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Cunning Plan… to teach about environmental history in the medieval period
Teaching History feature
As an undergraduate, following a traditional history course, I was surprised and intrigued, one sunny summer day, to find myself reading about sunspots and studying graphs of solar activity. My reading list for an essay on the social and economic history of the fourteenth century included the work of historians...
Cunning Plan… to teach about environmental history in the medieval period
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Building historical thinking together: breathing new life into mini whiteboards
Teaching History article
Formative assessment, in particular Assessment for Learning, created waves in classrooms in the early 2000s. Mini whiteboards, with pen and cloth, became popular and remain part of the toolkit in some classrooms. Teachers work hard to assess the learning of all students in a class, rather than just those who...
Building historical thinking together: breathing new life into mini whiteboards
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Move Me On 200: trainee has found little scope to develop students’ oracy
Teaching History feature
Move Me On is designed to build critical, informed debate about the character of teacher training, teacher education and professional development. It is also designed to offer practical help to all involved in training new history teachers. Each issue presents a situation in initial teacher education/training with an emphasis upon...
Move Me On 200: trainee has found little scope to develop students’ oracy
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Bob Dylan and the concept of evidence
Teaching History article
No edition of Teaching History devoted to creativity could be complete without returning to the riches that popular songs offer to historians and history teachers alike. The five Bob Dylan songs that Christopher Edwards explores here are chosen not merely for their ‘literary qualities' and ‘emotional charge'; they also provide...
Bob Dylan and the concept of evidence
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Polychronicon 140: Why did the Cold War End?
Teaching History feature
The end of the Cold War is a controversial subject. Contemporary analysts did not see it coming. Any explanation of its ending which seeks to build up a network of causation will therefore be forced to make arguments based on events whose significance was not necessarily seen at the time....
Polychronicon 140: Why did the Cold War End?
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Chatting about the sixties: historical reasoning in essay-writing
Teaching History article
An article about essay writing may not seem the most obvious choice for an issue of Teaching History devoted to creative thinking. Yet, as Christine Counsell so richly demonstrated in her work on analytical and discursive writing, the process of crafting an argument is a highly complex and creative challenge....
Chatting about the sixties: historical reasoning in essay-writing
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Telling rich stories about women’s lives in the American West at GCSE
Teaching History article
Concerned by the absence of women’s voices in her school’s scheme of work on the American West, and struck by the narrow, male-dominated narrative in her GCSE textbook, Nicole Ridley set out to rethink the way the topic was taught. Galvanised by her research into different ways to integrate women’s history,...
Telling rich stories about women’s lives in the American West at GCSE
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... transnational history
Teaching History feature
Until the beginning of the twenty-first century, historians’ aversion to sweeping generalisations meant that they typically conducted their research within the boundaries of the nation state. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of globalisation and the birth of the internet, new political, intellectual, and practical developments began...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... transnational history
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Move Me On 199: handling differences between history lead's advice and history teachers' approaches
Teaching History feature
Move Me On is designed to build critical, informed debate about the character of teacher training, teacher education and professional development. It is also designed to offer practical help to all involved in training new history teachers. Each issue presents a situation in initial teacher education/training with an emphasis upon...
Move Me On 199: handling differences between history lead's advice and history teachers' approaches
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Establishing a dialogue with Year 9 about why environmental history matters
Teaching History article
The enquiry sequence on which Alex Benger reports in this article was inspired by two specific concerns: a sense that history education must have more to contribute to young people’s understanding of and ability to confront the climate crisis; and a desire to help pupils to engage more broadly with...
Establishing a dialogue with Year 9 about why environmental history matters
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Beyond the bolt-on: placing local history at the heart of a diverse and decolonial curriculum
Teaching History article
Students’ rapt response to a filmed interview with a former miner now working as part of the school’s premises team convinced Fred Oxby of the power of local stories. This was not simply because they captured students’ attention, nor even because such stories enabled them to see that history was not...
Beyond the bolt-on: placing local history at the heart of a diverse and decolonial curriculum
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Move Me On 198: trainee finds it difficult to explain substantive concepts effectively
Teaching History feature
Move Me On is designed to build critical, informed debate about the character of teacher training, teacher education and professional development. It is also designed to offer practical help to all involved in training new history teachers. Each issue presents a situation in initial teacher education/training with an emphasis upon...
Move Me On 198: trainee finds it difficult to explain substantive concepts effectively
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Teaching History 198: Out now
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Read Teaching History 198: Curriculum Journeys
Reflections on the process of curriculum design in history have prompted many colourful metaphors. While some point to the opportunities for creativity inherent in the task, others leave little doubt about the mental exertion required for effective planning on different scales. Michael Riley offered...
