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The teaching and learning of history for 15-16 year olds: have the Japanese anything to learn from the English experience
Teaching History article
What would you expect the differences to be between Japan and England in how pupils learn history in the post-14 phase? Perhaps your guess would be: Japanese school students learn a lot of historical facts and focus upon their own identity and English school students talk a lot more in...
The teaching and learning of history for 15-16 year olds: have the Japanese anything to learn from the English experience
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Worlds in collision: university tutor and student perspectives on the transition to degree level history
Teaching History article
What does it mean to be good at history? At certain times during their formal education students seem to be required to adjust their understanding of what studying history entails. Alan Booth writes from the viewpoint of a university tutor. He has collated ‘student voice’ on the experience of studying...
Worlds in collision: university tutor and student perspectives on the transition to degree level history
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Content restricted and maturation retarded? Problems with the post-16 history curriculum
Teaching History article
Mike Tillbrook examines the impact of the new AS and A2 courses, raising several serious concerns. He explores problems for effective and rigorous assessment as well as implications of the new course structure for the quality and range of historical learning. Critical of new restrictions in content, he suggests that...
Content restricted and maturation retarded? Problems with the post-16 history curriculum
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History and Mathematics or History with Mathematics: does it add up?
Teaching History article
Ian Phillips expresses some frustration with the way the Numeracy across the Curriculum strand of England’s Key Stage 3 Strategy is sometimes presented. He argues that the acid test of cross-curricular numeracy is the value of mathematical understanding in aiding historical thinking and imagination. He criticises attempts to plant numeracy...
History and Mathematics or History with Mathematics: does it add up?
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Reading and enquiring in Years 12 and 13
Teaching History article
Historical enquiry is blooming at Key Stage 3. Thanks to a rich array of source materials available on the web and in textbooks, superb history-specific training courses and genuinely innovative practice in schools, pupils can increasingly be found wrestling with demanding and often lengthy sources. They do this in order...
Reading and enquiring in Years 12 and 13
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... the impact of the British Empire on Britain?
Teaching History feature
The murder of George Floyd during the summer of 2020 and the ongoing ‘culture war’ in Britain over the legacy of the British Empire have reignited interest in imperial history. This focuses, in particular, on the question of the empire’s impact on Britain itself: on how the act of conquering...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... the impact of the British Empire on Britain?
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... medieval science and medicine?
Teaching History feature
The phrase ‘medieval science’ may seem nonsensical. ‘How can... a synonym for “backward”,’ the editors of The Cambridge History of Science Volume 2 ask rhetorically, ‘modify a noun that signifies the best available knowledge from the natural world?’ To answer their question, we must rethink our assumptions, both about the...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... medieval science and medicine?
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Recorded webinar: Histories of Indigenous peoples of North America
Article
Any study of the intercultural relationships between the Indigenous peoples of North America and British settlers usually focuses on the differences that resulted in disputes and violence. However, on closer examination, the interaction also involved the exchange of ideas and the forging of alliances, which required diplomacy and respect for...
Recorded webinar: Histories of Indigenous peoples of North America
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Cunning Plan… to teach about environmental history in the medieval period
Teaching History feature
As an undergraduate, following a traditional history course, I was surprised and intrigued, one sunny summer day, to find myself reading about sunspots and studying graphs of solar activity. My reading list for an essay on the social and economic history of the fourteenth century included the work of historians...
Cunning Plan… to teach about environmental history in the medieval period
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Building historical thinking together: breathing new life into mini whiteboards
Teaching History article
Formative assessment, in particular Assessment for Learning, created waves in classrooms in the early 2000s. Mini whiteboards, with pen and cloth, became popular and remain part of the toolkit in some classrooms. Teachers work hard to assess the learning of all students in a class, rather than just those who...
Building historical thinking together: breathing new life into mini whiteboards
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Virtual Branch recording: The Women's World Committee against War & Fascism
Connected and Competing Activisms
How did a group of women activists with varied ideological backgrounds construct several important campaigns against fascism in the interwar period? How did this Women's World Committee against War and Fascism (Comité Mondial des Femmes contre la Guerre et le Fascisme) undertake effective humanitarian and propaganda work and forge extensive...
Virtual Branch recording: The Women's World Committee against War & Fascism
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Triumphs Show: The BeBold Network
Teaching History feature
In April 2019, I was in a bit of a rut. My enquiry questions and lesson sequences seemed stale. I felt like I had been at my school for too long. To mix things up, I secured a new role for September at a start-up school.
Full of excitement, I...
