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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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Move Me On 162: Reading
Teaching History feature
This issue’s problem: James Connolly is finding it difficult to judge how much or what kind of reading he should expect of his students.
James Connolly, an eager and knowledgeable historian, has frequently struggled to pitch things appropriately for students. This applies particularly to his expectations of their reading, but also...
Move Me On 162: Reading
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Move Me On 134: Getting enough A-level experience
Teaching History feature
Problem for the history mentor: Tom Clarkson is worried that he will not have enough A level teaching experience to teach Year 12 effectively next year.
Tom Clarkson is well into his second teaching placement and fears that the outline plans on his timetable for working with Year 12 will...
Move Me On 134: Getting enough A-level experience
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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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Polychronicon 162: Reinterpreting the May 1968 events in France
Teaching History feature
As Kristin Ross has persuasively argued, by the 1980s interpretations of the French events of May 1968 had shrunk to a narrow set of received ideas around student protest, labelled by Chris Reynolds a ‘doxa’. Media discourse is dominated by a narrow range of former participants labelled ‘memory barons’ –...
Polychronicon 162: Reinterpreting the May 1968 events in France
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Move Me On 161: Knowledge & Understanding
Teaching History feature
This issue’s problem: Caroline Herschel doesn’t really notice and respond effectively to what the lesson she has just taught reveals about students’ knowledge and understanding.
Caroline Herschel is a hard-working, conscientious trainee who is anxious to feel that she has got things ‘right’. She is well organised and plans lessons well...
Move Me On 161: Knowledge & Understanding
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Age of Revolutions Resources
Information
The Age of Revolutions is a period in history between c.1775-1848. Over the course of these years, society underwent a series of revolutions in almost all theatres of life: political, war, social and cultural, and economic and technological. Revolutionary ideas and revolutionary actions swept across the world, and historians still discuss and...
Age of Revolutions Resources
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Polychronicon 161: John Lilburne
Teaching History feature
John Lilburne might have been destined for obscurity in less interesting times. He was the second son of a minor gentry family, apprenticed to a London woollen merchant in 1632. It was his master’s connections that drew him into religious opposition to Charles I and the illegal book trade, resulting...
Polychronicon 161: John Lilburne
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Move Me On 142: Makes assumptions about students' thinking
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem: Rob Collingwood keeps just making assumptions about his students' thinking.
Rob Collingwood seemed to make a very promising start to his first school placement, but as time goes on his mentor is becoming concerned about the lack of connection between Rob's thinking and that of his students. Rob...
Move Me On 142: Makes assumptions about students' thinking
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The Power of Context: using a visual source
Teaching History article
Drawing on her wealth of experience and expertise in using visual sources in the classroom, in this article Jane Card explores how a single painting, a portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray, might form the basis for a sequence of lessons.
Arguing that although highly...
The Power of Context: using a visual source
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Chartism
Classic Pamphlet
It is not surprising that Chartism has attracted a great deal of interest from historians and students, for at no other period in British history, with the possible exception of the second and third decades of the twentieth century, has so much excitement and activity been aroused at the working-class...
Chartism
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The origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict
Historian article
On 29 January 1949 there was a debate in the British House of Commons. When Winston Churchill, the leader of the opposition, interrupted Ernest Bevin’s history of the Palestine problem he was told by the Foreign Secretary: ‘over half a million Arabs have been turned by the Jewish immigrants into...
The origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict
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The Harkness Method: achieving higher-order thinking with sixth-form
Teaching History article
Hark the herald tables sing! Achieving higher-order thinking with a chorus of sixth-form pupils
On 9 April 1930, a philanthropist called Edward Harkness donated millions of dollars to the Phillips Exeter Academy in the USA. He hoped that his donation could be used to find a new way for students to sit around a table...
The Harkness Method: achieving higher-order thinking with sixth-form
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Cunning Plan 159: Was King John unlucky with his Barons?
Teaching History feature
Typical teaching of King John and Magna Carta focuses either on the weakness of John or the importance (as Whig historians would see it) of Magna Carta. The first question is a bit boring and the second discussion unhistorical. This enquiry sequence is designed for students aged 11 to 13. It...
