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A guide to Assessment Reform at Key Stage 4
Briefing Pack
Big changes in assessment at Key Stage 4 took place the last time specifications were reformed. If you want to compare the assessment approaches taken by different examination Boards, then this handy briefing guide will provide you with the introductory information you need to be able to make sense of...
A guide to Assessment Reform at Key Stage 4
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Key Principles for teaching Thematic Studies at GCSE
GCSE Guidance
For many teachers the thematic study is the most new and most troubling unit of the new GCSE specifications. By following this link, you will be connected to an article that appears on www.thinkinghistory.co.uk. This free website for teachers is maintained by Ian Dawson. In this article Ian works with...
Key Principles for teaching Thematic Studies at GCSE
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Recorded webinar series: Commemorating the 75th anniversary of the UN Convention on Genocide
Multipage Article
9 December 2023 was the 75th anniversary of the passing of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (known as the UN Convention on Genocide). The convention was a clear statement by the international community that crimes of that nature should never happen...
Recorded webinar series: Commemorating the 75th anniversary of the UN Convention on Genocide
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Move Me On 162: Reading
Teaching History feature
This issue’s problem: James Connolly is finding it difficult to judge how much or what kind of reading he should expect of his students.
James Connolly, an eager and knowledgeable historian, has frequently struggled to pitch things appropriately for students. This applies particularly to his expectations of their reading, but also...
Move Me On 162: Reading
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New, Novice or Nervous? 162: GCSE Thematic Study
Teaching History feature: the quick guide to the no-quick-fix
Thematic studies have been a long-standing feature of the Schools History Project (SHP) GCSE specifications in England and Wales; but for teachers of ‘Modern World’ GCSE specifications, the thematic study in the new GCSE specifications for teaching in England from September 2016 is unfamiliar territory. Perhaps you are entirely new...
New, Novice or Nervous? 162: GCSE Thematic Study
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Climate change: greening the curriculum?
Teaching History article
Inspired by the news that Bristol had become the UK’s first Green Capital, Kate Hawkey, Jon James and Celia Tidmarsh set out to explore what a ‘Green Capital’ School Curriculum might look like. They explain how they created a cross-curricular project to deliver in-school workshops focused on the teaching of...
Climate change: greening the curriculum?
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Cunning Plan 162: Transferring knowledge from Key Stage 3 to 4
Teaching History feature
Planning to deliver the new GCSE specifications presents a challenge and an opportunity to any history department, whatever their previous specification. The sweep of history that students will now study at GCSE is much broader than ‘Modern World’ departments are used to; including a medieval or early modern depth study...
Cunning Plan 162: Transferring knowledge from Key Stage 3 to 4
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Using nominalisation to develop written causal arguments
Teaching History article
How nominalisation might develop students’ written causal arguments
Frustrated that previously taught writing frames seemed to impede his A-level students’ historical arguments, James Edward Carroll theorised that the inadequacies he identified in their writing were as much disciplinary as stylistic. Drawing on two discourses that are often largely isolated from...
Using nominalisation to develop written causal arguments
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From the history of maths to the history of greatness
Teaching History article
Readers of Teaching History will be familiar with the benefits and difficulties of cross-curricular planning, and the pages of this journal have often carried analysis of successful collaborations with the English department, or music, or geography. Harry Fletcher-Wood describes in this article a collaboration involving maths, providing for us the...
From the history of maths to the history of greatness
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Adventures in assessment
Teaching History article
In Teaching History 157, Assessment Edition, a number of different teachers shared the ways in which their departments were approaching the assessment and reporting of students’ progress in a ‘post-levels’ world. This article adds to those examples, first by illustrating how teachers from different schools in the Bristol area are...
Adventures in assessment
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New, Novice or Nervous? 161: Teaching substantive concepts
Teaching History feature
It’s worrying when pupils reach Year 9 or 10 unable to properly interpret or find fluency in major abstract nouns that crop up again and again in history. They should have bumped into ‘empire’, ‘republic’, ‘federation’, ‘peasantry’, ‘commons’ and ‘communism’, many times by Year 10, so why are many students...
New, Novice or Nervous? 161: Teaching substantive concepts
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Polychronicon 161: John Lilburne
Teaching History feature
John Lilburne might have been destined for obscurity in less interesting times. He was the second son of a minor gentry family, apprenticed to a London woollen merchant in 1632. It was his master’s connections that drew him into religious opposition to Charles I and the illegal book trade, resulting...