Triumphs Show: The BeBold Network
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‘What is history?’ Africa and the excitement of sources with Year 7
Teaching History article
Many history departments choose to begin their Year 7 curriculum with an introduction to the nature of history and the processes in which historians engage as they develop, refine and substantiate claims about the past. In this article, Adbul Mohamud and Robin Whitburn report on an such an introductory unit, designed with a specific focus on the history...
‘What is history?’ Africa and the excitement of sources with Year 7
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Lesson sequence: Life in a Medieval Village - taster lesson
Article
This series of lessons has been designed to make gaining knowledge of medieval rural life engaging for students and to teach them how good historical fiction is constructed. Students learn how to write a story about life in the fourteenth-century Suffolk village of Walsham and to do so successfully they...
Lesson sequence: Life in a Medieval Village - taster lesson
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Lesson sequence: Life in a Medieval Village
Article
The first lesson of this sequence is available free to all secondary members here.
This series of lessons has been designed to make gaining knowledge of medieval rural life engaging for students and to teach them how good historical fiction is constructed. Students learn how to write a story about life in...
Lesson sequence: Life in a Medieval Village
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Teaching Year 8 pupils to take seriously the ideas of ordinary people from the past
Teaching History article
Jacob Olivey wanted Year 8 to know that ordinary people in the nineteenth century constructed their own identities. In this reflection on how his practice developed in his training year, Olivey illustrates the importance of using historical scholarship in choosing foundational knowledge to teach. He shows how he used that...
Teaching Year 8 pupils to take seriously the ideas of ordinary people from the past
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Film: Yeltsin and the Oligarchs
Film Series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
If you're unable to see the film below, please use the link for your Membership type:Historian members | Primary members | Secondary members | Student members
Film: Yeltsin and the Oligarchs
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Key Principles for teaching Thematic Studies at GCSE
GCSE Guidance
For many teachers the thematic study is the most new and most troubling unit of the new GCSE specifications. By following this link, you will be connected to an article that appears on www.thinkinghistory.co.uk. This free website for teachers is maintained by Ian Dawson. In this article Ian works with...
Key Principles for teaching Thematic Studies at GCSE
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Building meaningful models of progression
Teaching History article
Setting us free? Building meaningful models of progression for a ‘post-levels' world
Alex Ford was thrilled by the prospect of freedom offered to history departments in England by the abolition of level descriptions within the National Curriculum.
After analysing the range of competing purposes that the level descriptions were previously...
Building meaningful models of progression
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Film: Living with Violence at the End of the British Empire
Age of Emergency
In the 1950s, Britain fought a series of brutal wars against insurgents in the colonies of Malaya, Kenya, and Cyprus. How did people at home experience these wars? How did they learn about the use of torture and other unsettling tactics? And how did they respond to this knowledge?
In...
Film: Living with Violence at the End of the British Empire
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On-demand webinar: Engaging with interpretations at A-level
Webinar series: Developing students’ historical thinking at A-level
Webinar series: Developing students’ historical thinking at A-level
Session 3: Engaging with interpretations
This third session will focus on how a range of different teachers have dealt with student misconceptions about interpretations. It will first consider how teachers have helped their students to read the work of historians sensitively and will then...
On-demand webinar: Engaging with interpretations at A-level
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Early Modern Britain 1509-1745
HA Secondary Resources (Key Stage 3)
While the 2014 Curriculum sets out the broad focus of each particular content area, considerable choice has been left to history departments in determining which particular events or developments to include and how they can best 'combine overview and depth studies to help pupils understand both the long arc of...
Early Modern Britain 1509-1745
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On-demand webinar: Historical writing
Embracing messiness: teaching disciplinary thinking in history
Embracing messiness: teaching disciplinary thinking in history
Session 4: Historical writing
This session focuses on how we can support our students to write like historians. We will explain why PEE models and other simplistic frameworks actually limit our students and instead we should look to the work of historians as...
On-demand webinar: Historical writing
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On-demand webinar: Keeping sources messy
Embracing messiness: teaching disciplinary thinking in history
Embracing messiness: teaching disciplinary thinking in history
Session 2: Keeping sources messy
This session looks into how source work has often been too tidy in the classroom setting and the reasons behind this. It will explore a different approach to working with sources and evidence and give practical approaches to exemplify what...
On-demand webinar: Keeping sources messy
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Teacher Fellowship programme: The Caribbean, Monarchy and Legacies of Empire
Teacher Fellowship programme 2025
Although twelve Caribbean colonies gained independence during Elizabeth II's reign, only four opted to become republics (most recently Barbados, in 2021) and eight retain the British monarch as head of state to this day. Emphasising Caribbean sources and perspectives, this Teacher Fellowship programme examines the role of the British monarchy in the...
Teacher Fellowship programme: The Caribbean, Monarchy and Legacies of Empire
