-
Time and chronology: conjoined twins or distant cousins?
Teaching History article
Weaknesses in pupils' grasp of historical chronology are a commonplace in popular discussion of the state of history education. However, as Blow, Lee and Shemilt argue, although undoubtedly necessary and fundamental, mastery of chronological conventions is not sufficient: the difficulties that pupils experience when learning history are conceptual, as much...
Time and chronology: conjoined twins or distant cousins?
-
Polychronicon 146: Interpreting the history of 'big history'
Teaching History feature
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....
Polychronicon 146: Interpreting the history of 'big history'
-
Teaching History 144: History for All
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
02 Editorial
03 HA Secondary News
04 Paula Worth - Which women were executed for witchcraft? And which pupils cared? Low-attaining Year 8 use fiction to tackle three demons: extended reading, diversity and causation (Read article)
16 Yosanne Vella - The gradual transformation of historical situations: understanding ‘change and continuity'...
Teaching History 144: History for All
-
Assessment of students' uses of evidence
Teaching History article
Drawing on her research into students' evidential reasoning, Elisabeth Pickles explores the possibilities for how such reasoning might be assessed. Existing exam mark schemes focus too heavily on generic processes involved in the analysis of source material and insufficiently on the historical validity of reasoning and conclusions produced. Approaching the...
Assessment of students' uses of evidence
-
Teaching History 177: Out now
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Read Teaching History 177
Building Knowledge
As regular readers will know, the theme for each issue of Teaching History is usually determined in response to the range of proposals that the editors receive. Given the current focus within the education system in England on how knowledge is built cumulatively over...
Teaching History 177: Out now
-
Teaching History 175: Out now
24th June 2019
The effort to discern hidden voices is intrinsic to the integrity of historical practice. The professional historian poring over primary sources strives to establish who can be heard in any text or artefact, which voices are being inadvertently favoured or what light further voices might shed on the question in...
Teaching History 175: Out now
-
Are we creating a generation of 'historical tourists'?
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
A trip to the battlefields of the First World War throws into stark relief the challenges presented by work on interpretations related to historical sites. Andrew Wrenn first drew attention to the difficulties of promoting...
Are we creating a generation of 'historical tourists'?
-
Triumphs Show 113: How to make the Elizabethan Religious Settlement sufficiently complicated for Year 8
Teaching History feature
This edition of the 'Triumphs Show' explains 'How to make the Elizabethan Religious Settlement sufficiently complicated for Year 8'.
Triumphs Show 113: How to make the Elizabethan Religious Settlement sufficiently complicated for Year 8
-
Teaching history's big pictures: including continuity as well as change
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
School history teachers are not the only ones wrestling with the challenges of building ‘big pictures' that do justice to complexity. In this article, social and cultural historian Penelope Corfield puts our interest in long-term...
Teaching history's big pictures: including continuity as well as change
-
Teaching History 136: Shaping the Past
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
02 Editorial
03 HA Secondary News
04 When were Jews in medieval England most in danger? Exploring change and continuity with Year 7 – Ben Jarman (Read article)
13 Shaping macro-analysis from micro-history: developing a reflexive narrative of change in school history – Hywel Jones (Read article)
22 Triumphs show: How...
Teaching History 136: Shaping the Past
-
Polychronicon 135: Post-modern Holocaust Historiography
Teaching History feature
The field of Holocaust studies has been hit by an intellectual earthquake whose precise magnitude and long-term consequences cannot be ascertained at this stage. In 2007 Saul Friedländer published The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939-1945. The book has been rightly celebrated as the first victim-centred synthetic history...
Polychronicon 135: Post-modern Holocaust Historiography
-
What is progress in history?
Teaching History article
Evelyn Vermeulen argues that in order for teachers to identify outcomes for the learning of history, they must think clearly about the different attributes of the discipline - its ideas, structures and processes - and the relationship between them. Here, she takes us on her own professional thinking journey. She...
What is progress in history?
-
Interpretations of History: Issues for Teachers in the Development of Pupils' Understanding
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
This article is based on collaborative work between staff at a University department of educational studies and a comprehensive school. Ian Davies and Rob Williams reviews the status and meaning of interpretations in history education...