Polychronicon 161: John Lilburne
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The knowledge illusion
Teaching History article
Focusing on students’ attempts to explain the relative significance of different factors in Hitler’s rise to power, Catherine McCrory explores the vexed question of why students who seem able to express necessary historical knowledge on one occasion cannot effectively reproduce it on another. Drawing on a detailed analysis of what...
The knowledge illusion
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Developing independent learning with Year 7
Teaching History article
Jaya Carrier’s decision to focus on developing a more independent approach to learning in history at Key Stage 3 was prompted by concerns about her A-level students. In seeking to establish secure foundations for students’ own historical research, Carrier first examined the assumptions of her colleagues and her students. She...
Developing independent learning with Year 7
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Cunning Plan 161: Magna Carta's legacy
Teaching History feature
Both Dawson and Hayes have recently written Cunning Plans that show how exciting Magna Carta is.
So why not stop there? Bring the barons to life with a flare of Dawson and send Magna Carta flying across the continent with just a hint of Hayes. Hey, from the same edition,...
Cunning Plan 161: Magna Carta's legacy
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Using causation diagrams to help sixth-formers think about cause and effect
Teaching History article
Alex Alcoe was concerned that mastery of certain keywords and question formulae at GCSE perhaps obscured fundamental gaps in his students’ understanding of the nature of causation. These gaps were revealed when he invited Year 12 students to make explicit, by annotating a diagram, their understanding of the relationship between...
Using causation diagrams to help sixth-formers think about cause and effect
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Using Google Docs to develop Year 9 pupils’ essay-writing skills
Teaching History article
Lucy Moonen set out to explore whether collaborative writing in small groups, facilitated by the use of Google Docs, would help to sustain students’ focus on essay writing as the development of an historical argument.
She explains how she set up an essay on the League of Nationals as a...
Using Google Docs to develop Year 9 pupils’ essay-writing skills
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Earth in vision: Enviromental Broadcasting
Historian article
Joe Smith, Kim Hammond and George Revill share some of the findings of their work examining what digital broadcast archives are available and which could be made available in future.
The BBC’s archives hold over a million hours of programmes, dating back to the 1930s (radio) and 1940s (television). It...
Earth in vision: Enviromental Broadcasting
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Women in British Coal Mining
Historian article
With the final closure of Britain’s deep coal mines, Chris Wrigley examines the long-standing involvement of women in and around this challenging and dangerous form of work.
With the closure in 2015 of Thoresby and Kellingley mines, the last two working deep coal mines in Britain, leaving only open-cast coal...
Women in British Coal Mining
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The Sykes-Picot agreement and lines in the sand
Historian article
Paula Kitching reveals how a secret diplomatic negotiation 100 years ago provides an insight into the political complexities of the modern-day Middle East.
The Middle East is an area frequently in the news. Over the last ten years the national and religious tensions appear to have exploded with whole regions...
The Sykes-Picot agreement and lines in the sand
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Using Folktales, Myths and Legends
Global Learning
This resource was commissioned by the Historical Association to offer teachers an entry point into the new primary History curriculum using stories: folktales, myths and legends from the civilisations, communities and cultures of the statutory programmes of study.
In this resource, pupils are encouraged to recall and retell stories orally,...
Using Folktales, Myths and Legends
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Interpreting Agincourt: KS3 Scheme of Work
Scheme of Work
2015 was a year of anniversaries. As part of our funded commemoration projects surrounding the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt, we commissioned this scheme of work looking at interpretations of the battle and period, particularly aimed at pupils in Key Stage 3.
It comes with a complete resource...
Interpreting Agincourt: KS3 Scheme of Work
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WWI and the flu pandemic
Historian article
In our continuing Aspects of War series Hugh Gault reveals that the flu pandemic, which began during the First World War, presented another danger that challenged people’s lives and relationships.
Wounded in the neck on the first day of the battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, Arthur Conan Doyle’s son Kingsley...
WWI and the flu pandemic
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The archer's stake and the battle of Agincourt
Historian article
Our perspective on how archers performed in battle is enhanced byMark Hinsley's research into their use of protective stakes.
On the approach to Agincourt in 1415 a small skirmish took place at Corbie, on the Somme. A force of French men-at-arms sallied out from the town and cut up some...
The archer's stake and the battle of Agincourt
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Henry V in the cinema
Historian article
Public attitudes to Henry V are very much influenced by WilliamShakespeare's interpretation. Richard Inverne discusses howShakespeare's version has been translated into cinematic form byLaurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh.
Shakespeare indulges himself considerably with his own relatively recent history - Richards II and III, Henrys IV, V and VI, for example....
Henry V in the cinema
