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Asses, archers and assumptions: strategies for improving thinking skills in history in Years 9 to 13
Teaching History article
Thinking skills’ is a term that has been substantially over-used. It often seems to be rather a lazy shorthand for justifying the teaching of history by suddenly bolting on some ‘thinking’ - as if history is not all about thought in the first place. Arthur Chapman suggests using techniques from...
Asses, archers and assumptions: strategies for improving thinking skills in history in Years 9 to 13
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Helping students put shape on the past; systematic use of analogies to accelerate understanding
Teaching History article
One of the challenges facing pupils in the history classroom is conceptual understanding. Pupils also find it difficult to recognise themes or patterns across different parts of time and space. Ian Myson has recognised the importance of analogy as a way to facilitate pupils’ understanding. He is quick to recognise,...
Helping students put shape on the past; systematic use of analogies to accelerate understanding
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Less time, more thought: coping with the challenges of two-year Key Stage 3
Teaching History article
Nathan Cole and Denise Thompson have really thought about Key Stage 3. They have been forced to; they now teach it in only two years. The switch to a two-year Key Stage 3 has made them re-evaluate their entire programme of study, and their rationale for teaching history. The result...
Less time, more thought: coping with the challenges of two-year Key Stage 3
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'If Jesus Christ were amongst them, they would deceive Him'
Teaching History article
During discussions about planning, Tim Kemp and Charlotte Bickmore recently concluded that despite the name they give to their major Year 8 unit (The Making of the United Kingdom), they tend mainly to focus on England, and even more especially, on London. They have a good point. Ask an average...
'If Jesus Christ were amongst them, they would deceive Him'
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Worlds in collision: university tutor and student perspectives on the transition to degree level history
Teaching History article
What does it mean to be good at history? At certain times during their formal education students seem to be required to adjust their understanding of what studying history entails. Alan Booth writes from the viewpoint of a university tutor. He has collated ‘student voice’ on the experience of studying...
Worlds in collision: university tutor and student perspectives on the transition to degree level history
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Uncovering the hidden histories: black and Asian people in the two world wars
Teaching History Article
The stories we tell in history are often stories about ourselves. This can lead to tremendous distortion. Rupert Gaze was shocked when a young black student told him that there was no point in his studying the Second World War because it had nothing to do with him or his...
Uncovering the hidden histories: black and Asian people in the two world wars
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Developing conceptual understanding through talk mapping
Teaching History article
As history teachers, we talk about concepts all the time. We know that pupils need to understand them in order to make sense of the past. Precisely what we mean when we talk about concepts is less clear, however. Research into how history teachers talk about their practice suggests that,...
Developing conceptual understanding through talk mapping
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‘You hear about it for real in school.’ Avoiding, containing and risk-taking in the classroom
Teaching History article
In this article, Alison Kitson and Alan McCully discuss the findings of their research into history teaching in the most divided part of the United Kingdom: Northern Ireland. Drawing on interviews with students and teachers, they consider what history teaching might contribute to an understanding of the current situation and...
‘You hear about it for real in school.’ Avoiding, containing and risk-taking in the classroom
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Mussolini's marriage and a game in the playground: using analogy to help pupils understand the past
Teaching History article
Diana Laffin and Maggie Wilson want their pupils to connect with people in the past and to experience some of their emotions. The emotional factor is a difficult one in history, both for pupils and professional historians. When studying Eden’s actions at Suez, for example, what we lack is a...
Mussolini's marriage and a game in the playground: using analogy to help pupils understand the past
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The Spice of Life? Ensuring variety when teaching about the Treaty of Versailles
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Much has been said and written about different learning styles in recent years. Some people have responded with evangelical enthusiasm, others exercise a more cautious approach, whilst a few disregard it completely. Certainly, there are...
The Spice of Life? Ensuring variety when teaching about the Treaty of Versailles
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Does the linguistic release the conceptual? Helping Year 10 to improve their casual reasoning
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Does new vocabulary help students to express existing ideas for which they do not yet have words or does it actually give them new ideas which they did not previously hold? James Woodcock asks whether...
Does the linguistic release the conceptual? Helping Year 10 to improve their casual reasoning
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Do we have to read all of this?' Encouraging students to read for understanding
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
What’s the hardest part of history? Heads of Year 9 at options time seem depressingly clear - ‘Don’t do history, there’s too much writing.’ David Hellier and Helen Richards show that at The Green School...
