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Historical learning using concept cartoons
Teaching History article
Although perhaps unfamiliar to the majority of our readers, concept cartoons are not a new educational tool. Christoph Kühberger here lays out his rationale for using this technique, borrowed from science education, in history teaching. Concept cartoons provide a means for pupils to express such difficult historical concepts as the...
Historical learning using concept cartoons
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Year 7 use oral traditions to make claims about the rise and fall of the Inka empire
Teaching History article
As part of her department’s effort to diversify the history curriculum, Paula Worth began a quest to research and then shape a lesson sequence around the Inkas. Her article shows how she allowed the new topic and its historiography to challenge and extend her own use of sources, particularly oral tradition....
Year 7 use oral traditions to make claims about the rise and fall of the Inka empire
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The mechanics of history: interpretations and claim construction processes
Teaching History article
Holly Hiscox was concerned that many of her A-level students – asked to evaluate three different historical interpretations for their non-examined assessment task – still tended to hold unhelpful misconceptions about the nature of interpretations. In this article she explains how she created an introductory scheme of work to help them understand...
The mechanics of history: interpretations and claim construction processes
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Questions and answers about questions and answers
Teaching History article
Intrigued by the wide range of pupils’ responses to a sourcebased essay question, Jonathan Sellin decided to investigate why pupils were using sources in such different ways. Probing his own philosophical assumptions about history, and how they have changed over time, prompted Sellin to explore pupils’ assumptions about how historians use sources to make claims about the past. By asking pupils to...
Questions and answers about questions and answers
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Building Key Stage 5 students’ analysis of interpretations
Article
Students of A-level history are required to analyse and evaluate historical interpretations. Samuel Head found limitations in his Year 13 students’ understanding of how and why historians arrive at differing interpretations, which impeded their ability to analyse them. He set about tackling this with carefully sequenced planning and a processual model...
Building Key Stage 5 students’ analysis of interpretations
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Unpicking the threads of interpretations
Teaching History article
Determined to do justice to the complexity of the seventeenth century, as a messy but crucial period in British history, and to develop their pupils’ disciplinary understanding of how and why interpretations of the past are constructed, Dan Keates and his department set out to exploit the rich seam of...
Unpicking the threads of interpretations
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Moving Year 9 towards more complex causal explanations of Holocaust perpetration
Teaching History article
Building on research by the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education, Matthew Duncan was concerned that his students were drawn to simplistic explanations of Holocaust perpetrators’ actions. As well as the UCL Centre’s research, Duncan drew on history education research from Canada and history teachers’ theorisation in England for inspiration in...
Moving Year 9 towards more complex causal explanations of Holocaust perpetration
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Film: What's the wisdom on... Historical Interpretations
Your Virtual History Department Meeting
We’ve been talking to our secondary school members and we know how difficult life is for teachers in the current circumstances, so we wanted to lend a helping hand.
'What’s the wisdom on…' is a new and already popular feature in our secondary journal Teaching History and provides the perfect stimulus for a...
Film: What's the wisdom on... Historical Interpretations
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What’s the wisdom on… Interpretations of the past
Teaching History feature
How often do your pupils actually look at the products of historians – their scholarly writing, their debates, their to-and-fro of argument?
What's the Wisdom On... is a short guide providing new history teachers with an overview of the ‘story so far’ of practice-based professional thinking about a particular aspect of...
What’s the wisdom on… Interpretations of the past
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From ‘double vision’ to panorama: exploring interpretations of Nazi popularity
Teaching History article
Jim Carroll relished the opportunity, in the new A-level specification he was teaching, to find an effective way of teaching his students to analyse interpretations in their coursework essays. Reflecting on the difficulties he had faced as a trainee teacher teaching younger pupils about interpretations, and dissatisfied with examination board...
From ‘double vision’ to panorama: exploring interpretations of Nazi popularity
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Why history is the future: the centrality of historical thinking in the AI age
Teaching History article
Many young people, aware of the rapid development and widespread use of generative forms of artificial intelligence, assume that the knowledge and skills they will need to navigate their future bear little relationship to those offered by the study of history. In response to these assumptions, Kieran Lavis and Katharine Burn...
Why history is the future: the centrality of historical thinking in the AI age
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What’s The Wisdom On… using material culture in the classroom?
Teaching History feature
How often do you refer to objects in the classroom? When did you last explore with your pupils the materiality of past lives? The ‘material turn’ in historical research and scholarship opens up different lines of enquiry and different kinds of history from those revealed by documentary evidence. It can...
What’s The Wisdom On… using material culture in the classroom?
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Triumphs Show: Seeing consequences in 3D
Teaching History feature
‘You think you’ve found a way to help our Year 7s explain historical consequence?’ My head of department sounded intrigued. ‘View them as shockwaves!’ I exclaimed. ‘Just like Boba Fett’s ship in Star Wars!’ My head of department raised an eyebrow.
