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Bruce! You're history.' The place of history in the Scottish curriculum
Teaching History article
History teachers in Scotland are feeling vulnerable. A curriculum review is leading to debates about history’s place in schools – will it or should it be a statutory part of Scotland’s curriculum for 11-14 year olds? Many of the concerns in Sam Henry’s article will ring true for teachers throughout...
Bruce! You're history.' The place of history in the Scottish curriculum
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Hitting the right note: how useful is the music of African-Americans to historians?
Teaching History article
Here is a wonderful reminder of the richness of materials available to history teachers. With ever greater emphasis being placed on different learning styles, it is a good moment to remind ourselves that we can cater for virtually all of them in our classrooms. This includes a preference for learning...
Hitting the right note: how useful is the music of African-Americans to historians?
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English, history and song in Year 9: mixing enquiries for a cross-curricular approach to teaching the most able
Teaching History article
Several articles in previous editions of Teaching History have touched on the themes of crosscurricularity, Assessment for Learning and the most able. Tony McConnell and Mandy Monaghan bring these themes together in describing how the English and history departments in their school have taken advantage of a natural area of...
English, history and song in Year 9: mixing enquiries for a cross-curricular approach to teaching the most able
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Promote the past, celebrate the present: putting your history department in the news
Teaching History article
Dan Collins urges history teachers to promote both their subject and their department in the local press. Drawing on his experience of a history department in a large, mixed, multi-cultural comprehensive school in West London, Dan argues that there are many opportunities available, from national anniversaries to the success of...
Promote the past, celebrate the present: putting your history department in the news
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Voices from Rwanda: when seeing is better than hearing
Teaching History article
Where were you when you last witnessed history being formed? How did you know that the events you had witnessed would turn out to be significant? The missile attack on a plane in Rwanda on 6 April 1994 passed Martyn Beer by at the time. It was later that he...
Voices from Rwanda: when seeing is better than hearing
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Teaching about heritage through a cross-curricular enquiry
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
What should we do with our brightest and best? Neal Watkin and Johannes Ahrenfelt suggest an enquiry for a very high ability Year 8 group which is both challenging and genuinely historical. The enquiry itself...
Teaching about heritage through a cross-curricular enquiry
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The hidden crisis in GCSE History
Teaching History article
Joining the debate launched in the last edition, John Dixon argues that in relation to competing subjects, history has become harder. He believes that this could be reviewed without loss of standards. He highlights what he sees as a perverse situation of conflicting trends: on the one hand, practice in...
The hidden crisis in GCSE History
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The importance of history
Article
The importance of history: Powerpoint presentation from the Regional Subject CfBT/HA ConferencesStarting point. Creating a departmental vision.The construction of any curriculum begins with questions about the purpose and philosophy of the curriculum. The new orders for history offer departments a ready made statement of history's importance and purpose.
The importance of history
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A Guide to the Key Stage 3 programme (pre-2014)
Key Stage 3 Guide
Please note: this unit was produced for a previous national curriculum (pre-2014). However, much of the advice remains useful and it provides a context to topics that continue to be very important for history teachers. Subject leaders, ITE providers and others may find it useful to consider how currently relevant topics were...
A Guide to the Key Stage 3 programme (pre-2014)
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Planning and Teaching the New Key Stage 3 PoS
Website Link
These notes, ideas and teaching suggestions have developed from CPD courses run over the last few years and from planning and developing SHP resources for the new KS3 programme.
Inevitably, it's a statement of current thinking with ideas constantly developing but I hope it proves useful and practical in helping...
Planning and Teaching the New Key Stage 3 PoS
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Past Forward: Interpretations of History
Article
The internet revolution has accentuated the need for critical thinking about different interpretations of the past and has also generated a huge and exciting range of possibilities in terms of web-based sources and interpretations. Most teachers are now familiar with the many excellent websites that are designed to support school...
