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How visual learning in 'A' level history can improve memory and conceptual understanding
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Steve Garnett shares some the techniques that he uses to involve different kinds of learner in his post-16 lessons and explains how he arrived at these approaches after reflecting on problems in his own early...
How visual learning in 'A' level history can improve memory and conceptual understanding
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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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It's a lot harder than politics'...students' experience of history at Advanced Level
Teaching History article
Does the experience of studying history in the sixth form prepare students adequately for study at university? There is plenty of attention given to the issue of continuity across the Key Stages but much less attention given to the transition from school into higher education. It is largely assumed that...
It's a lot harder than politics'...students' experience of history at Advanced Level
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Move Me On 200: trainee has found little scope to develop students’ oracy
Teaching History feature
Move Me On is designed to build critical, informed debate about the character of teacher training, teacher education and professional development. It is also designed to offer practical help to all involved in training new history teachers. Each issue presents a situation in initial teacher education/training with an emphasis upon...
Move Me On 200: trainee has found little scope to develop students’ oracy
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The importance of subject specific training
HA Update
It is my passion for history and interest in young people that has sustained me both as a teacher and latterly as a PGCE history tutor.
Last term a number of seemingly unrelated issues began to coalesce in my mind. Over the summer I met a number of teachers that...
The importance of subject specific training
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Move Me On 198: trainee finds it difficult to explain substantive concepts effectively
Teaching History feature
Move Me On is designed to build critical, informed debate about the character of teacher training, teacher education and professional development. It is also designed to offer practical help to all involved in training new history teachers. Each issue presents a situation in initial teacher education/training with an emphasis upon...
Move Me On 198: trainee finds it difficult to explain substantive concepts effectively
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Polychronicon 157: Reinterpreting police-public relations in modern England
Teaching History feature
The relationship between the police and the public has long been a key subject in English social history. The formative work in this field was conducted between the 1970s and 1990s, but the past few years have witnessed something of a revival of research in the area. By focusing on...
Polychronicon 157: Reinterpreting police-public relations in modern England
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Recorded Webinar: ‘Drawing the Line’: the 1947 Partition of India
Article
August 2022 marks 75 years since British India was divided at independence into two separate states: India and Pakistan (the latter including today’s Bangladesh). As with the 70th commemoration in 2017, this anniversary will trigger a great deal of collective remembering in Britain just as in South Asia itself.
Freedom from...
Recorded Webinar: ‘Drawing the Line’: the 1947 Partition of India
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The Evacuee Letter Exchange Project: using audience-centred writing to improve progression from Key Stage 2 to Key Stage 3
Teaching History article
Jenny Parsons' work in primary-secondary liaison in history is nationally acclaimed. She is often asked to share her department's practice at courses and conferences. Readers of Teaching History are already familiar with her work in another area: in the ‘Triumphs Show' of Teaching History 93 (the ICT edition in November...
The Evacuee Letter Exchange Project: using audience-centred writing to improve progression from Key Stage 2 to Key Stage 3
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Learning from a pandemic
Teaching History article
In order to contextualise and make sense of the Covid-19 pandemic, Verity Morgan worked with her school’s long-standing partner school in Ghana to devise an innovative project combining history and science, past and present. In this article, Morgan sets out the rationale for the project, her detailed adaptation of a British Council...
Learning from a pandemic
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When computers don't give you a headache: the most able lead a debate on medicine through time
Teaching History article
Dan Moorhouse begins with a complaint about ICT. It is not the clichéd teacher-complaint – that the computers keep crashing, and the students are messing around on the Internet (and how, exactly, do you turn the things on?) Instead, he observes that the use of ICT in the classroom is...
When computers don't give you a headache: the most able lead a debate on medicine through time
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Revisiting chronological knowledge from before 1066
Article
Thinking about...the study of an aspect or theme in British history that revisits or extends pupils' chronological knowledge from before 1066Alf Wilkinson presents a personal exploration of how we might use this Key Stage 3 unit to help our students develop a coherent understanding of history.
Revisiting chronological knowledge from before 1066
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Driving your development – taster films
Article
These two short films form part of our Driving your development unit, designed as a practical toolkit for new teachers to support you to survive and thrive applying for and into your first history teaching post. The unit aims to cover all of the major aspects of successfully applying for your first history teaching...
