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Why we must change history GCSE
Teaching History article
A head of steam for change in GCSE history has been building for some time now amongst history teachers, heads of history, advisers, teacher-trainers, researchers, consultants and all who regularly engage in debate about history teaching and learning. All those who read widely, share their practice, experience many Key Stage...
Why we must change history GCSE
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Teaching History 69
Journal
Editorial 2
News 3
Articles:
Young Children's Thinking in History Hilary Cooper 8
The Magnificent Seven: Reasons for Teaching about Prehistory Peter Stone 13
National Curriculum History, Schemes of Work and the Primary School Child Brian Scott 19
Delivering the Primary History Curriculum Keith Crawford and Graham Rogers 22
The...
Teaching History 69
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Teaching History 96: Citizenship and Identity
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Build it in, don’t bolt it on: history’s opportunity to support critical citizenship - Andrew Wrenn (Read article)
Weighing a century with a website: teaching Year 9 to be critical - Lindsey Rayner (Read article)
Democracy is not boring - Sean Lang (Read article)
Doomed Youth: Using theatre to support...
Teaching History 96: Citizenship and Identity
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Mushrooms and snake-oil: using film as AS/A level
Teaching History article
In this article, Seán Lang examines the power of film to shape AS/A students’ perception and even understanding of the past. He argues that teachers of Years 12 and 13 underestimate at their peril the impact film can have on how students shape their perception of history. Although, as he...
Mushrooms and snake-oil: using film as AS/A level
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Teaching History 95: Learning to Think
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Who wants to fight? Who wants to flee? Teaching history from a ‘thinking skills’ perspective - Jon Nichol (Read article)
Note-making, knowledge-building and critical thinking are the same thing - Heidi le Cocq (Read article)
Exceptional performance at GCSE: What makes a starred A? - Angela Leonard (Read article)
Analysing...
Teaching History 95: Learning to Think
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Teaching History 94: Raising the Standard
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Raising the Standard of History education. WW2 cemetries and twenty years of curriculum change, Ordinary pupils, extraordinary results: a structured approach to raising attainment at GCSE, Talk to your inspector: making the most of your history inspection, Stretching the very able student in the mixed ability classroom, Year 11 and...
Teaching History 94: Raising the Standard
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Drop the dead dictator: a Year 9 newsroom simulation
Teaching History article
Rosalind Stirzaker has big ambitions for her students. She wants them to do more than make a simple list of the key causes of the Second World War. Yes, she wants them to complete a piece of written work, but she wants – and gets – a great deal more...
Drop the dead dictator: a Year 9 newsroom simulation
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Using the Internet to teach about interpretations in Years 9 and 12
Teaching History article
Are you getting fed up of ICT experts and others telling you to watch out for ‘bias’ in websites? Have you sat open-mouthed through a training session or staff meeting where the need to teach pupils to be critical of what they find on the web is sagely discussed, as...
Using the Internet to teach about interpretations in Years 9 and 12
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Giving students proper recognition for historical oracy
Teaching History article
It was concern about Year 13 students’ reluctance to articulate their thinking that prompted Toby Dove to review his approach to the promotion of oracy within history. Having recognised the importance of young people being able to express and defend their claims in valid ways, as well as the ways...
Giving students proper recognition for historical oracy
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Thinking from the inside: je suis le roi
Teaching History article
Dale Banham and Ian Dawson show how active learning deepens students’ understanding of attitudes and reactions to the Norman Conquest. At the same time they build a bold argument for active learning, including a direct strike at the two most common objections to it. Many teachers still see it as...
Thinking from the inside: je suis le roi
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Approaches to teaching about national identities and belonging across the history curriculum
Teaching History article
How might ideas from social science help history teachers and their students make sense of multiple and hybrid identities in a complex world? Magnoff, Tengra and Walker explore their pupils’ thinking about identity over time and the ways in which they have sought through their long-term curriculum planning to develop...
Approaches to teaching about national identities and belonging across the history curriculum
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Promoting self-efficacy through combined literacy and oracy projects
Teaching History article
In this article, Jonty Haywood shows how his pupils have used literacy and oracy to create their own history. By giving them engaging (and age- and attainment-appropriate) secondary source material, Haywood enabled his pupils to create something of their own about an area of history that interested them. He shows...
Promoting self-efficacy through combined literacy and oracy projects
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... global history?
Teaching History feature
In 1990, the inaugural edition of the Journal of World History was published. The articles within included William H. McNeill’s reflection on his 1963 magnum opus The Rise of the West: a history of the human community. Both a self-critique and a call to action, in this article McNeill acknowledged...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... global history?