Do we have to read all of this?' Encouraging students to read for understanding
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JFK: the medium, the message and the myth
Teaching History article
Dale Banham and Russell Hall present a multi-faceted rationale for an in-depth study of the 1991 film, JFK. They treat it as an ‘interpretation’ in the National Curriculum sense, constructing a varied and meticulous learning journey towards its analysis. By the end of that journey pupils had examined the central...
JFK: the medium, the message and the myth
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Why can't they just live together happily, Miss?' Unravelling the complexities of the Arab-Israeli conflict at GCSE
Teaching History article
How often do our students long for black and white rather than the shades of grey that history generally presents us with? Understanding the Arab-Israeli conflict is all about understanding diversity and complexity in all their shades of grey. Alison Stephen, teaching in an immensely diverse school herself, is determined...
Why can't they just live together happily, Miss?' Unravelling the complexities of the Arab-Israeli conflict at GCSE
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Seeing, hearing and doing the Renaissance (Part 1): Let's have a Renaissance party!
Teaching History article
In two, linked articles, appearing in this and the next edition, Maria Osowiecki shares an account of a five-lesson enquiry, based on the concept of historical significance (National Curriculum Key Element 2e) for mixed ability Year 8. She wanted to experiment with an array of creative teaching techniques that would...
Seeing, hearing and doing the Renaissance (Part 1): Let's have a Renaissance party!
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Using this map and all your knowledge, become Bismarck
Teaching History article
Understanding the past is not an abstract exercise. Historical questions revolve around decisions made by real people under real pressure. As historians, we factor psychological pressure into our analysis. How, though, are we to enable our students to do the same? To study why Bismarck began a programme of overseas...
Using this map and all your knowledge, become Bismarck
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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
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The Tudor Monarchy in crisis: using a historian's account to stretch the most able students in Year 8
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Contributors to this journal have long recognised that success in public examinations is at least partly achieved by carefully teaching in Key Stage 3. A critical component of A-Level is that students who wish to...
The Tudor Monarchy in crisis: using a historian's account to stretch the most able students in Year 8
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Historical significance - the forgotten 'Key Element'?
Teaching History article
How many history departments regularly discuss the quality of their enquiries and teaching processes that relate to historical significance? It would not be unusual, in 2002, for a history department to spend time in a department meeting reflecting upon pupils’ learning about causation or to explore the connection between pupils’...
Historical significance - the forgotten 'Key Element'?
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Picturing place: what you get may be more than what you see
Teaching History article
Pictures abound in history classrooms and teachers use them in many different ways. They add - often literally - some colour to the past, helping us to imagine what different worlds were like. Pictures can be used quite legitimately in this way to fire imagination and stimulate interest. But we...
Picturing place: what you get may be more than what you see
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Using fictional characters to explore the relationship between historical interpretation and contemporary attitude
Teaching History article
Helping students to understand how and why people in the present interpret the past differently is a challenge. It is also vital if we are to develop an understanding of why the meanings we ascribe to the past are not fixed, but rather are subject to our own prejudices or...
Using fictional characters to explore the relationship between historical interpretation and contemporary attitude
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'Please send socks': How much can Reg Wilkes tell us about the Great War?
Teaching History article
This was an opportunity all good historians dream about. A large box crammed with artefacts about a soldier who fought in the First World War, just begging to be read, studied, sorted and organised. Being faced with such a wealth of uncatalogued primary evidence could have proved daunting enough without...
'Please send socks': How much can Reg Wilkes tell us about the Great War?
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Moral dilemmas: history teaching and the Holocaust
Teaching History article
The new Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London has been very favourably received by the general public, and by teachers and their students. Initially controversial - was a war museum the ideal site for such an exhibition, for example? - it has since been widely praised for...
Moral dilemmas: history teaching and the Holocaust
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How did changing conceptions of place lead to conflict in the American West? Reflecting on revision methods for GCSE
Teaching History article
Mary Woolley decided to make four revision sheets for her lower-band Year 11 set. Each was to help them view their American West study through a different lens. She was rather uncertain, however (and so were the pupils) about her fourth sheet on places. Her reflections on the revision sheet...
How did changing conceptions of place lead to conflict in the American West? Reflecting on revision methods for GCSE
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Learning about an 800-year-old fight can't be all that bad, can it? Its like what Simon and Kane did yesterday': modern-day parallels in history
Teaching History article
Deborah Robbins charts a story of her own learning during the PGCE year. She explains how she identified a point of interest in her own practice - the use of modern-day examples. Turning this into a focus for testing her own hypotheses, she theorised from her own lessons to produce...
Learning about an 800-year-old fight can't be all that bad, can it? Its like what Simon and Kane did yesterday': modern-day parallels in history
