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Triumphs Show 111: Recreating 1930s Europe with the help of Year 9
Teaching History feature
Sally Evans demonstrates how constructing a map of Europe can enhance pupils' understandings on the causations of World War Two.
Triumphs Show 111: Recreating 1930s Europe with the help of Year 9
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Bruce! You're history.' The place of history in the Scottish curriculum
Teaching History article
History teachers in Scotland are feeling vulnerable. A curriculum review is leading to debates about history’s place in schools – will it or should it be a statutory part of Scotland’s curriculum for 11-14 year olds? Many of the concerns in Sam Henry’s article will ring true for teachers throughout...
Bruce! You're history.' The place of history in the Scottish curriculum
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Getting Year 7 to set their own questions about the Islamic Empire, 600-1600
Teaching History article
Sometimes particular problems can lead to unexpected solutions. In this case, Sally Burnham decided to solve a problem that she had identified among her Year 12 students by changing the way in which she teaches Year 7. Her Year 12s were finding it difficult to set appropriate questions for their...
Getting Year 7 to set their own questions about the Islamic Empire, 600-1600
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Teaching History 199: Out now
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Read Teaching History 199: Ordinary People
We editors always enjoy kicking around ideas for the theme of each edition of Teaching History. It sometimes surprises readers to learn that we don’t come up with a title, and then commission articles. Rather, we immerse ourselves in the scores of proposals that come...
Teaching History 199: Out now
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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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Teaching History 198: Out now
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Read Teaching History 198: Curriculum Journeys
Reflections on the process of curriculum design in history have prompted many colourful metaphors. While some point to the opportunities for creativity inherent in the task, others leave little doubt about the mental exertion required for effective planning on different scales. Michael Riley offered...
Teaching History 198: Out now
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Teaching History 184: Out now
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Read Teaching History 184: Different lenses
For millennia, human beings have used lenses as tools: to help them see further, to magnify or to correct defects of vision. Yet lenses can distort as well as illuminate the unseen.
Robert Hooke, the seventeenth-century scientist who helped popularise the microscope through his...
Teaching History 184: Out now
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How visual evidence reflects change and continuity in attitudes to the police in the 19th and early 20th centuries
Teaching History article
While history teachers (and examiners) regularly invite students to consider what cartoons or paintings reveal about contemporary attitudes to particular social or political developments, such sources are often difficult to interpret and to use appropriately. Drawing on a wealth of detailed research and a passion to support teachers and students with...
How visual evidence reflects change and continuity in attitudes to the police in the 19th and early 20th centuries
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From flight paths to spiders’ webs: developing a progression model for Key Stage 3
Teaching History journal article
The disapplication of level descriptions in the 2014 National Curriculum has spurred many history departments to rethink their approach not only to assessment but to their models of progression. In this article Rachael Cook builds on the recent work of history teachers such as Ford (TH157), Hawkey et al (TH161),...
From flight paths to spiders’ webs: developing a progression model for Key Stage 3
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How introducing cultural and intellectual history improves critical analysis in the classroom
Teaching History article
In his article in this journal just over a year ago, Steven Driver set out his vision for a less myopic range of topics in A-level coursework. In this edition, Driver demonstrates how he has built student enthusiasm for, and knowledge of, a topic which he had previously identified as...
How introducing cultural and intellectual history improves critical analysis in the classroom
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... immigration in French history
Historian feature
3 July 2024 marks the 50th anniversary of a significant, yet little known, event in French history: the declaration of an end to the recruitment of economic migrants. Over the previous decades, some three million migrant workers had arrived to surprisingly little fanfare, building the economic growth later mythologized by...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... immigration in French history
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Triumphs Show 192: Balancing micro- and macronarratives of the Holocaust
Teaching History feature
Lien de Jong celebrates her 90th birthday in September 2023. In lots of ways, her biography is similar to many Europeans of her generation. She was born, grew up and went to school in The Hague during the 1930s. She trained to work in a nursery. In the 1950s, she...
