-
Move Me On 154: Mixed Ability Groups
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem:Joe Priestley is having problems providing sufficient challenge for the higher attainers within his mixed ability groups
Joe Priestley has settled into his training placement very well and has impressed other members of the history department with his lively and engaging ideas.
In his early teaching he was...
Move Me On 154: Mixed Ability Groups
-
New, Novice or Nervous? 154: Using historical scholarship in the classroom
Teaching History feature
As another World Book Day goes past, you have been watching the English department wax lyrical about all of the wonderful books that pupils might read. You know that there is a wealth of well-written historical scholarship out there for pupils to dive into, yet you are not sure about...
New, Novice or Nervous? 154: Using historical scholarship in the classroom
-
Waking up to complexity
Teaching History article
Waking up to complexity: using Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers to challenge over-determined causal explanations
Teaching student to construct causal argument is a staple of history teaching and, in this year, questions about the causes of the First World War are particularly pertinent and once again the public eye. Claire Holliss,...
Waking up to complexity
-
Unpacking the suitcase and finding history: doing justice to the teaching of diverse histories in the classroom
Teaching History article
Unpacking the suitcase and finding history: doing justice to the teaching of diverse histories in the classroom
It has become a truism that Britain is a multi-cultural society yet, as Mohamud and Whitburn argue, there is still a great deal of thinking to be done by history teachers in accounting...
Unpacking the suitcase and finding history: doing justice to the teaching of diverse histories in the classroom
-
Polychronicon 154: Elizabeth I
Teaching History feature
Elizabeth I is admired today for her power dressing and her power portraits; her political acumen and her success in a man's world.
The adulation of Elizabeth started during her own lifetime when she was praised as a goddess and even as a celestial power. Elizabeth's semi-mythical status is reflected...
Polychronicon 154: Elizabeth I
-
Combating a Cook-centric past through co-curricular learning
Teaching History article
Combating a Cook-centric past through co-curricular learning: Year 9 dig out maps and rulers to challenge generalisations about the Age of Discovery
Paula Worth presents in this article a means of challenging students' tendency to generalise even when they know that they should not. How can we encourage our students...
Combating a Cook-centric past through co-curricular learning
-
Cunning Plan 154: Who is buried in the box?
Teaching History feature
Question: Who is buried in the box?
Seeking a new and exciting way to introduce my Year 7 students to history, I looked to a practical solution. Ian Dawson once used a Thinking History exercise where students looked at the idea of ‘layers of history'. It was useful in structuring...
Cunning Plan 154: Who is buried in the box?
-
Making sense of the eighteenth century
Teaching History article
Making sense of the eighteenth century
Pressures on curriculum time force us all to make difficult choices about curriculum content, but the eighteenth century seems to have suffered particular neglect. Inspired by the tercentenary of the accession of the first Georgian king and the interest in the Acts of Union prompted...
Making sense of the eighteenth century
-
Period, place and mental space
Teaching History article
Period, place and mental space: using historical scholarship to develop Year 7 pupils' sense of period
What is a sense of period? And how can pupils' sense of period be developed? Questions such as these have troubled history teachers for many years, often revolving around debates over the role played by...
Period, place and mental space
-
Teaching History Curriculum Supplement 2014
Changes to the secondary history curriculum
Although modifications to the content of the National Curriculum for history have not been as dramatic as once feared, the effective revocation of the previous attainment target is radical indeed. When these changes are considered alongside the fact that more than half of maintained secondary schools (all academies and free...
Teaching History Curriculum Supplement 2014
-
Move Me On 144: Defines GCSE teaching in terms of a diet of practice exam questions
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem: Roger Wendover has come to define GCSE teaching in terms of a diet of practice exam questions.
Roger is a few weeks into his second placement and his mentor, John, has been taken aback by the rigid approach that he has adopted in teaching Year 10. John was...
Move Me On 144: Defines GCSE teaching in terms of a diet of practice exam questions
-
Understanding 'change and continuity' through colours and timelines
Teaching History article
The small-scale research that Yosanne Vella reports in this article was driven by concern to help pupils develop ‘big picture' visions of the past and to engage effectively with the idea of change as a process rather than an event. The strategy that she adopts - asking groups of students...
