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Teaching History regular features
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Teaching History includes a number of regular features for secondary history teachers. On these pages you can access all recent and many older editions of each of these features:
What's the Wisdom On provides a short guide to an aspect of history teaching.
What have historians been arguing about... (formerly Polychronicon) aims to help...
Teaching History regular features
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Helping Year 9 to engage effectively with ‘other genocides’
Teaching History article
In this article, Andy Lawrence returns to arguments made in Teaching History 153 about the importance of teaching young people about other modern genocides in addition to the Holocaust. Building on those arguments with his own rationale, Lawrence also acknowledges the constraints on curriculum time that compel all departments to...
Helping Year 9 to engage effectively with ‘other genocides’
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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
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Using fictional characters to explore the relationship between historical interpretation and contemporary attitude
Teaching History article
Helping students to understand how and why people in the present interpret the past differently is a challenge. It is also vital if we are to develop an understanding of why the meanings we ascribe to the past are not fixed, but rather are subject to our own prejudices or...
Using fictional characters to explore the relationship between historical interpretation and contemporary attitude
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The return of King John: using depth to strengthen overview in the teaching of political change
Teaching History article
Dale Banham's article in Teaching History 92, ‘Getting ready for the Grand Prix: learning to build a substantiated argument in Year 7' has influenced much debate about extended writing. It has been influential way beyond the history education community. It also raised new questions about the management of historical content....
The return of King John: using depth to strengthen overview in the teaching of political change
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Passive receivers or constructive readers?
Teaching History article
Rachel Foster reports here on research that she conducted into how students engage with academic texts. Unhappy with the usual range of texts that students encounter, often truncated and ‘simplified' in the name of accessibility, she designed a scheme of work which sought to find out how her students responded...
Passive receivers or constructive readers?
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Tackling A-level students’ misconceptions about historical interpretations and the historiography of Scottish witchcraft
Teaching History article
Maya Stiasny was troubled by a stubbornly persistent flaw in her A-level students’ conception of historical interpretations. Students were seeing historians’ arguments as snapshots in time, emerging magically and unproblematically out of personal views, rather than crafted as a process. Stiasny wanted her students to understand that process as an academically rigorous...
Tackling A-level students’ misconceptions about historical interpretations and the historiography of Scottish witchcraft
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Developing sixth-form students' thinking about historical interpretation
Teaching History article
Understanding historical interpretation involves understanding how historical knowledge is constructed. How do sixth formers model historical epistemology? In this article Arthur Chapman examines a small sample of data relating to sixth form students' ideas about why historians construct differing interpretations of the past. He argues that understanding interpretation requires students to...
Developing sixth-form students' thinking about historical interpretation
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Dealing with the consequences
Teaching History journal article
Do GCSE and A-level questions that purport to be about consequences actually reward reasoning about historical consequences at all? Molly-Ann Navey concluded that they do not and that they fail to encourage the kind of argument that academic historians engage in when reaching judgements about consequences. Navey decided that it...
Dealing with the consequences
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Where are we and where are we going?
Teaching History article
Richard Harris draws on their own and others’ research to take stock of where the history teaching community is in terms of curriculum thinking. Harris argues that despite a number of positive developments in recent years, certain issues continue to have undesirable effects on curriculum design. Such issues include inertia...
Where are we and where are we going?
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Using an anthology of substantial sources at GCSE
Teaching History article
Struck by his GCSE students’ bewildered expressions when studying source extracts, Liam McDonnell decided to adopt a new approach to source analysis. Inspired by the work of other history teachers, McDonnell decided to use an anthology of substantial sources when studying nineteenth-century Whitechapel in London. By revisiting the sources at...
Using an anthology of substantial sources at GCSE
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Building a better past: plans to reform the curriculum
Teaching History article
David Nicholls summarises some of the problems facing history education and offers a commentary on various cases for reform. He argues that we need to look at provision holistically from 5 to 21 and urges collaboration across phases and sectors. By working more closely together, the history community as a...
Building a better past: plans to reform the curriculum
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Polychronicon 118: interpretations of Henry VII
Teaching History feature
Polychronicon was a fourteenth-century chronicle that brought together much of the knowledge of its own age. Our Polychronicon in Teaching History is a regular feature helping school history teachers to update their subject knowledge, with special emphasis on recent historiography and changing interpretation. This edition of 'Polychronicon' explores the historical...
