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Cunning Plan 96: teaching citizenship through KS3 history
Teaching History feature
Big theme: dissent and the formation of the concept of ‘rights'
You can teach citizenship not only without compromising National Curriculum content, processes and concepts, but in such a way as to improve them. Review your department's ‘whole Key Stage' planning. Secure rigour and high levels of challenge by remembering...
Cunning Plan 96: teaching citizenship through KS3 history
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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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Learning from a pandemic
Teaching History article
In order to contextualise and make sense of the Covid-19 pandemic, Verity Morgan worked with her school’s long-standing partner school in Ghana to devise an innovative project combining history and science, past and present. In this article, Morgan sets out the rationale for the project, her detailed adaptation of a British Council...
Learning from a pandemic
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Making rigour a departmental reality
Teaching History article
Faced with the introduction of a two-year key stage and a new whole-school assessment policy, Rachel Arscott and Tom Hinks decided to make a virtue out of necessity and reconsider their whole approach to planning, teaching and assessment at Key Stage 3. In this article they give an account of...
Making rigour a departmental reality
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Teaching the iGeneration
Teaching History article
Teaching the iGeneration: what possibilities exist in and beyond the history classroom?
The development of communications technology in recent years has not only changed the ways in which students can access their world: it also changes the way they think about it. Sheldrake and Watkin draw here upon work that...
Teaching the iGeneration
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Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime: using external support, local history and a group project to challenge the most able
Teaching History article
The most able can be challenged in a variety of ways and at a number of levels, from the extension question for the individual child to the extended enquiry for the most able class. In a Leading Edge History project, Guy Woolnough and his colleagues took the concept of challenge...
Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime: using external support, local history and a group project to challenge the most able
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Bringing Rwanda into the classroom
Teaching History article
A short 20 years: meeting the challenges facing teachers who bring Rwanda into the classroom
As the twentieth anniversary of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda approaches, Mark Gudgel argues that we should face the challenges posed by teaching about Rwanda. Drawing on his experience as a history teacher in the...
Bringing Rwanda into the classroom
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Understanding Key Concepts: Diversity
Article
Please note: this resource pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum. For more recent resources, see How diverse is your history curriculum? and Diversity links and resources for Secondary history.
This material enables history teachers to explore the concept of diversity.
Section 1 discusses the concept of diversity and its importance in the...
Understanding Key Concepts: Diversity
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Using databases to explore the real depth in the data
Teaching History article
Is it a good thing to have a lot of evidence? Surely the historian would answer that yes, it is: the more evidence that can be used, the better. The problem with this approach, though, is that too much data can be overwhelming for the history student - and, in...
Using databases to explore the real depth in the data
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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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Deconstructing lazy analogies in Year 9
Teaching History article
Reflecting on the continuing problem of students holding an impoverished understanding of the value or ‘uses' of history, Steve Rollett turned his attention to the question of analogy. He took the axiom to which students make common appeal (‘we can learn from mistakes in the past') and set about trying...
Deconstructing lazy analogies in Year 9
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Taking control of assessment
Teaching History article
Ian Luff recognised that in a post-levels world efforts to devise new assessment systems risked replicating old problems or creating new ones. Drawing on his many years’ experience of teaching and school leadership Luff argues that for assessment in history to be truly useful to teachers and pupils it needs...
Taking control of assessment
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Helping Year 9 explore the cultural legacies of WW1
Teaching History article
A world turned molten: helping Year 9 to explore the cultural legacies of the First World War
Rachel Foster shows how her own study of cultural history led to a new dimension in her planning. She wanted to show her students not only that historians are interested in many different...
Helping Year 9 explore the cultural legacies of WW1
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‘One big cake’: substantive knowledge of the mid-Tudor crisis in Year 7 students’ writing
Teaching History article
While looking to revamp his department’s Year 7 enquiry on the Tudors, Jack Mills turned to historiographical debates regarding the ‘mid-Tudor crisis’ to inform his curricular decision making. In doing so, Mills noted that the debate hinged on interpretations of substantive concepts such as ‘crisis’. He therefore also drew on previous...
