Long-term knowledge plans

While the retention of historical knowledge is obviously important for students who face public examinations at the end of two or three year courses, the retention of different kinds of historical knowledge matters at all stages of young people’s education. Specific details that lend colour and interest to particular topics (and often play a vital role in explaining why events played out as they did) may well be forgotten; but teachers need to think carefully about the kind of ‘residue’ that they want to remain. What broader contextual knowledge will support the next specific study on which students are going to embark? What kind of summaries or essential reference points will help to anchor the over-arching framework that they are constructing?  The materials in this section deal with ways in which teachers can plan in the longer-term, across whole key stages and across the whole-school curriculum, to support the retention, retrieval, re-use and refinement of students’ knowledge over time. 

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  • Polychronicon 146: Interpreting the history of 'big history'

    Article

    In recent decades, a novel approach to history has emerged, called ‘big history', which provides an overview of all of human history, embedded within biological, geological and astronomical history covering the grandest sweep of time and space, from the beginning of the universe to life on Earth here and now....

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  • 'Doing justice to history': the learning of African history in a North London secondary school

    Article

    ‘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...

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  • Cunning Plan 143: enquiries about the British empire

    Article

    I wanted to give my Year 8 students ownership of their work on the British Empire by allowing them to suggest our ‘enquiry question'. In order to introduce the Empire, I brought in sugar, spices, bananas, chilli peppers and cotton. I then showed maps demonstrating the Empire at its height....

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  • Limited lessons from the Holocaust?

    Article

    Limited lessons from the Holocaust? Critically considering the ‘anti-racist' and citizenship potentialPrevious issues of Teaching History have seen extensive debate about the appropriateness of approaching Holocaust education with explicitly social or moral - as opposed to historical - aims. Rather than taking sides, Alice Pettigrew first acknowledges the range of...

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  • Polychronicon 141: Adolf Eichmann

    Article

    Almost 60 years ago Adolf Eichmann went on trial for crimes committed against the Jews while he was in the service of the Nazi regime. His capture by the Israeli secret service and his abduction from Argentina triggered a number of journalistic books that portrayed him as a pathological monster...

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  • Raising the bar: developing meaningful historical consciousness at Key Stage 3

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. How can we help pupils make sense of the history that they learn so that the whole adds up to more than the sum of its parts? How can we help pupils develop and sophisticate...

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  • Note-making, knowledge-building and critical thinking are the same thing

    Article

    Heidi Le Cocq sets out the classic problem of the history teacher: how does she cover the content and ensure that pupils reflect and analyse at the same time? She relates this to a another problem: how do you prepare pupils well for coursework (ensuring, for example, that they adopt...

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