Polychronicon 118: interpretations of Henry VII
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Polychronicon 117: interpretations of Douglas Haig
Teaching History feature
Polychronicon was a fourteenth-century chronicle that brought together much of the knowledge of its own age. Our Polychronicon in Teaching History is a regular feature helping school history teachers to update their subject knowledge, with special emphasis on recent historiography and changing interpretation. This edition of 'Polychronicon' considers the historical...
Polychronicon 117: interpretations of Douglas Haig
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Creating a progression model for teaching historical perspectives in Key Stage 3
Teaching History article
Jacob Olivey set out to design enquiries which would enable his pupils to reconstruct, using evidence, the perspectives of people in the past. In this article he shares in detail the planning and outcomes of two enquiries: one for Year 7 and one for Year 8. Olivey offers a example...
Creating a progression model for teaching historical perspectives in Key Stage 3
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Knowledge and the Draft NC
Teaching History article
Silk purse from a sow's ear? Why knowledge matters and why the draft History NC will not improve it
Katie Hall and Christine Counsell attempt to construct a Key Stage 3 scheme of work out of the draft National Curriculum for history that was released for consultation in England in...
Knowledge and the Draft NC
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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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Making reading routine
Teaching History article
Inspired by the growing number of history teachers who have sought to introduce younger pupils to academic historical scholarship in the classroom, Tim Jenner wanted to bring about his own reading revolution at Key Stage 3. But rather than simply develop one-off lessons or enquiries based on scholarship his goal...
Making reading routine
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What’s in a narrative? Unpicking Year 9 narratives of change in Stalin’s Russia
Teaching History article
Is it structure or the selection of knowledge that makes writing historical narrative so difficult? Where does a conceptual focus on change, or causation, come in? James Ellis set out to explore the challenges his Year 9 pupils faced in writing historical narratives about change. Inspired by the work of...
What’s in a narrative? Unpicking Year 9 narratives of change in Stalin’s Russia
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Polychronicon 164: The End of the Cold War
Teaching History feature
A quarter-century on from 1989-91, with a large amount of archive and media material available, these epic years are ripe for historical analysis. Yet their proximity to our time also throws up challenging questions about the practice of ‘contemporary history’, and the complexity of events raises larger issues about how...
Polychronicon 164: The End of the Cold War
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Using 1980s popular music to explore historical significance
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Scott Allsop helped his students to uncover the implicit criteria informing someone else's attribution of historical significance to past events. That ‘someone else' was Billy Joel whose 1989 song became the focus for deconstructive analysis....
Using 1980s popular music to explore historical significance
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Transforming Year 7's understanding of the concept of Imperialism: a case study on the Roman Empire
Teaching History article
Those of us in the U.K. know that many of our pupils finish their entire historical education without a satisfactory grasp of basic substantive concepts as they are used in history. Do all our low-attaining or ‘low ability’ 14-year-olds who are pressured to drop history at 14 really emerge with...
Transforming Year 7's understanding of the concept of Imperialism: a case study on the Roman Empire
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Using historical discourse to find narrative coherence in the GCSE period study
Teaching History article
When planning a GCSE period study on the American West, Alex Ford wrestled with reconciling the content demands of the examination specifications with the need to provide his students with a memorable narrative. In this article, Ford shows how he drew on the latest academic scholarship to construct a rigorous,...
Using historical discourse to find narrative coherence in the GCSE period study
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Using nominalisation to develop written causal arguments
Teaching History article
How nominalisation might develop students’ written causal arguments
Frustrated that previously taught writing frames seemed to impede his A-level students’ historical arguments, James Edward Carroll theorised that the inadequacies he identified in their writing were as much disciplinary as stylistic. Drawing on two discourses that are often largely isolated from...
Using nominalisation to develop written causal arguments
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Why are you wearing a watch? Complicating narratives of economic and social progress
Teaching History article
Frustrated by the traditional narrative of the industrial revolution as a steady march of progress, and disappointed by her students’ dull and deterministic statements about historical change, Hannah Sibona decided to complicate the tidy narrative of continual improvement.
Inspired by an article by E.P. Thompson, Sibona reflected that introducing her...
Why are you wearing a watch? Complicating narratives of economic and social progress