Interpretations of History: Issues for Teachers in the Development of Pupils' Understanding
-
Polychronicon 117: interpretations of Douglas Haig
Teaching History feature
Polychronicon was a fourteenth-century chronicle that brought together much of the knowledge of its own age. Our Polychronicon in Teaching History is a regular feature helping school history teachers to update their subject knowledge, with special emphasis on recent historiography and changing interpretation. This edition of 'Polychronicon' considers the historical...
Polychronicon 117: interpretations of Douglas Haig
-
Cooperative Learning: the place of pupil involvement in a history textbook
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Pupil involvement is at the heart of every good history lesson. Its planning ensures that pupils are given the opportunity to think for themselves, share ideas, discuss evidence and debate points. The history education community...
Cooperative Learning: the place of pupil involvement in a history textbook
-
Stepping into the past: using images to travel through time
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Pupils are eternally curious about their teachers. Do they really have lives outside the classroom? Could Miss Jones have once been a child? Does she have parents and grandparents and a past of her own?...
Stepping into the past: using images to travel through time
-
Teaching History 113: Creating Progress
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
This edition deals with creating progress: History teachers are creating progress - the idea and the reality. Why rely on others to define and design it? The creation process is every teacher's property and there is no celing on what we might help pupils achieve. JFK, Progression models, Roleplay in...
Teaching History 113: Creating Progress
-
Cunning Plan 123: planning a school trip
Teaching History journal feature
School trips are a fantastic opportunity for learning, but they must be planned tightly. Each trip must be carefully justified – what will the students learn which they cannot learn in school? Is this sufficient to justify them (and you) having a day out of the classroom? Does the trip...
Cunning Plan 123: planning a school trip
-
It's like they've gone up a year!' Gauging the impact of a history transition unit on teachers of primary and secondary
Teaching History article
Year 7 history teachers frequently bemoan the lack of historical learning in the primary sector. Pupils may be well versed in suffixes and similes, but their study of history can be limited. This group of history teachers decided that things could be different. Not only did they bring enquiry methods...
It's like they've gone up a year!' Gauging the impact of a history transition unit on teachers of primary and secondary
-
Voices from Rwanda: when seeing is better than hearing
Teaching History article
Where were you when you last witnessed history being formed? How did you know that the events you had witnessed would turn out to be significant? The missile attack on a plane in Rwanda on 6 April 1994 passed Martyn Beer by at the time. It was later that he...
Voices from Rwanda: when seeing is better than hearing
-
Innovation, inspiration and diversification: new approaches to history at Key Stage 3
Teaching History article
Good history teaching should not be the responsibility of a single department working in isolation. The history subject community as a whole should work together to ensure that history teaching is of as high a quality as possible. This does not mean that every department, and every teacher, should do...
Innovation, inspiration and diversification: new approaches to history at Key Stage 3
-
'Britain was our home': Helping Years 9, 10, and 11 to understand the black experience of the Second World War
Teaching History article
In this article, Helena Stride shows how the Imperial War Museum responded to criticism that insufficient attention had been paid to the contribution of black and Asian people to Britain’s wars. She focuses on one of two resource-packs produced by the Museum, which highlights the experience of Britain’s colonial peoples,...
'Britain was our home': Helping Years 9, 10, and 11 to understand the black experience of the Second World War
-
Transforming Year 7's understanding of the concept of Imperialism: a case study on the Roman Empire
Teaching History article
Those of us in the U.K. know that many of our pupils finish their entire historical education without a satisfactory grasp of basic substantive concepts as they are used in history. Do all our low-attaining or ‘low ability’ 14-year-olds who are pressured to drop history at 14 really emerge with...
Transforming Year 7's understanding of the concept of Imperialism: a case study on the Roman Empire
-
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
-
Parallel catastrophes? Uniqueness, redemption and the Shoah
Teaching History article
Nicolas Kinloch’s 1998 review of Michael Burleigh’s Ethics and Extermination in Teaching History, 93, sparked a debate amongst our readers about the teaching of the Holocaust, concerning both rationales and practical approaches. Citing the damage caused to pupils’ understanding by a Spielberg view of history, he emphasised that the rationale...
Parallel catastrophes? Uniqueness, redemption and the Shoah