It was September 2024, and I had just joined...
Triumphs Show: Seeing consequences in 3D
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Cunning Plan 165: Helping lower-attaining students
Teaching History feature
My GCSE students were about to embark on their controlled assessment, which asked them to weigh up conflicting views on the British military’s contribution to the D-Day landings. Students were asked to engage with a range of historians’ views and textbooks as well as some contemporary source material to assess...
Cunning Plan 165: Helping lower-attaining students
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Triumphs Show 164: interpretations at A Level
Teaching History feature: celebrating and sharing success
Julia Huber and Katherine Turner found that their A-level students struggled to identify the line of argument in a passage of historical scholarship, an essential prerequisite for answering their coursework question. They devised an activity that helped students to unpick and visually contrast historians’ interpretations of the relative importance of...
Triumphs Show 164: interpretations at A Level
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Year 8 and interpretations of the First World War
Teaching History article
Dan Smith was concerned that his pupils were drawing on over-simplified generalisations about different periods of the past when they were considering why interpretations change over time. This led him to consider how pupils’ contextual knowledge and chronological fluency might be used more explicitly in order to avoid weak generalisations...
Year 8 and interpretations of the First World War
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Beyond the bolt-on: placing local history at the heart of a diverse and decolonial curriculum
Teaching History article
Students’ rapt response to a filmed interview with a former miner now working as part of the school’s premises team convinced Fred Oxby of the power of local stories. This was not simply because they captured students’ attention, nor even because such stories enabled them to see that history was not...
Beyond the bolt-on: placing local history at the heart of a diverse and decolonial curriculum
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Tracing the popular memory of Rosa Parks with Year 9
Teaching History article
Inspired by Jeanne Theoharis’s biography of Rosa Parks, Ed Durbin initially planned to challenge the ‘fable’ that had been constructed around her life. He soon realised, however, that he wanted to take the opportunity to get ‘behind’ the fable and help his students understand how and why it had been constructed. Drawing...
Tracing the popular memory of Rosa Parks with Year 9
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Who inherits the house? Using heritage to shape pupils’ thinking about historical significance
Teaching History article
Reflecting on the reasons why generic models for teaching historical significance are never quite adequate, Rachel Foster found herself considering, instead, the specific contexts in which arguments about historical significance arise. These reflections took her to the fascinating example of stately homes. Drawing on scholarship such as that of Peter...
Who inherits the house? Using heritage to shape pupils’ thinking about historical significance
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Shaping what matters: Year 9 decide why we should care about the Windrush scandal
Teaching History article
Mark Fowle began work on an enquiry to contextualise the Windrush scandal for his pupils in south London, in response to the first national Stephen Lawrence Day, in 2018. He went on to work with his colleagues in a new school to broaden pupils’ historical perspective through stories of migration...
Shaping what matters: Year 9 decide why we should care about the Windrush scandal
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Lengthening Year 9’s narrative of the American civil rights movement
Teaching History article
Inspired by reading the work of Stephen Tuck, Ellie Osborne set out to design a new sequence of lessons that would help her students adopt a longer lens on the American civil rights movement. At the same time, Osborne wanted to put more emphasis on the agency and campaigns of activists,...
Lengthening Year 9’s narrative of the American civil rights movement
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How visual evidence reflects change and continuity in attitudes to the police in the 19th and early 20th centuries
Teaching History article
While history teachers (and examiners) regularly invite students to consider what cartoons or paintings reveal about contemporary attitudes to particular social or political developments, such sources are often difficult to interpret and to use appropriately. Drawing on a wealth of detailed research and a passion to support teachers and students with...
How visual evidence reflects change and continuity in attitudes to the police in the 19th and early 20th centuries
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Broadening Year 7’s British history horizons with Welsh medieval sources
Teaching History article
Hiscox wanted to broaden her students’ understanding of the complexity of the British past, and developed an enquiry into the Norman Conquest of Wales to help achieve that aim. Hiscox reports her enquiry design and its outcomes, sharing how she broadened both content and the types of sources that students...
Broadening Year 7’s British history horizons with Welsh medieval sources
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Using eighteenth-century material culture to develop evidential thinking in Year 8
Teaching History article
It seems that teapots really can talk. Eleanor Dimond took her undergraduate experience of studying material culture into the classroom, with startling results. Historians of material culture have developed distinctive evidential methods which, in stark contrast to typical GCSE and A-Level approaches, see a strong interplay between analysis of the physical attributes...
Using eighteenth-century material culture to develop evidential thinking in Year 8
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Fifties Britain through the senses: ‘never had it so good’?
Teaching History article
Maya Stiasny was faced with difficulties familiar to many of us. Her new Year 12 students were struggling to get to grips with a new period of history. They were not interrogating primary sources with sufficient vigour. Her solution, detailed here, was novel. Working on the rich social history of post-war...
Fifties Britain through the senses: ‘never had it so good’?