Past Forward: Interpretations of History
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Key Stage 3 New Programme of study resources: Part 1
Article
The HA supported by the CfBT is in the process of developing resources to enable secondary teachers to tackle the new Key Stage 3 programme of study for history. We shall be devoting an entire section of the website to these resources taking you through the concepts, processes, range and...
Key Stage 3 New Programme of study resources: Part 1
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Ofsted and History in Schools
Article
HM Inspector John Hamer reviews the evidence. In a lecture marking the 150th anniversary of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Schools, Peter Gordon recalled a nineteenth century HMI, the Reverend W.H. Brookfield. His circle of friends included Tennyson, the Hallams and Thomas Carlyle.
Ofsted and History in Schools
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Film history in the Classroom
Article
A PowerPoint presentation by Ben Walsh indicating ways in which we can use Film in the history classroom. We often look at images or watch film clips but do we always see all that there is to see...Click the link below to open the presentation>>>
Film history in the Classroom
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ICT Resources for GCSE History Teachers
Article
The HA has compiled 3 invaluable spreadsheets that take you through the main History GCSE specifications, topic by topic, providing online resources for each topic and covering all the areas specified by the main awarding bodies. Each spreadsheet takes you through each specification and is filled with links to all the best available...
ICT Resources for GCSE History Teachers
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Past Forward: Keynote address: fulfilling history's potential
Article
How much is it possible to love a subject? “I get so excited about my next history lesson” wrote Peter in December, “that I find myself dreaming about it before it happens”.1 How much is it possible for a teacher to love a subject? You love it so much that...
Past Forward: Keynote address: fulfilling history's potential
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Past Forward: History, Citizenship and Identity
Article
History teaching is inextricably associated with values and ideology. This paper argues that if history is to remain a vibrant element of the curriculum in the future, then history teachers will have to meet a number of specific challenges. Central in this respect is the issue of history’s unique contribution...
Past Forward: History, Citizenship and Identity
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Past Forward: Historical significance
Article
I recently came across the following in a Sunday newspaper: The Government is expected to announce a major overhaul of mathematics teaching in the next few days and it will be writing to employers and teaching bodies to ask how the subject can be ‘made more relevant to the twenty-first...
Past Forward: Historical significance
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AS & A2 History
Article
My complaints about the new AS/A2 specifications have been reported elsewhere,1 but below I outline my main concerns regarding the new examination system, which I see as a missed opportunity to introduce a 16-19 History curriculum that meets the needs of young people in the twenty-first century. The Curriculum 2000...
AS & A2 History
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I understood before, but not like this: maximising historical learning by letting pupils take control of trips
Teaching History article
We are used, in the current idiom, to ‘sharing objectives with pupils’. Too often, however, they are emphatically our objectives rather than theirs and sharing is shorthand for one-way communication. Helen Snelson’s article explores what sharing objectives can mean when objectives are genuinely jointly produced, rather than ‘cascaded’ and reports...
I understood before, but not like this: maximising historical learning by letting pupils take control of trips
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Making history meaningful: helping students see why history matters
Teaching History article
October 17 saw thousands of people writing a blog of a normal Tuesday as part of the ‘History Matters’ campaign. There was great media interest in the event and the papers were full of the blogs of the famous and not so famous; people were keen to write up their...
Making history meaningful: helping students see why history matters
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Developing a history department intranet as a resource for students and staff
Article
Four years ago, as an academic historian with a recently-acquired Secondary History PGCE, I was striving to satisfactorily deal with the many challenges faced by all NQTs in their first appointment. Among many other things, it was the sheer pace of the school day and the practical issues of lesson...
Developing a history department intranet as a resource for students and staff
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Nutshell
Article
This edition of 'Nutshell' discusses 'using Performance Management objectives to improve your history teaching'.
Nutshell
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Nutshell
Article
This edition of 'Nutshell' highlights concerns about the AS/A2 assessments.
Nutshell
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Nutshell
Article
This edition of 'Nutshell' discusses 'The future of GCSE history'.
Nutshell