Teaching History 198: Out now
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Teaching History 198: Curriculum Journeys
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
03 Editorial (Read article)
04 HA Secondary News
06 HA Update
08 Unpacking the enquiry puzzle – Ben Arscott (Read article)
16 ‘What’s the point of learning history?’ Establishing a dialogue with Year 9 about why environmental history matters – Alex Benger (Read article)
26 Cunning Plan… for using the story of Eunice Foote...
Teaching History 198: Curriculum Journeys
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Who inherits the house? Using heritage to shape pupils’ thinking about historical significance
Teaching History article
Reflecting on the reasons why generic models for teaching historical significance are never quite adequate, Rachel Foster found herself considering, instead, the specific contexts in which arguments about historical significance arise. These reflections took her to the fascinating example of stately homes. Drawing on scholarship such as that of Peter...
Who inherits the house? Using heritage to shape pupils’ thinking about historical significance
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Shaping what matters: Year 9 decide why we should care about the Windrush scandal
Teaching History article
Mark Fowle began work on an enquiry to contextualise the Windrush scandal for his pupils in south London, in response to the first national Stephen Lawrence Day, in 2018. He went on to work with his colleagues in a new school to broaden pupils’ historical perspective through stories of migration...
Shaping what matters: Year 9 decide why we should care about the Windrush scandal
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Triumphs Show: Embracing scholarship to guide Year 7 on an exploration of the Silk Roads
Teaching History feature
It has been the same for history teachers all over the country: the dramatic shift in perspective after reading Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads. Frankopan’s groundbreaking scholarship transported me to distant lands. His book introduced me to cultures and civilisations previously unknown. I wanted my pupils to venture along the same...
Triumphs Show: Embracing scholarship to guide Year 7 on an exploration of the Silk Roads
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Integrating heritage education and public history at school
Teaching History article
As a busy teacher of history and part-time doctoral student exploring history, heritage and identity, Joris thought a lot about heritage, students’ understanding of heritage and how such ideas could best be brought into the history classroom. Meanwhile, he discovered that the buildings next to his school were about to...
Integrating heritage education and public history at school
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... Modern British LGBTQ+ history
Teaching History feature
While academic historians began to make important contributions to our understanding of British LGBTQ+ history in the 1970s (and, indeed, this built on historical scholarship from as early as the 1880s), the field of British queer history became properly established within university history departments and mainstream academic scholarship from the...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... Modern British LGBTQ+ history
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Move Me On 197: struggling to manage the history teacher education programme alongside part-time work
Teaching History feature
Move Me On is designed to build critical, informed debate about the character of teacher training, teacher education and professional development. It is also designed to offer practical help to all involved in training new history teachers. Each issue presents a situation in initial teacher education/training with an emphasis upon...
Move Me On 197: struggling to manage the history teacher education programme alongside part-time work
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Teaching History 197: Out now
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Read Teaching History 197: Public History
Public history is history facing outwards: engaging with the public sphere beyond the ivory tower of research and scholarship in universities. In a recent essay entitled ‘Glorious memory’, Hicks writes of ‘an explosion of new public histories’ in recent decades, ‘led by communities from...
Teaching History 197: Out now
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Teaching History 197: Public History
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
03 Editorial (Read article)
04 HA Secondary News
06 HA Update: Talk more to write better
08 Beyond and behind the ‘quiet bus lady’: tracing the popular memory of Rosa Parks with Year 9 – Ed Durbin (Read article)
16 Who inherits the house? Using heritage to shape pupils’ thinking about...
Teaching History 197: Public History
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Deconstructing lazy analogies in Year 9
Teaching History article
Reflecting on the continuing problem of students holding an impoverished understanding of the value or ‘uses' of history, Steve Rollett turned his attention to the question of analogy. He took the axiom to which students make common appeal (‘we can learn from mistakes in the past') and set about trying...
Deconstructing lazy analogies in Year 9
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Teaching History 139: Analysing History
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
02 Editorial
03 HA Secondary News
04 From human-scale to abstract analysis: Year 7 analyse the changing relationship of Henry II and Becket - Tim Jenner (Read article)
11 Encountering diversity in the history of ideas: engaging Year 9 with Victorian debates about ‘progress' - Jonathan White (Read article)
14 Cunning Plan: Teaching about...
Teaching History 139: Analysing History
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Mudlarking in the Thames: evidence, ecology and enquiry
Teaching History article
Maryam Dorudi arrived at her second PGCE placement school to find many pupils receiving free school meals and speaking English as an additional language. Wanting her students to identify as Londoners and historians, she was drawn into the world of mudlarking and Lara Maiklem. Over the course of eight lessons, she...
Mudlarking in the Thames: evidence, ecology and enquiry