‘One big cake’: substantive knowledge of the mid-Tudor crisis in Year 7 students’ writing
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How do we get better at going on trips: Planning for progression outside the classroom
Teaching History article
School trips are, it seems, always in the news. They are under threat, or vital, or the preserve of wealthier students, or a forum for poor behaviour, or a day out of the classroom to build relationships, or a fantastic learning experience where students learn important life skills (such as...
How do we get better at going on trips: Planning for progression outside the classroom
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Assessment and planning for progression at Key Stage 3
HA Guide and Links
The 2014 National Curriculum does not include an attainment target or any specified level against which you are expected to assess pupils' progress. The new attainment target says simply that:
‘By the end of each key stage, pupils are expected to know, apply and understand the matters, skills and processes...
Assessment and planning for progression at Key Stage 3
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Doing a Gombrich: Year 9 make connections by shaping big narratives
Article
Oliver Scott explains how he fused two goals: planning a new Year 9 history curriculum and finding a way to help Year 9 connect it all together. Inspired by the distinctive style of E.H. Gombrich, Scott decided to have his pupils write a grand narrative at mid- and end-year points. The narrative...
Doing a Gombrich: Year 9 make connections by shaping big narratives
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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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Using narratives and big pictures to address the challenges of a 2-year KS3 curriculum
Teaching History article
Faced with cutting her Key Stage 3 curriculum to two years, Natalie Kesterton and her department were determined to do more with less. Not only did they want to ensure that their pupils developed a secure, wide-ranging knowledge of British and world history, they also wanted to address deficits in pupils’...
Using narratives and big pictures to address the challenges of a 2-year KS3 curriculum
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Communicating about the past: Resource A
Article
Please note: this resource pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content and links may be outdated.
Nine examples of outcomes or tasks are described, that model the 'variety of ways' in which pupils can communicate about the past, all but one taken from issues of Teaching History. These examples...
Communicating about the past: Resource A
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Looking through the keyhole at Birkenhead from 1900 to 1950 with Year 7
Journal article
Matt Jones wanted to harness the power of local history to help his students understand the profound social changes experienced across Britain in the first half of the twentieth century.
While he hoped that the personal stories of six families in Birkenhead would help to humanise abstract concepts such as...
Looking through the keyhole at Birkenhead from 1900 to 1950 with Year 7
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Exploring big overviews through local depth
Teaching History article
Exploring big overviews through local depth
Rachel Foster and Kath Goudie's search for a more rigorous and interesting way of teaching Year 7 the Norman Conquest was initially driven by a desire to incorporate local history in a more meaningful way in their Key Stage 3 schemes of work.
This...
Exploring big overviews through local depth
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Bob Dylan and the concept of evidence
Teaching History article
No edition of Teaching History devoted to creativity could be complete without returning to the riches that popular songs offer to historians and history teachers alike. The five Bob Dylan songs that Christopher Edwards explores here are chosen not merely for their ‘literary qualities' and ‘emotional charge'; they also provide...
Bob Dylan and the concept of evidence
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Big Stories and Big Pictures: Making Outlines and Overviews Interesting
Teaching History journal article
An examination, with practical strategies, of the teaching of 'outlines and overviews' by Michael Riley.
Why teach overviews?
One of the problems of the first phase of National Curriculum history was the percieved overload of content. Some teachers felt obliged to race through the Programme of Study, treating issues in...
Big Stories and Big Pictures: Making Outlines and Overviews Interesting
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Assessing the Battle of Waterloo in the classroom
Teaching History article
Defying the Iron Duke: assessing the Battle of Waterloo in the classroom
The approaching bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo has stimulated debate about how it should be commemorated. This article reports a collaboration between the Waterloo200 Committee and Tom Wheeley, history teacher, to create a lesson sequence analysing the...
Assessing the Battle of Waterloo in the classroom