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  • Witchcraft - Using fiction with Year 8s

      Teaching History article
    Which women were executed for witchcraft? And which pupils cared?  Paula Worth was concerned that her low-attaining set were only going through the motions when tackling causal explanation. Identifying, prioritising and weighing causes seemed an empty routine rather than a fascinating puzzle engaging intellect and imagination. She was also concerned...
    Witchcraft - Using fiction with Year 8s
  • Disciplining cross-curricularity?

      Teaching History article
    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. Why should we think in inter-disciplinary rather than cross-curricular terms when planning collaborative work with colleagues in other subjects? What scope is there for working in inter-disciplinary ways and what is the value of such...
    Disciplining cross-curricularity?
  • Empathy without illusions

      Teaching History article
    Empathy may have disappeared from official documents but the history teacher who does not still regularly think about it, plan for it and teach it would be hard to find. What is history if not, in part, an attempt to understand how people thought and felt in the past? This...
    Empathy without illusions
  • 'You be Britain and I'll be Germany...' Inter-school e-mailing in Year 9

      Teaching History article
    E-mailing is fast becoming our preferred means of communication and for good reason. It is immediate: we can fire off a few lines and receive a reply within seconds. It is also flexible: unlike a telephone conversation, we do not have to reply there and then; we can go away...
    'You be Britain and I'll be Germany...' Inter-school e-mailing in Year 9
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • Finding voices in the past: exploring identity through the biography of a house

      Teaching History article
    Heather De Silva, Jenny Smith and Jason Tranter outline a new study unit, planned jointly by their history and geography departments and designed specifically to meet the new requirements for local history required by England’s recently revised National Curriculum for history. They aimed to help pupils to capture a part...
    Finding voices in the past: exploring identity through the biography of a house
  • So, what exactly does an AST do?

      Teaching History article
    Professional development lies at the heart of any thriving, forward-thinking profession. In teaching, however, despite the government’s recent drive to ‘modernise’ the profession, it can still be a bit hit and miss. What are the opportunities for ambitious and successful teachers of history to widen their horizons and engage in...
    So, what exactly does an AST do?
  • 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
  • Nazi perpetrators in Holocaust education

      Teaching History article
    The Holocaust is often framed, in textbooks and exam syllabi, from a perpetrator perspective as a narrative of Nazi policy. We are offered a different orientation here. Interrogating and understanding the Holocaust involves understanding why the people who perpetrated the Holocaust did the things that they did. As Wolf Kaiser...
    Nazi perpetrators in Holocaust education
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • Move Me On 96: Struggling with language register - getting pitch right

      Teaching History feature
    This Issue's Problem: John Ball is having difficulty getting his language register right Problem: John is several weeks into his first school placement. He is very much enjoying the PGCE course. It is proving to be the intellectual and practical challenge that he hoped. He has come to the course...
    Move Me On 96: Struggling with language register - getting pitch right
  • Securing contextual knowledge in year 10

      Teaching History article
    Using regular, low-stakes tests to secure pupils' contextual knowledge in Year 10 Lee Donaghy was concerned that his GCSE students' weak contextual knowledge was letting them down. Inspired by a mixture of cognitive science and the arguments of other teachers expressed in various blogs, he decided to tackle the problem...
    Securing contextual knowledge in year 10
  • Move Me On 157: Getting knowledge across

      Teaching History feature
    This issue's problem: Rose Valognes feels she hasn't got enough ways of getting knowledge across to the students before they can do something with it. After a positive start to her training year, Rose Valognes seems to have got stuck in a rut in her thinking, with her lessons falling...
    Move Me On 157: Getting knowledge across
  • Polychronicon 140: Why did the Cold War End?

      Teaching History feature
    The end of the Cold War is a controversial subject. Contemporary analysts did not see it coming. Any explanation of its ending which seeks to build up a network of causation will therefore be forced to make arguments based on events whose significance was not  necessarily seen at the time....
    Polychronicon 140: Why did the Cold War End?
  • Move Me On 156: Assessment for Learning

      Teaching History feature
    This issue's problem: Fred North treats ‘Assessment for Learning' as though it is a bolt-on extra unconnected to his learning objectives Fred is an enthusiastic trainee who has generally made a good impression on students and colleagues over the course of his first term. He has been determined to establish a...
    Move Me On 156: Assessment for Learning
  • How Michael moved us on: transforming Key Stage 3 through peer review

      Teaching History article
    Thomas Tallis history department have an interesting approach to planning. Whereas, all too often, this most time-consuming and intellectually demanding of teachers’ tasks is rendered invisible, and is supposed to happen by magic in the middle of the night, this department chose to make the planning process genuinely collaborative, pivotal...
    How Michael moved us on: transforming Key Stage 3 through peer review
  • Triumphs Show 139: Whodunnit? The Felling mining disaster of 1812

      Teaching History feature
    Whodunnit? The Felling mining disaster, 1812 The room buzzes as pathologists swap stories about injuries on the latest bodies. Some have virtually all limbs missing, others have been crushed by rockfall. Others have been found seemingly asleep with not a mark on their bodies. You have stepped into a Year...
    Triumphs Show 139: Whodunnit? The Felling mining disaster of 1812
  • Making sense of the eighteenth century

      Teaching History article
    Making sense of the eighteenth century Pressures on curriculum time force us all to make difficult choices about curriculum content, but the eighteenth century seems to have suffered particular neglect. Inspired by the tercentenary of the accession of the first Georgian king and the interest in the Acts of Union prompted...
    Making sense of the eighteenth century