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Time's arrows? Using a dartboard scaffold to understand historical action
Teaching History article
Arthur Chapman presents a task-specific scaffold - a ‘dart' board - designed to teach students how to interrogate sources of information so that these become sources of evidence for particular claims about past actions, beliefs and aims. Chapman also uses his ‘dart' board to foster students' reflection on the degrees of...
Time's arrows? Using a dartboard scaffold to understand historical action
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Substantial sculptures or sad little plaques? Making 'interpretations' matter to Year 9
Teaching History article
Andrew Wrenn builds upon current, popular and practical work on ‘interpretations of history' analysed in recent editions. Using the public's responses to the temporary exhibition on the slave trade housed at Bristol City Museum, he offers a range of fascinating practical activities for Year 9 pupils. Many of these could...
Substantial sculptures or sad little plaques? Making 'interpretations' matter to Year 9
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Why go on a pilgrimage? Using a concluding enquiry to reinforce and assess earlier learning
Teaching History article
Jamie Byrom describes the learning activities within a final enquiry for a National Curriculum area of study - Britain 1066-1500. The strong message in this article is that the learning in each enquiry is only as good as the planning and teaching of the enquiries that precede it. Byrom's model...
Why go on a pilgrimage? Using a concluding enquiry to reinforce and assess earlier learning
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Equiano - voice of silent slaves?
Teaching History article
Andrew Wrenn shows how a study of the life of Olaudah Equiano can support pupils’ historical learning in a number of ways. Not only is this a ‘little story’ that can help to illuminate or raise questions about the the ‘big picture’, it can also help pupils to reflect upon...
Equiano - voice of silent slaves?
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Camels, diamonds and counterfactuals: a model for teaching causal reasoning
Teaching History article
In the last edition of Teaching History, Arthur Chapman described how he uses ICT to develop sixth form students’ conceptual understanding of interpretations, significance and change. In this article, he turns his attention to causal reasoning and analysis. Drawing on the work of historians such as Evans and Carr, he...
Camels, diamonds and counterfactuals: a model for teaching causal reasoning
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Teaching pupils how history works
Teaching History article
In the last edition of Teaching History Jayne Prior and Peter John presented an approach to extended writing that relied upon pupils’ earlier work.1 Pupil indignation was key. Furious at the blandness of some text presented to them, they used their own knowledge of colour, detail and drama to challenge...
Teaching pupils how history works
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... youth culture?
Teaching History feature
For such a boldly iconoclastic work, the Key Stage 3 textbook A New Focus on ... British Social History, c.1920–2000 (2023) provides a disarmingly conventional account of youth in the 1960s as ‘mostly better educated and informed than their parents had been at their age [and able] … to find...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... youth culture?
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Triumphs Show 108: Getting the whole school buzzing about history
Teaching History feature
It was the brainwave of the English department to bring in a script writer to work with Key Stage 3 students of the full ability range writing the lower school production. This was too good an opportunity for the history department to miss.
Triumphs Show 108: Getting the whole school buzzing about history
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Emotional response or objective enquiry? Using shared stories and a sense of place in the study of interpretations for GCSE
Article
In this article, Andrew Wrenn explores some issues that teachers might consider when supporting 14 and 15 year olds in their study of war memorials as historical interpretations. Tony McAleavy has argued that ‘popular' and ‘personal' interpretations and representations are just as worthy of study at Key Stage 3 as...
Emotional response or objective enquiry? Using shared stories and a sense of place in the study of interpretations for GCSE
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Emotional response or objective enquiry? Using shared stories and a sense of place
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
In this article, Andrew Wrenn explores some issues that teachers might consider when supporting 14 and 15 year olds in their study of war memorials as historical interpretations. Tony McAleavy has argued that ‘popular' and...
Emotional response or objective enquiry? Using shared stories and a sense of place
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Cunning Plan 144: promoting independent student enquiry
Teaching History feature
Getting students to generate their own questions can seem like a formidable challenge, even for experienced teachers with extensive subject knowledge developed over years of teaching. Imagine how much more alarming it appeared to a student-teacher being encouraged to take risks by handing more responsibility to the students. Could it...
Cunning Plan 144: promoting independent student enquiry
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Disembarking the religious rollercoaster
Teaching History article
Sarah Jackson-Buckley and Jessie Phillips found themselves perennially dissatisfied with the outcomes of their teaching of the Protestant Reformation. Determined that students should take away a sense of the momentous political and social consequences of the Reformation, they turned to historical scholarship, and to the work of other history teachers on...
Disembarking the religious rollercoaster
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Broadening horizons: using cross-curricular conversations to support historical understanding
Teaching History article
Bettney and Ridley focus on the context in which we teach and in which our students learn and on history in the context of the whole school curriculum and in relation to education about personal development. Taking the example of learning about parliament, they explore how the history curriculum and the...