Understanding 'change and continuity' through colours and timelines
-
Regional Aspects of the Scottish Reformation
Classic Pamphlet
Reformation Perspective
In recent years studies of the Scottish Reformation have undergone a marked change. Religion is seldom advanced as the sole mainspring of the events of 1560 and explanations have been increasingly sought in political and economic terms. On the political side growing opposition to French influence within Scotland...
Regional Aspects of the Scottish Reformation
-
Adam Smith
Classic Pamphlet
Adam Smith 1723-1790
Adam Smith was so pre-eminently one of the master minds of the eighteenth century and so obviously one of the dominating influences of the nineteenth, in his own country and in the world at large, that is somewhat surprising that we are so ill-informed regarding the details...
Adam Smith
-
The Evidence of the Casket Letters
Classic Pamphlet
It has been well said that the last word will never be written on the tragedy of Mary Stuart, for her fate presents problems which invite solution from the historians of successive generations, and yet can never be wholly solved, If the charge brought against the Queen of complicity in...
The Evidence of the Casket Letters
-
Women in Late Medieval Bristol
Classic Pamphlet
During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Bristol was one of England's greatest towns, with a population of perhaps 100,000 after the Black Death of 1348. Its status was recognised in 1373, with its creation as the realm's first provincial urban county, but only in 1542, with the creation of the...
Women in Late Medieval Bristol
-
Podcast Series: An Introduction to Magna Carta
An Introduction to Magna Carta
What precedents were there to Magna Carta? Why was the charter originally drawn up and signed in 1215? Why was it reissued during the thirteenth century? Would “ordinary” people have been aware of Magna Carta? How effective was Magna Carta as means to controlling medieval kings? Why was it resurrected...
Podcast Series: An Introduction to Magna Carta
-
Prehistoric Scotland
Classic Pamphlet
Prehistory is an attempt to reconstruct the story of human societies inhabiting a given region before the full historical record opens there. Its data, furnished by archaeology, are the constructions members of such societies erected and the durable objects they made. The events which should form its subject matter naturally...
Prehistoric Scotland
-
India in 1914
Historian article
Rather as Queen Victoria was never as ‘Victorian' as we tend to assume, so British India in the years leading up to 1914 does not present the cliched spectacle of colonists in pith helmets and shorts lording it over subservient natives that we might assume. Certainly that sort of relationship...
India in 1914
-
Franz Ferdinand
Historian article
The Kapuzinerkirche (Church of the Capuchins) in Vienna's Neue Markt is one of the more curious attractions of the city, housing as it does the Kaisergruft crypt in which the Habsburgs are entombed, or rather in which their bodies are entombed: the hearts are usually kept in the Loreto Chapel...
Franz Ferdinand
-
The Romanov Tercentenary: nostalgia versus history on the eve of the Great War
Historian article
The spring of 2013 was unusually significant for devotees of the Romanov dynasty. Though there was little international recognition of the fact, the season marked the 400th anniversary of the accession of Russia's first Romanov tsar. Historically, the story was a most dramatic one, for Mikhail Fedorovich had not seized...
The Romanov Tercentenary: nostalgia versus history on the eve of the Great War
-
Lions of the Great War: How are Sikh soldiers of the First World War seen today?
Key Stage Three History scheme of work
This Key Stage Three History scheme of work focuses in depth on the contribution of Sikh soldiers from the Indian subcontinent fighting on behalf of the UK between 1914 and 1918. It is designed to follow on from a focus on the First World War, probably in Year Nine and...
Lions of the Great War: How are Sikh soldiers of the First World War seen today?
-
Cunning Plan 142: Why do historical interpretations change over time?
Teaching History feature
History teachers have been talking about the need to teach broad narratives, overview and chronology for a long time. They have also recognised how essential it is for students to have an opportunity to study the ways in which the past has been interpreted, and the reasons why these interpretations...
Cunning Plan 142: Why do historical interpretations change over time?
-
Seeing the historical world
Teaching History article
In this article, Lindsay Cassedy, Catherine Flaherty and Michael Fordham draw upon their empirical research to assess what understandings their students had of historical interpretations at the end of their compulsory education in history. They found that most students operated with an underlying epistemological model that did not reflect the...
Seeing the historical world
-
Four faces of nursing and the First World War
Historian article
With the centenary approaching, article after article will appear on battles, the men who fought, those who refused, those that died, those who returned and those that made the decisions. There will be articles on the home front and the women that stepped into the men's shoes often to be...
Four faces of nursing and the First World War
