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Looking through a Josephine-Butler shaped window: focusing pupils' thinking on historical significance
Teaching History article
Christine Counsell draws upon her recent work in developing definitions and practice concerning pupils' thinking about historical significance. Here she tries out those ideas in relation to the 19th century campaigner against the Contagious Diseases Acts, Josephine Butler. Counsell explains why she developed her own set of criteria for structuring...
Looking through a Josephine-Butler shaped window: focusing pupils' thinking on historical significance
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The how of history: using old and new textbooks in the classroom to develop disciplinary knowledge
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
What are textbooks for and how do we think of them? As inevitably partial views of the past that reflect their purpose and moment of construction and their authors' location in physical and ideological time...
The how of history: using old and new textbooks in the classroom to develop disciplinary knowledge
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Introducing History Lab
A crowd-sourced history club
In 2021, teacher Richard Lewis founded History Lab as an idea for a history club that goes beyond the curriculum and enables students to think, form opinions and voice them as well as learning from one another's perspectives. The club can be led by a teacher, librarian or other knowledgeable...
Introducing History Lab
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Debates: Narratives - what matters most in school history education?
Teaching History article
In England, a curriculum review is imminent. Following a recent ‘call for evidence' by the government, further consultation on the future shape of history in schools will follow. The HA is currently consulting its membership and will be publishing discussion papers in January 2012. At such a time, everyone in...
Debates: Narratives - what matters most in school history education?
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Triumphs Show 180: From ‘most able’ to ‘mini’ historians
Teaching History feature
Finding ways to stretch and challenge the highest-attaining students has been a long-standing concern of many history teachers, and strategies for doing so have developed far beyond merely bolting on additional tasks. One way in which I have sought to challenge my own high-attaining students has been by setting them...
Triumphs Show 180: From ‘most able’ to ‘mini’ historians
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Cunning Plan 151: When and for whom has 1688 been 'Glorious'?
Teaching History feature
This enquiry is about how interpretations are formed and why they change. It aims to show Year 9, right at the end of their study of British history, the ways in which meanings of 1688 have shifted over time. It will test students' knowledge and strengthen their chronology of 300...
Cunning Plan 151: When and for whom has 1688 been 'Glorious'?
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Conducting the orchestra to allow our students to hear the symphony
Teaching History article
Alex Ford and Richard Kennett both welcome the renewed emphasis on knowledge within recent curriculum reforms in England, but are concerned about some of the ways in which the principle of a ‘knowledge-rich’ curriculum has been interpreted and transformed into particular pedagogical prescriptions. In this article they explain their reasons...
Conducting the orchestra to allow our students to hear the symphony
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... Stalin’s final years
Teaching History feature
Stalinism overshadows Soviet history. Few historical subjects are more controversial. Historians have read the years before 1928 as Stalin’s long rise to power, those after 1953 as an extended reckoning with the Stalinist dictatorship. Definitions of Stalinism fix the features, policies, and practices that constituted Stalin’s personal dictatorship between 1928...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... Stalin’s final years
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Numismatics and History
Classic Pamphlet
Numismatics may be defined as the science of money in its physical aspects. It is only indirectly connected with the theory of money, which belongs to the sphere of economics. Its subject-matter consists of the material objects which in most societies are used to measure the worth of goods and...
Numismatics and History
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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
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Film: What's the wisdom on... Causation
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 brand-new and already popular feature in our secondary journal Teaching History and provides the perfect...
Film: What's the wisdom on... Causation
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Round Table Discussion: Does Content Matter?
Annual Conference 2010
This round table discussion took place on Saturday 15th May 2010. The panel includes: Dr Katharine Burn (Editor of Teaching History), Dr Michael Riley (Director of the Schools History Project.); Colin Jones (President of the Royal Historical Society and Professor of History at Queen Mary, London); David Evans (Former Head of Eton).
Round Table Discussion: Does Content Matter?
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The International Journal Volume 3 Number 1
Journal
International Journal of Historical Teaching, Learning and Research
Volume 3 Number 1 January 2003
Editorial
British Island Stories: History, Schools and Nationhood - Robert Phillips
Articles
School History, National History and the Issue of National Identity - Ann Low-Beer
Nationalism and the Origins of Prejudice - Cedric Cullingford
...
The International Journal Volume 3 Number 1
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What’s The Wisdom On... history assessment?
