This issue's problem: Nancy Astor seems to have reached a plateau in her development as a history teacher. After a difficult start to her training year, Nancy seemed to be making rapid progress, but her development has now slowed and her mentor is concerned that she may not achieve her full...

From Muddleton Manor to Clarity Cathedral: improving Year 12's extended writing through an enhanced sense of the reader Mary Brown recognised that her A-level students were finding extended writing difficult, particularly in terms of guiding the reader through the argument with appropriate ‘signposting'. To help her students manage this, Brown...

‘Much to learn you still have!' An attempt to make Year 9 Masters of Learning How can history teachers structure learning pathways through historical content in ways that engage and challenge all pupils, that enable them to work at an appropriate pace and that also encourage pupils to self-assess and...

Wrestling with Stephen and Matilda: planning challenging enquiries to engage Year 7 in medieval anarchy McDougall found learning about Stephen and Matilda fascinating, was sure that her pupils would also and designed an enquiry to engage them in ‘the anarchy' of 1139-1153 AD. Pupils enjoyed exploring ‘the anarchy' and learning...

Historical reasoning in the classroom: What does it look like and how can we enhance it? The history education community has long recognised that historical thinking depends on the interplay between substantive knowledge about the past and the procedural, or second-order, concepts that historians use to construct, shape and give...

This issue's problem: Helen Troy is uncertain how to provide appropriate support for certain students without restricting what they can achieve. Helen showed considerable determination in securing her teacher training place. Her own education had been within a highly selective school system and her first application was unsuccessful because of...

The Association for Historical Dialogue and Research (AHDR) is a Cyprus-based organization that works to foster dialogue among history teachers and other educators across the divide in Cyprus. In one of their UN-funded projects, ADHR members worked with UK colleagues to shape a lesson sequence and resources on the Ottoman period...

This seemingly straightforward question will prompt correspondingly straightforward answers from your mixed-ability Year 7 class, such as ‘they were slaves who fought with swords until one of the men died for the crowd's entertainment', as one of my pupils answered. Scratch the surface, and almost every word in this response...

Like many other history departments nationally, Ed Podesta and his colleagues face a daunting practical challenge: redesigning three years' historical learning so that it can fit into a compressed two-year Key Stage 3, whilst enhancing, rather than compromising, the quality of students' historical learning. Podesta's article reports the beginning of...

Joanne Pearson reflects on her experiences as a history teacher and teacher educator, considering the ways in which she has seen women represented in the history curricula of different schools in England. She makes the case that greater attention needs to be paid by history teachers to the criteria against...

02 Editorial  03 HA Secondary News  04 HA Update  08 Beth Baker and Steven Mastin - Did Alexander really ask, ‘Do I appear to you to be a bastard?' Using ancient texts to improve pupils' critical thinking (Read article) 14 Cunning Plan: Getting students to use classical texts - Beth Baker...

Department meetings have a range of purposes, and all teachers will be aware of some of the more tedious tasks that have to be completed at such meetings. The most exciting meetings for us are those where we can sit down as a history department and design a new enquiry....

‘Doing justice to history': the learning of African history in a North London secondary school and teacher development in the spirit of ubuntu The medium is the message, Marshall McLuhan observed many years ago and the ‘form' of what we do carries ‘content' as Hayden White has argued. This article...

Developing Year 8 students' conceptual thinking about diversity in Victorian society Elizabeth Carr writes here about a new scheme of work she developed to teach students about diversity in Victorian society. When dealing with a concept such as diversity, it can be easy for students to slip into stereotypes based...

Getting students to generate their own questions can seem like a formidable challenge, even for experienced teachers with extensive subject knowledge developed over years of teaching. Imagine how much more alarming it appeared to a student-teacher being encouraged to take risks by handing more responsibility to the students. Could it...

Robin Conway's interest in student led enquiry derived from a concern to encourage his students to take much more responsibility for their own learning. Here he explains how his department gradually learned to entrust students with defining the enquiry questions and planning the kinds of teaching and learning activities to be...

The current National Curriculum for history requires pupils to ‘identify and investigate specific historical questions, making and testing hypotheses for themselves'. While Kate Hammond relished the encouragement that this gave to her pupils to engage in the process of historical enquiry, she was keen to develop a much clearer sense...

The small-scale research that Yosanne Vella reports in this article was driven by concern to help pupils develop ‘big picture' visions of the past and to engage effectively with the idea of change as a process rather than an event. The strategy that she adopts - asking groups of students...

Vision Mapper is a free web resource to support long-term planning and decision making in education. With its wide range of group activities and inspirational materials designed to inspire broader thinking, challenge your views and create realistic, achievable action plans, Vision Mapper can help you create a long-term vision and...

Mary Partridge wanted her pupils not only to become more aware of competing and contrasting voices in the past, but to understand  how historians orchestrate those voices. Using Edward Grim's eye-witness account of Thomas Becket's murder, her Year 7 pupils explored nuances in the word ‘shocking' as a way of...