Driving your development – taster films
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The International Journal Volume 5 Number 2
Journal
Articles
Lieke van WijkThe Learning and Teaching of History in Europe: EUROCLIO's Enquiries Compared
Peter Brett Citizenship and the National Curriculum
Jerome FreemanThe Current State of the 4-19 History Curriculum in England and Possible Future Developments: a QCA Perspective
Jon NicholFrom Russia with Love: a History Curriculum...
The International Journal Volume 5 Number 2
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Managing the scope of study
Teaching History article
Anna Dickson and her department sought a solution to the challenges posed to their pupils by the expanded curricular scope of the new GCSE. In particular, they wanted to address the difficulties their pupils experienced in understanding the Cold War. Dickson outlines here how she drew on the work of...
Managing the scope of study
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Virtual Branch Recording: Women and the Reformations
Article
The Reformations, both Protestant and Catholic, have long been told as stories of men. But women were central to the transformations that took place in Europe and beyond. What was life like for them in this turbulent period? How did their actions and ideas shape Christianity and influence societies around the world? ...
Virtual Branch Recording: Women and the Reformations
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Move Me On 189: engendering students' curiosity
Teaching History feature
Move Me On is designed to build critical, informed debate about the character of teacher training, teacher education and professional development. It is also designed to offer practical help to all involved in training new history teachers. Each issue presents a situation in initial teacher education/training with an emphasis upon...
Move Me On 189: engendering students' curiosity
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Migration - GCSE
Links to Articles & Podcasts
Podcasts
Podcast Series: England's Immigrants 1330-1550
Podcast Series: Social & Political Change in the UK 1800-present: Part 3 Diversity - A Changing Population
Podcast Series: Diversity in Early Modern Britain
Social & Political Change in the UK 1800-present: Part 5 Religion
The Huguenots in Britain & Ireland
Native North Americans...
Migration - GCSE
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Making rigour a departmental reality
Teaching History article
Faced with the introduction of a two-year key stage and a new whole-school assessment policy, Rachel Arscott and Tom Hinks decided to make a virtue out of necessity and reconsider their whole approach to planning, teaching and assessment at Key Stage 3. In this article they give an account of...
Making rigour a departmental reality
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Triumphs Show: Embracing scholarship to guide Year 7 on an exploration of the Silk Roads
Teaching History feature
It has been the same for history teachers all over the country: the dramatic shift in perspective after reading Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads. Frankopan’s groundbreaking scholarship transported me to distant lands. His book introduced me to cultures and civilisations previously unknown. I wanted my pupils to venture along the same...
Triumphs Show: Embracing scholarship to guide Year 7 on an exploration of the Silk Roads
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Getting Year 10 to understand the value of precise factual knowledge
Teaching History article
Up until the early 1990s, historical knowledge sometimes had rather a bad press. Various developments, in National Curriculum, at GCSE and, importantly, in ordinary teachers’ practice and debate, then led to a much closer integration of what we once called ‘content’ and ‘skills’. Tony McAleavy examined changing perceptions of the...
Getting Year 10 to understand the value of precise factual knowledge
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Virtual Branch recording: A Life Revealed in Letters: Catalina Micaela
Article
What was life really like for a Spanish royal woman? Catalina Micaela, the younger daughter of Philip II of Spain, wrote extensively to her husband Carlo Emanrele I of Savoy giving fascinating insights into the events at court and the pressures on the families, providing a glimpse into sixteenth-century Spain and...
Virtual Branch recording: A Life Revealed in Letters: Catalina Micaela
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Pride and delight: motivating pupils through poetic writing about the First World War
Teaching History article
This project emerged from team-teaching with history teachers in history lessons. Gill Minikin draws upon her expertise as an English teacher to help pupils become excited by the challenge of ‘squeezing language' into poems. History teachers often ask pupils to write poems but they do not necessarily draw upon all...
Pride and delight: motivating pupils through poetic writing about the First World War
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Triumphs Show: Year 9 explore what permacrisis might have felt like in 1938
Teaching History feature
In April 2023, I attended an event at the University of Sheffield with my colleague, Katy Dixon, and a handful of our Year 10 historians. The event showcased the work of Professor Julie V. Gottlieb and playwright Nicola Baldwin who had written a play about the writer and critic of...
Triumphs Show: Year 9 explore what permacrisis might have felt like in 1938
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New, Novice or Nervous? 150: Getting pupils to see change over time
Teaching History feature
This page is the starting point for all who are new to the published writings of history teachers. Every problem you wrestle with, other history teachers have wrestled with too. Quick fixes don't exist. But if you discover others' writing, you'll soon find - and want to join - something...
New, Novice or Nervous? 150: Getting pupils to see change over time