Teaching History feature
Between 1991 and 1995, secondary history teachers in England and Wales had something of a collective awakening about assessment. It followed a huge policy shift in history education: history’s first National Curriculum, rolled out in 1991.
What's the Wisdom On... is a short guide providing new history teachers with an overview...
What’s The Wisdom On... history assessment?
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Building local history into the curriculum
Teaching History article
Neil Bates and Robert Bowry have chosen to tackle the issue of curriculum coherence by including local history, both as starting point for new students joining the school in Year 7 and as a golden thread running throughout their Key Stage 3 curriculum. In this article they explain the rationale...
Building local history into the curriculum
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Cunning Plan 185… for building difference into GCSE curriculum design
Teaching History feature
Many history teachers have been busy making space in their curriculum plans for different sorts of histories. This process, as Priyamavda Gopal has argued (in response to claims that moves to decolonise the curriculum constitute an attempt to censor history by editing out those bits viewed as ‘stains’ on the nation’s...
Cunning Plan 185… for building difference into GCSE curriculum design
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Developing independent learning with Year 7
Teaching History article
Jaya Carrier’s decision to focus on developing a more independent approach to learning in history at Key Stage 3 was prompted by concerns about her A-level students. In seeking to establish secure foundations for students’ own historical research, Carrier first examined the assumptions of her colleagues and her students. She...
Developing independent learning with Year 7
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Mapping a disability history perspective onto the history of the British Empire
Historian article
Disabled peoples could be found across the British Empire; at the same time, the process of colonisation could create forms of disability, while the concept of ‘disability’ became embedded in discourses of race and gender. In this article, Esme Cleall demonstrates how thinking about disability is essential to understanding the...
Mapping a disability history perspective onto the history of the British Empire
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On-demand webinar series: Developing students’ historical thinking at A-level
HA webinar series for subject leaders and teachers of history at KS5
What does this series cover?
This webinar series will help you to support your A-level students to gain detailed knowledge of particular periods and to engage in rigorous historical thinking. The topics covered will include building students’ knowledge, developing students’ disciplinary understanding in order to help them construct arguments in...
On-demand webinar series: Developing students’ historical thinking at A-level
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Finding fragments of change on Endell Street: an interdisciplinary approach
Teaching History article
Gemma Hargraves saw a history book recommended on social media and looked it up. Within the first pages she realised this was a book she needed to share with her students due to the positive female role models and other resonant themes. This article outlines a short sequence of lessons...
Finding fragments of change on Endell Street: an interdisciplinary approach
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Bringing together students from Bradford and Peshawar
Article
Connecting Classrooms: bringing together Bradford and Peshawar, primary and secondary schools, history and English
In this article, Dianne Excell shares her experience of a crossphase, collaborative project funded by the British Council that brought together teachers and pupils from three schools in Bradford and five schools in Peshawar, Pakistan. Although...
Bringing together students from Bradford and Peshawar
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The Aztecs & Spanish Conquest for GCSE
Briefing Pack
Ian Mursell set up Mexicolore in 1980 with his Mexican partner Graciela Sánchez and has worked since then with a wide variety of heritage and academic partners specialising in Aztec and Maya history. With the Aztecs now becoming a study unit on the OCR 2016 GCSE specification B, the Historical...
The Aztecs & Spanish Conquest for GCSE
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Causation
Key Concepts
Please note: these links were compiled in 2009. For a more recent resource, please see: What's the Wisdom on: Causation.
These Teaching History Articles on 'Causation' are highly recommended reading to those who would like to get to grips with this key concept:
1. Move Me On 92. Problem page for history mentors. Teaching...
Causation
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Shaping the debate: why historians matter more than ever at GCSE
Teaching History article
The question of how to prepare students to succeed in the examination while also ensuring that they are taught rigorous history remains as relevant as ever. Faced with preparing students to answer a question that seemingly precluded argument, Rachel Foster and Kath Goudie demonstrate how they used historical scholarship both to...
Shaping the debate: why historians matter more than ever at GCSE
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Myths and Monty Python: using the witch-hunts to introduce students to significance
Article
In this article Kerry Apps introduces students to the significance of the witch-hunts in the modern era, at the time when they occurred, and in the middle of the eighteenth century. She presents her rationale for choosing the witch-hunts as a focus for the study of significance, and shows how her thinking about her teaching has evolved through her evaluation of her students’...
Myths and Monty Python: using the witch-hunts to introduce students to significance