Cunning Plan 159: Was King John unlucky with his Barons?
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Engaging Year 9 students in party politics
Teaching History article
Sarah Black wanted to remedy Year 9's lack of knowledge about nineteenth-century politics. With just five lessons to work with, she decided to devise a sequence on Gladstone and Disraeli, shaping the sequence with an enquiry question that invited argument about change and continuity. Black analyses the status and function of different layers of knowledge within her sequence, evaluates the interaction...
Engaging Year 9 students in party politics
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Enabling Year 7 to write essays on Magna Carta
Teaching History article
Setting out to teach Magna Carta to the full attainment range in Year 7, Mark King decided to choose a question that reflected real scholarly debates and also to ensure that pupils held enough knowledge in long-term memory to be able to think about that question meaningfully. As he gradually prepared his pupils to produce their own causation arguments in response to that question, King was startled by...
Enabling Year 7 to write essays on Magna Carta
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Triumphs Show 159: teaching paragraph construction
Teaching History feature
My adventures in dancing in the classroom started back in the autumn term. I was working with a group of Year 8 students looking at interpretations of King John and we were selecting and analysing quotations from historians as part of the enquiry question ‘Was King John really so bad?' My students were struggling with...
Triumphs Show 159: teaching paragraph construction
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Move Me On 100: Deciding on lesson objectives
Teaching History feature
This Issue's Problem: Hugh Horsea, PGCE student, is having difficulty deciding on his lesson objectives
Problem:
Hugh is a few weeks into his first placement. He is enthusiastic and hard working and was successful in the first teaching tasks that he undertook. However, now that he has moved beyond directed...
Move Me On 100: Deciding on lesson objectives
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War Plan Red: the American Plan for war with Britain
Article
John Major discusses an astonishing aspect of past Anglo-American history. All great powers have developed contingency plans for war with each other, and the United States in the early twentieth century was no exception. Each of Washington’s schemes was given a distinctive colour. Green mapped out intervention in neighbouring Mexico,...
War Plan Red: the American Plan for war with Britain
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Podcast Series: The Vikings
Podcasted history
An HA Podcasted History of the Vikings featuring Professor Rosamond McKitterick, Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge.
Podcast Series: The Vikings
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Home Rule for Ireland - For and against
Historian article
At a time when the United Kingdom continues to review its internal constitutional arrangements, Matthew Kelly explores how this constitutional debate can be traced back to Gladstone's decision to promote Home Rule for Ireland and how these proposals evolved over time and were challenged.
Irish political history decisively entered a...
Home Rule for Ireland - For and against
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Move Me On 158: Modelling tasks
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem: Arthur Wellesley is struggling to model tasks effectively for students.
Arthur has made a positive start to his training, but remains rather nervous in the classroom. He recognises the importance of well-planned lessons and his outline plans generally have a clear, logical structure. His mentor thinks that he...
Move Me On 158: Modelling tasks
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Polychronicon 158: Reinterpreting Napoleon
Teaching History feature
On 18 June 2015, the two-hundredth anniversary of the great battle of Waterloo will be commemorated in Britain and on the continent (though not in France). It will represent the climax of the Napoleonic bicentenary, which has been in full flow since the turn of the twenty-first century. Fresh biographies...
Polychronicon 158: Reinterpreting Napoleon
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Triumphs Show 158: interactive learning walls and substantive vocabulary
Teaching History feature
Year 10 use an interactive learning wall to cement their understanding of substantive vocabulary
It is the first term of their GCSE course and Year 10 are already starting to flag a little. They are enjoying studying the Russian Revolution, but are struggling to remember all the new words they...
Triumphs Show 158: interactive learning walls and substantive vocabulary
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Smithfield's Bartholomew Fair
Historian article
On the north-western side of the City of London, directly in front of St Bartholomew's Hospital near the ancient church of St Bartholomew the Great, there once lay a ‘smooth field', now known as Smithfield. This open space of around ten acres had a long and turbulent history. In medieval...
Smithfield's Bartholomew Fair
