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Building Key Stage 5 students’ analysis of interpretations
Article
Students of A-level history are required to analyse and evaluate historical interpretations. Samuel Head found limitations in his Year 13 students’ understanding of how and why historians arrive at differing interpretations, which impeded their ability to analyse them. He set about tackling this with carefully sequenced planning and a processual model...
Building Key Stage 5 students’ analysis of interpretations
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What’s The Wisdom On… using material culture in the classroom?
Teaching History feature
How often do you refer to objects in the classroom? When did you last explore with your pupils the materiality of past lives? The ‘material turn’ in historical research and scholarship opens up different lines of enquiry and different kinds of history from those revealed by documentary evidence. It can...
What’s The Wisdom On… using material culture in the classroom?
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Does the grammatical ‘release the conceptual’?
Teaching History article
Jim Carroll noticed basic literacy errors in his Year 13s’ writing, but on closer examination decided that these were not best addressed purely as literacy issues. Through an intervention based on clauses, Carroll managed to enable his students to write better, but he did this by teasing out principles of...
Does the grammatical ‘release the conceptual’?
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Triumphs Show 164: interpretations at A Level
Teaching History feature: celebrating and sharing success
Julia Huber and Katherine Turner found that their A-level students struggled to identify the line of argument in a passage of historical scholarship, an essential prerequisite for answering their coursework question. They devised an activity that helped students to unpick and visually contrast historians’ interpretations of the relative importance of...
Triumphs Show 164: interpretations at A Level
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Story time? Investigating using stories about the French Revolution with Year 12
Teaching History article
Recognising a significant return to stories in the history classroom, Holliss and Carroll wanted to think carefully about what this meant for A-level history. While stories had always been present in their classrooms, they wanted to experiment with the methods of the ‘new storytellers’, building lessons, then sequences of lessons,...
Story time? Investigating using stories about the French Revolution with Year 12
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‘Man, people in the past were indeed stupid’
Teaching History journal article
In this article, which is based on Huijgen’s PhD dissertation Balancing between the past and the present, Tim Huijgen and Paul Holthuis present the results of an experimental method of teaching 14–16-year-old students to contextualise their historical studies in a different way. In the four lessons described, students’ initial reactions...
‘Man, people in the past were indeed stupid’
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Designing an enquiry in a challenging setting
Teaching History article
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...
Designing an enquiry in a challenging setting
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Thinking beyond boundaries
HA Update
In October of last year, the Royal Historical Society (RHS) published an important report highlighting the racial and ethnic inequalities in the teaching and practice of history in the UK (RHS, 2018). Focused on history teaching at university, it nevertheless highlighted the need for thinking to occur at all levels...
Thinking beyond boundaries
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Teaching History 131: Assessing Differently
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
02 Editorial
03 HA Secondary News
04 Speed cameras, dead ends, drivers and diversions: Year 9 use a ‘road map’ to problematise change and continuity – Rachel Foster (Read article)
09 The Holy Grail? GCSE History that actually enhances historical understanding! – Katie Hall (Read article)
17 ‘Create something interesting...
Teaching History 131: Assessing Differently
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Beyond the classroom: developing student teachers' work with museums and historic sites
Teaching History article
Working visits to historical sites for the purposes of developing pupils’ historical understanding can be extremely useful. As part of their training, student teachers need to acquire understanding and skills in the planning and management of worthwhile ‘fieldwork’. This work can be very powerful indeed if it emerges from co-operation...
Beyond the classroom: developing student teachers' work with museums and historic sites
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Using turning points in anti-racist history to explore historical significance at Key Stage 3
Teaching History article
In this article, Joel Sharples explains the organising principles that underpinned his planning for a new enquiry sequence inspired by a local photography exhibition. The exhibition’s title ‘Brick Lane 1978: The Turning Point’ prompted him to think afresh about the idea of ‘a turning point’ – a concept that he...
Using turning points in anti-racist history to explore historical significance at Key Stage 3
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200 editions of Teaching History!
Teaching History feature
In 1968, Mary Price wrote an article for the HA journal, History. Entitled ‘History in danger’, it told a shocking story. The subject of history in Britain’s schools was losing its identity, argued Price, disappearing into various species of integrated humanities and civics. Pupils could see little purpose for it,...
200 editions of Teaching History!
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'How our area used to be back then': An oral history project in an east London school
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
How can oral history enquiries engage students with the study of history and help them connect their learning about the past to their present lives? How can oral history engage and develop students' understanding of...
