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Exploring change and continuity with Year 7
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
A great deal has been written about causation in the pages of Teaching History. From camels to linguistics, this is a second-order concept that teachers and pupils frequently deliberate.
Departments balance the need for substantive knowledge with explicit...
Exploring change and continuity with Year 7
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... Royal Studies
Teaching History feature
‘Royal Studies’ is much more than the study of kings and queens as individuals. It draws in their families, the institution of monarchy and monarchical government, court studies, relationships with the church, artistic and literary patronage, and more. While history ‘from below’ and studies of non-elite figures have enriched the...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... Royal Studies
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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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History in England’s primary schools: What do secondary history teachers need to know?
HA Update
What’s been happening in primary history lately? Invited to write an update on this, I decided to identify some themes that might be helpful to secondary teachers.
As a senior lecturer in primary education with responsibility for history and as a member of the HA Primary Committee, I was able...
History in England’s primary schools: What do secondary history teachers need to know?
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Move Me On: struggling with different emphases on teacher talk
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: struggling with different emphases on teacher talk
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... Chinese history?
Teaching History feature
Teaching Chinese history in the UK runs up against some immediate obstacles. It lacks the familiar staging posts of European history: Chairman Mao is among the few well-known names, and terms such as Cultural Revolution and Opium War may attract recognition, but are often not understood in detail. The situation...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... Chinese history?
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Cunning Plan 186: teaching Samurai Japan in Key Stage 3
Teaching History feature
Like many history departments we have been seeking to develop schemes of work that are more outward-looking, and, as the National Curriculum describes, ‘enable pupils to know and understand significant aspects of world history’.
To my mind, Samurai Japan offers students the opportunity to explore a time and place that is...
Cunning Plan 186: teaching Samurai Japan in Key Stage 3
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Move Me On 135: Not sure where to draw boundaries when handling sensitive issues
Teaching History feature
This Issue's Problem: Cathy Mompesson is uncertain where to draw the boundaries when teaching sensitive issues.
A recent Year 9 visit to the Imperial War Museum has left Cathy Mompesson confused about the relationship between moral and historical objectives in her teaching. Her placement school visits the museum every year,...
Move Me On 135: Not sure where to draw boundaries when handling sensitive issues
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Opportunities, challenges and questions: continual assessment in Year 9
Teaching History article
Our means of assessment might pose a problem. History teachers regularly set specific targets, with implicit or explicit reference to National Curriculum Levels, which are designed to move our pupils on and make them better historians. How, though, are we to prevent them from achieving their targets in a rather...
Opportunities, challenges and questions: continual assessment in Year 9
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Assessment without Level Descriptions
Teaching History article
Two heads of department in contrasting schools explain why they do not use Level Descriptions at all, other than at the very end of Key Stage 3. Influenced by ‘assessment for learning' principles, Sally Burnham and Geraint Brown develop a case for using assessment to help pupils grow in understanding...
Assessment without Level Descriptions
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Dr Black Box or How I learned to stop worrying and love assessment
Teaching History article
Drawing upon experimental work in different history departments, Mark Cottingham explores ‘assessment for learning' principles in practice. He raises the problem of a clash between these approaches and the progression model inherent in the National Curriculum Attainment Target, and, crucially, the way in which history departments are expected to use...
Dr Black Box or How I learned to stop worrying and love assessment
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Cunning Plan 185… for building difference into GCSE curriculum design
Teaching History feature
Many history teachers have been busy making space in their curriculum plans for different sorts of histories. This process, as Priyamavda Gopal has argued (in response to claims that moves to decolonise the curriculum constitute an attempt to censor history by editing out those bits viewed as ‘stains’ on the nation’s...
Cunning Plan 185… for building difference into GCSE curriculum design
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Power, authority and geography
Teaching History article
Dissatisfied by her previous enquiries on medieval kingship and inspired by Helen Castor’s 'She-Wolves', Elizabeth Carr sought to incorporate the stories of powerful medieval women such as Empress Matilda and Eleanor of Aquitaine into her Key Stage 3 curriculum. Carr used these stories to highlight to her pupils the crucial...
Power, authority and geography
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History using information technology: past, present and future
Article
Alaric Dickinson gives an overview of recent developments in the teaching of history using ICT and relates these to different contexts. He examines the appeal of the History Using IT materials and places these in the context of earlier developments. He also considers the role of ICT in the context...
History using information technology: past, present and future
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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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Cunning Plan 134: local history at KS3
Teaching History feature
Question: How can we plan to integrate local history into Key Stage 3 schemes of work so that pupils are engaged by the relevance of the subject across different periods of time?
Local history can come in all shapes and sizes, from a large-scale oral history project to the perusal...
Cunning Plan 134: local history at KS3
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HA Update: History for all – a wider view
Teaching History feature
In this update, I plan to share ideas and practice from colleagues who lead and teach history in special schools in the northeast of England. Ten years have passed since the publication of History for All and this therefore seems a good moment for reflection. By 2011, in many of England’s schools,...
HA Update: History for all – a wider view
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'A lot of guess work goes on': Children's understanding of historical accounts
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated
The ESRC-funded Project Chata has collected evidence of children's ideas about the discipline of history and attempted to see if there is any progression in those ideas. Here, Peter Lee describes how Chata has tried...
'A lot of guess work goes on': Children's understanding of historical accounts
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Triumphs Show 182: A public lecture series
Teaching History feature
The history we present to students, however rigorous and challenging, and however full of integrity in eflecting history as a discipline, is a shiny show of our best resources. Peeling back this curtain and allowing students to see the real world of academic history was a major motivation in inviting some...
Triumphs Show 182: A public lecture series
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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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Questions and answers about questions and answers
Teaching History article
Intrigued by the wide range of pupils’ responses to a sourcebased essay question, Jonathan Sellin decided to investigate why pupils were using sources in such different ways. Probing his own philosophical assumptions about history, and how they have changed over time, prompted Sellin to explore pupils’ assumptions about how historians use sources to make claims about the past. By asking pupils to...
Questions and answers about questions and answers
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Cunning Plan 181: Incorporating a more global perspective within Key Stage 3
Teaching History feature
While lockdown, in response to the Covid-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020, brought a period of turbulence to the education sector, it also brought a wealth of generosity, with a vast range of free online CPD offered by different providers. One in particular was the webinar series ‘West African History before the 1600s’ hosted...
Cunning Plan 181: Incorporating a more global perspective within Key Stage 3
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Using extra-curricular opportunities to broaden students’ encounters with history
Teaching History article
In this article, Jess Angell shows how her department seeks to make extra-curricular activities accessible to all. There is a strong focus on involving professional historians, since so many students seem not to understand who historians are, or what they do. But the audience is wider than just history students:...
Using extra-curricular opportunities to broaden students’ encounters with history
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Move Me On 180: feeling unprepared to start as NQT because of Covid-19
Teaching History feature
Una Marson had her training interrupted by school closures in response to Covid-19 and feels unprepared to start as an NQT.
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...
Move Me On 180: feeling unprepared to start as NQT because of Covid-19
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Triumphs Show 133: Getting more pupils choosing History at GCSE
Teaching History feature
It is often remarked that history is under pressure nationally at GCSE. Our history numbers have never been enormous, and we have recently gone down from 2 sets to one set. The crunch came in 2007 when we collapsed to a dismal 12 students. A variety of factors may have...
Triumphs Show 133: Getting more pupils choosing History at GCSE