Triumphs Show 192: Balancing micro- and macronarratives of the Holocaust
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Cunning Plan 152.2: using Gillray’s cartoons with Year 8
Teaching History feature
The past 30 years have seen a general revival in scholarly activity relating to ‘all aspects of 18th-century British history'. However, this increase in academic study, which has broadly coincided with the introduction and development of the National Curriculum in England, has not resulted in the period being studied in great...
Cunning Plan 152.2: using Gillray’s cartoons with Year 8
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Polychronicon 167: The strange career of Richard Nixon
Teaching History feature
If you know just one thing about the career of the 37th President of the United States, it is likely to be this: Watergate. Nixon’s resignation in August 1974 was caused by his decision to cover up a burglary at the Democratic Party’s campaign headquarters for the 1972 election, which...
Polychronicon 167: The strange career of Richard Nixon
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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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Polychronicon 113: slavery in 20th-century America
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' is on 'Interpreting...
Polychronicon 113: slavery in 20th-century America
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Teaching History 192: Out now
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Read Teaching History 192: Breadth
If the length of a curriculum relates to how long it lasts – to its duration in classroom time and to the volume of historical time it covers – then curricular breadth refers us to the number and the variety of the dimensions of human...
Teaching History 192: Out now
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What’s the wisdom on… Evidence and sources
Teaching History feature
The year 1910 saw the publication of a remarkable book on history teaching by M.W.Keatinge.
The purpose of this guide. What's the Wisdom On... is a short guide providing new history teachers with an overview of the ‘story so far’ of practice-based professional thinking about a particular aspect of history teaching....
What’s the wisdom on… Evidence and sources
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Using The Wipers Times to build an enquiry on the First World War
Teaching History article
Teaching ‘the lesson of satire': using The Wipers Times to build an enquiry on the First World War
‘Blackadder for real' is how the British journalist and broadcaster, Ian Hislop, characterised The Wipers Time, the newspaper published on the front line by members of the 12th Battalion Sherwood, and recently brought...
Using The Wipers Times to build an enquiry on the First World War
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Triumphs Show 121: 60th Anniversary commemoration of the end of WWII
Teaching History feature
It’s early July 2004, and the history department of Harrogate Grammar School are chatting in the staff room enjoying a bit of spare time now that exam classes have disappeared. The subject of what the department will do next year when it comes to trips, speakers and special days comes...
Triumphs Show 121: 60th Anniversary commemoration of the end of WWII
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Polychronicon 147: Witchcraft, history and children
Teaching History feature
Witchcraft is serious history. 1612 marks the 400th anniversary of England's biggest peacetime witch trial, that of the Lancashire witches: 20 witches from the Forest of Pendle were imprisoned, ten were hanged in Lancaster, and another in York. As a result of some imaginative commemorative programmes, a number of schools...
Polychronicon 147: Witchcraft, history and children
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Polychronicon 142: 'instructive reversals' - (re)interpreting the 1857 events in Northern India
Teaching History feature
The dramatic, chaotic and violent events that took place in Northern India in 1857/8 have been interpreted in many ways, as, for example, the ‘Indian Mutiny', the ‘Sepoy War' and the ‘First Indian War of Independence'. The tales that have been told about these events have been profoundly shaped, however,...
Polychronicon 142: 'instructive reversals' - (re)interpreting the 1857 events in Northern India
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What time does the tune start? From thinking about 'sense of period' to modelling history at Key Stage 3
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
A ‘sense of period' is the contextual backdrop to the study of any aspect of history. As experienced historians, we tend to take for granted both our structural map of the past and our rich...
What time does the tune start? From thinking about 'sense of period' to modelling history at Key Stage 3
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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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Cunning Plan 114: building overview understanding of 19th-century social history
Teaching History feature
This five-lesson sequence gradually builds overview understanding of aspects of 19th century social history through a depth study of the campaigner and reformer, Josephine Butler. Through the sequence, pupils build on earlier work on historical significance, first, by reviewing their understanding of the huge range of reasons why things get...
Cunning Plan 114: building overview understanding of 19th-century social history