'How our area used to be back then': An oral history project in an east London school
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Helping Year 7 put some flesh on Roman bones
Teaching History article
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...
Helping Year 7 put some flesh on Roman bones
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Looking through a Josephine-Butler shaped window: focusing pupils' thinking on historical significance
Teaching History article
Christine Counsell draws upon her recent work in developing definitions and practice concerning pupils' thinking about historical significance. Here she tries out those ideas in relation to the 19th century campaigner against the Contagious Diseases Acts, Josephine Butler. Counsell explains why she developed her own set of criteria for structuring...
Looking through a Josephine-Butler shaped window: focusing pupils' thinking on historical significance
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Have we got the question right? Engaging future citizens in local history enquiry
Teaching History article
Gary Clemitshaw describes a five-lesson sequence integrating history, citizenship and ICT. He examines the varied rationales and problems underlying a citizenship-history link and then argues for the role of the local dimension in securing a connection that preserves the integrity of the discipline of history. He focuses upon causation as...
Have we got the question right? Engaging future citizens in local history enquiry
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The how of history: using old and new textbooks in the classroom to develop disciplinary knowledge
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
What are textbooks for and how do we think of them? As inevitably partial views of the past that reflect their purpose and moment of construction and their authors' location in physical and ideological time...
The how of history: using old and new textbooks in the classroom to develop disciplinary knowledge
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No more ‘doing’ diversity
Teaching History feature
Catherine Priggs and her history department colleagues were increasingly concerned that their curriculum was too narrow. They feared that major areas of history were being left out and that many of their own pupils were not seeing themselves, in their various ethnic, cultural and world identities, in the past. Priggs...
No more ‘doing’ diversity
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Teaching History 189: Collaboration
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
02 Editorial (Read article)
03 HA Secondary News
04 HA Update
08 Adding up marginal gains: using Lesson Study to make microimprovements in teaching Year 8 how to use sources – Tony McConnell, Davinia Daley, Rebecca Levy, Lisa Waddell and Richard Waddington (Read article)
23 Triumphs Show: ‘The Strands of Memory’: how a...
Teaching History 189: Collaboration
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Cunning Plan 151: When and for whom has 1688 been 'Glorious'?
Teaching History feature
This enquiry is about how interpretations are formed and why they change. It aims to show Year 9, right at the end of their study of British history, the ways in which meanings of 1688 have shifted over time. It will test students' knowledge and strengthen their chronology of 300...
Cunning Plan 151: When and for whom has 1688 been 'Glorious'?
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Debates: Narratives - what matters most in school history education?
Teaching History article
In England, a curriculum review is imminent. Following a recent ‘call for evidence' by the government, further consultation on the future shape of history in schools will follow. The HA is currently consulting its membership and will be publishing discussion papers in January 2012. At such a time, everyone in...
Debates: Narratives - what matters most in school history education?
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Triumphs Show 180: From ‘most able’ to ‘mini’ historians
Teaching History feature
Finding ways to stretch and challenge the highest-attaining students has been a long-standing concern of many history teachers, and strategies for doing so have developed far beyond merely bolting on additional tasks. One way in which I have sought to challenge my own high-attaining students has been by setting them...
Triumphs Show 180: From ‘most able’ to ‘mini’ historians
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Conducting the orchestra to allow our students to hear the symphony
Teaching History article
Alex Ford and Richard Kennett both welcome the renewed emphasis on knowledge within recent curriculum reforms in England, but are concerned about some of the ways in which the principle of a ‘knowledge-rich’ curriculum has been interpreted and transformed into particular pedagogical prescriptions. In this article they explain their reasons...
Conducting the orchestra to allow our students to hear the symphony
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Teaching History 153: The Holocaust & Other Genocides
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
02 Editorial
03 HA Secondary News
04 Tamsin Leyman and Richard Harris - Connecting the dots: helping Year 9 to debate the purposes of Holocaust and genocide education (Read article)
11 Darius Jackson - ‘But I still don't get why the Jews': using cause and change to answer pupils' demand for an...
Teaching History 153: The Holocaust & Other Genocides
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Teaching History 183: Race
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
02 Editorial (Read article for free)
03 HA Secondary News
04 HA Update: History For All – a wider view – Gabrielle Reddington (Read article)
08 Inventing race? Year 8 use early modern primary sources to investigate the complex origins of racial thinking in the past – Kerry Apps (Read...
Teaching History 183: Race