Broadening horizons: using cross-curricular conversations to support historical understanding
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Meeting the historian through the text
Teaching History article
Edna Shoham and Neomi Shiloah describe a process by which they taught their 15-year-old students to read historians’ accounts for sub-text, meaning and assumptions. In its emphasis on ‘meeting the historian’, their work overlaps with much of the thinking about teaching pupils about historical ‘interpretations’ as specifically required by the...
Meeting the historian through the text
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Thinking from the inside: je suis le roi
Teaching History article
Dale Banham and Ian Dawson show how active learning deepens students’ understanding of attitudes and reactions to the Norman Conquest. At the same time they build a bold argument for active learning, including a direct strike at the two most common objections to it. Many teachers still see it as...
Thinking from the inside: je suis le roi
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Recorded webinar: Exploring representations and attitudes to disability across history
Webinar
This webinar was presented by Richard Rieser, who is a campaigner and champion for disability rights and the coordinator of UK Disability History Month.
His presentation is part of our ongoing work to explore disability history and the arguments and representations of it and ensure that people from disability groups...
Recorded webinar: Exploring representations and attitudes to disability across history
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Using an anthology of substantial sources at GCSE
Teaching History article
Struck by his GCSE students’ bewildered expressions when studying source extracts, Liam McDonnell decided to adopt a new approach to source analysis. Inspired by the work of other history teachers, McDonnell decided to use an anthology of substantial sources when studying nineteenth-century Whitechapel in London. By revisiting the sources at...
Using an anthology of substantial sources at GCSE
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Triumphs Show 136: how one history department changed pupils' and parents' perceptions of homework
Teaching History feature
Devising worthwhile and engaging homework tasks, week in week out, can prove both demanding and frustrating - particularly in contexts where we know students will have be chased to complete them.
How can we make homework planning easier and more effective - and cut down the time spent chasing recalcitrant...
Triumphs Show 136: how one history department changed pupils' and parents' perceptions of homework
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... gender and sexuality
Teaching History feature
Although they overlap, gender and sexuality are each a distinctive field of historical research. Researching in these fields involves cross-disciplinary work and a range of media and methods. One of the greatest challenges is that of terminology: how to refer to the gender identity or sexuality of a subject in...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... gender and sexuality
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Reimagining the ‘Aba Riots’
Teaching History article
As an Early Career Teacher, Eleri Hedley-Carter set out to make the history she teaches in school more reflective of her undergraduate study of history – a discipline that strives to uncover a diverse past through various lenses and historical methods. In addition to expanding her school’s curriculum to include an...
Reimagining the ‘Aba Riots’
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Cunning Plan 178: How far did Anglo-Saxon England survive the Norman Conquest?
Teaching History feature
Cunning Plan for using the metaphor of a tree to help students characterise the process of change and engage with a historian’s argument.
In this Cunning Plan, Eve Hackett sets out how she used a recent work of history about the Norman Conquest as inspiration for her teaching of Year...
Cunning Plan 178: How far did Anglo-Saxon England survive the Norman Conquest?
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Modelling the discipline
Teaching History article
David Hibbert and Zaiba Patel decided to work together after becoming concerned that school history curricula might not enable students to interrogate popular British mythologising about World War II. Building on these pre-existing concerns, their collaboration with the historian Yasmin Khan yielded an Interpretations enquiry which asked students to consider...
Modelling the discipline
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Attempting to reach the heart of the matter
Journal article
Michael McIntyre and Vanessa Hull explain the work of Facing History and Ourselves, an education organisation based in the United States and working internationally.
Facing History aims to engage students in reflection on why violence occurred in the past, on what this teaches us about the world today and on...
Attempting to reach the heart of the matter
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Triumphs Show 192: Balancing micro- and macronarratives of the Holocaust
Teaching History feature
Lien de Jong celebrates her 90th birthday in September 2023. In lots of ways, her biography is similar to many Europeans of her generation. She was born, grew up and went to school in The Hague during the 1930s. She trained to work in a nursery. In the 1950s, she...
Triumphs Show 192: Balancing micro- and macronarratives of the Holocaust
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New, Novice or Nervous? 164: Constructing narrative
Teaching History feature: the quick guide to the no-quick-fix
Narrative is shedding its status as the ‘underrated skill’, re-emerging as a requirement of the new GCSE in England. As Counsell has argued, constructing a narrative is ‘no easy option’, however, and asking students to ‘Write an account…’ lacks the comfortable familiarity of ‘Explain why…’ or ‘How far…’. Fortunately, many...
New, Novice or Nervous? 164: Constructing narrative
