an approach to extended writing that relied upon pupils’ earlier work.1 Pupil indignation was key. Furious at the blandness of some text presented to them, they used their own knowledge of colour, detail and drama to challenge...

History teachers are waking up to the fact that you cannot raise standards in GCSE by very much if you leave this work until Year 10. To leave it that late is to resort to surface, tactical moves rather than to address the deep reasons why so many pupils find...

Big theme: dissent and the formation of the concept of ‘rights' You can teach citizenship not only without compromising National Curriculum content, processes and concepts, but in such a way as to improve them. Review your department's ‘whole Key Stage' planning. Secure rigour and high levels of challenge by remembering...

Denis Shemilt's four stages of adolescent ideas about historical methods in a nutshell.