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Teaching History 38
Journal
Editorial, 2
The Certificate of Pre-Vocational Education - What the History Teacher can Contribute - Ben Kerwood, 3
The Lincolnshire Educational Aids Project - A Successful Launch into Historical Aids - Ray Acton and Tim Hall, 8
The Humanities Teaching and Computing Project-Jon Nichol with Jackie Dean, 12
Report: HMI/National...
Teaching History 38
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Teaching History 92: Explanation and Argument
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Getting ready for the Grand Prix: learning how to build a substantiated argument in Year 7 - Dale Banham (Read article)
Being ambitious with the causes of the First World War: interrogating inevitability - Gary Howells (Read article)
The ‘structured enquiry’ is not a contradiction in terms: focused teaching for...
Teaching History 92: Explanation and Argument
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Cunning Plan… for teaching medieval Muslim Spain
Teaching History feature
Good morning Year 7. Once upon a time in the mid-eighth century, a young prince was forced to abandon his home. His home was in Damascus, and there, one night, his family had been taken by surprise. The young prince belonged to a family called the Ummayads. The Ummayads had...
Cunning Plan… for teaching medieval Muslim Spain
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Who was Paul Downing and what can his life tell us about trans history?
Teaching History article
Among the ‘ordinary people’ in the past, who constitute the focus of this issue of Teaching History, will be many who have not conformed to the gender norms of their own time. For Black trans artist Remi Graves, encountering one such individual – Paul Downing – in the London Archives was...
Who was Paul Downing and what can his life tell us about trans history?
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A knowledge-rich approach to introducing China’s history to Year 9
Teaching History article
Freya George was wondering how best to integrate more Asian histories into her school’s curriculum when a conversation among history teachers on social media led her to Jung Chang’s Wild Swans: three daughters of China. George then planned two enquiries, one introducing twentieth-century China, and one focusing entirely on Chang’s work. George styles...
A knowledge-rich approach to introducing China’s history to Year 9
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Unpacking the enquiry puzzle
Teaching History article
The defining qualities of a good enquiry question have been regularly revisited by contributors to Teaching History in the 25 years since Riley first outlined what he saw as three essential characteristics. Despite these endeavours, Ben Arscott notes that the properties of a good enquiry question remain somewhat elusive. His...
Unpacking the enquiry puzzle
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Cunning Plan… for using the story of Eunice Foote to bring environmental history into the curriculum
Teaching History feature
It was during a rainy Tuesday breaktime that I realised why I was so flippant about including environmental history in my curriculum. ‘The climate, you see,’ I said to my colleague Tamsin as I double-boiled the staffroom kettle, ‘can’t challenge you when you don’t include it.’
Kate Hawkey’s book History and the Climate...
Cunning Plan… for using the story of Eunice Foote to bring environmental history into the curriculum
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... schooling and the British Empire
Teaching History feature
The history of schooling and the British Empire encompasses a complex body of literature. Histories of formal education intersect with work on race, class and capitalism and link to adjacent fields such as histories of childhood. A basic contention shared throughout this field, however, is that there was a profound...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... schooling and the British Empire
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Reading with other readers in mind
Teaching History article
Peter Turner, along with his colleagues, wished to design a cross-curricular activity for post-16 students in history and English. The enquiry they devised addressed the issue of the changing reception of the classic novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in the immediate aftermath of its publication, and...
Reading with other readers in mind
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No more mark schemes: manageable and meaningful assessment for Years 7–9
Teaching History article
In seeking to answer the question of how to make valid, reliable, and meaningful judgements about students’ work in history, Elizabeth Carr’s department abandoned criteria-based mark schemes and replaced them with a form of comparative judgement conducted in relation to a series of exemplars. In this article, Carr explains the...
No more mark schemes: manageable and meaningful assessment for Years 7–9
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The Tenth Grade tells Bismarck what to do: using structured role-play to eliminate hindsight in assessing historical motivation
Teaching History article
Neomi Shiloah and Edna Shoham show how history teachers in Israel have begun to move away from traditional talk-and-chalk based teaching. They describe a blend of role-play and ICT that not only grabs pupils’ attention and caters for different styles of learning but also helps pupils to appreciate the difficulties...
The Tenth Grade tells Bismarck what to do: using structured role-play to eliminate hindsight in assessing historical motivation
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Tracing the popular memory of Rosa Parks with Year 9
Teaching History article
Inspired by Jeanne Theoharis’s biography of Rosa Parks, Ed Durbin initially planned to challenge the ‘fable’ that had been constructed around her life. He soon realised, however, that he wanted to take the opportunity to get ‘behind’ the fable and help his students understand how and why it had been constructed. Drawing...
Tracing the popular memory of Rosa Parks with Year 9
