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The Spice of Life? Ensuring variety when teaching about the Treaty of Versailles
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Much has been said and written about different learning styles in recent years. Some people have responded with evangelical enthusiasm, others exercise a more cautious approach, whilst a few disregard it completely. Certainly, there are...
The Spice of Life? Ensuring variety when teaching about the Treaty of Versailles
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Tripping over the levels: experiences from Ontario
Teaching History article
Here in the United Kingdom, we are used to the idea of assessing pupils’ work against Levels. In fact, perhaps we are a little too used to it. Our familiarity with the Level Descriptions in the National Curriculum, and the ways they might inform our Key Stage 3 assessments, can...
Tripping over the levels: experiences from Ontario
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Historical scholarship, archaeology and evidence in Year 7
Teaching History article
The stimulus for this article came from two developmental tasks that Barbara Trapani was set during the course of her initial teacher education programme: planning her first historical enquiry and bringing the work of an historian into the classroom. Trapani chose to tackle the two tasks together, using Susan Whitfield’s...
Historical scholarship, archaeology and evidence in Year 7
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From ‘double vision’ to panorama: exploring interpretations of Nazi popularity
Teaching History article
Jim Carroll relished the opportunity, in the new A-level specification he was teaching, to find an effective way of teaching his students to analyse interpretations in their coursework essays. Reflecting on the difficulties he had faced as a trainee teacher teaching younger pupils about interpretations, and dissatisfied with examination board...
From ‘double vision’ to panorama: exploring interpretations of Nazi popularity
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My essays could go on forever: using Key Stage 3 to improve performance at GCSE
Teaching History article
History teachers are waking up to the fact that you cannot raise standards in GCSE by very much if you leave this work until Year 10. To leave it that late is to resort to surface, tactical moves rather than to address the deep reasons why so many pupils find...
My essays could go on forever: using Key Stage 3 to improve performance at GCSE
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Move Me On 91: work with historical sources lacks focus
The problem page for history mentors
Problem: Mike Jones, student history teacher, is half-way through his PGCE year. He is making unusually good progress in his knowledge, understanding and practice with regard to the use of sources in history. He also appears to have no difficulty with classroom management and relationships with pupils. He easily creates...
Move Me On 91: work with historical sources lacks focus
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Identity in history: why it matters and must be addressed!
Teaching History journal article
Sophia Nzeribe Nascimento, a mixed-race teacher working in a diverse London school, set out to explore her students’ assumptions about who historians are. While her own ethnicity and gender may have convinced at least some of her students that history is not exclusively the preserve of old white men, she...
Identity in history: why it matters and must be addressed!
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History, citizenship and Oliver Stone
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
When is a work of art a work of history? How can we get our students to appreciate the difference without ignoring the overlap? How should we ask our students to approach the historical film...
History, citizenship and Oliver Stone
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From road map to thought map: helping students theorise the nature of change
Teaching History article
Warren Valentine was dissatisfied with his Year 7 students’ accounts of change across the Tudor period. Fixated with Henry VIII’s wives, they failed to reflect on or analyse the bigger picture of the whole Tudor narrative.
In order to overcome this problem, his department created a ‘thought-map’ exercise in which...
From road map to thought map: helping students theorise the nature of change
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‘Through the looking glass’
Journal article
Danielle Donaldson began to notice the verbs that her pupils used to express their ideas. She noticed that more successful pupils were using carefully chosen verbs to express their conceptual thinking about causation or change, and wondered how this might relate to, and reflect, the breadth and security of their...
‘Through the looking glass’
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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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New, Novice or Nervous? 160: Progression in evidential understanding
Teaching History feature
You have a wealth of fascinating sources you would love to explore with students but despair at their seeming inability to connect ‘source work' with the construction of historical claims. Year 7 get stuck in the ‘it's biased so we can never know' trap again and again. Year 9 students...
New, Novice or Nervous? 160: Progression in evidential understanding
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JFK: the medium, the message and the myth
Teaching History article
Dale Banham and Russell Hall present a multi-faceted rationale for an in-depth study of the 1991 film, JFK. They treat it as an ‘interpretation’ in the National Curriculum sense, constructing a varied and meticulous learning journey towards its analysis. By the end of that journey pupils had examined the central...
JFK: the medium, the message and the myth
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Helping Year 9 evaluate explanations for the Holocaust
Teaching History article
‘It made my brain hurt, but in a good way': helping Year 9 learn to make and to evaluate explanations for the Holocaust
Why genocides occur is a perplexing and complex question. Leanne Judson reports a strategy designed to help students think about perpetration and evaluate and propose explanations for...
Helping Year 9 evaluate explanations for the Holocaust
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Do we need another hero? Rorke's Drift
Teaching History article
Do we need another hero? Year 8 get to grips with the heroic myth of the Defence of Rorke's Drift in 1879
Mike Murray shares a lesson sequence in which his students examined changing interpretations of the Battle of Rorke's Drift in 1879. Building on earlier work on teaching interpretations...
Do we need another hero? Rorke's Drift
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Triumphs Show 148.1: collaborating to commemorate Olaudah Equiano
Teaching History feature
How a drink in the bar at the SHP conference - and discovery of a shared interest in ICT - led to the campaign for a Blue Plaque for an eighteenth-century abolitionist.
What do the 1970 Brazil World Cup-winning team, Charles Darwin and Vanilla Ice all have in common? This...
Triumphs Show 148.1: collaborating to commemorate Olaudah Equiano
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Time's arrows? Using a dartboard scaffold to understand historical action
Teaching History article
Arthur Chapman presents a task-specific scaffold - a ‘dart' board - designed to teach students how to interrogate sources of information so that these become sources of evidence for particular claims about past actions, beliefs and aims. Chapman also uses his ‘dart' board to foster students' reflection on the degrees of...
Time's arrows? Using a dartboard scaffold to understand historical action
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Substantial sculptures or sad little plaques? Making 'interpretations' matter to Year 9
Teaching History article
Andrew Wrenn builds upon current, popular and practical work on ‘interpretations of history' analysed in recent editions. Using the public's responses to the temporary exhibition on the slave trade housed at Bristol City Museum, he offers a range of fascinating practical activities for Year 9 pupils. Many of these could...
Substantial sculptures or sad little plaques? Making 'interpretations' matter to Year 9
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Why go on a pilgrimage? Using a concluding enquiry to reinforce and assess earlier learning
Teaching History article
Jamie Byrom describes the learning activities within a final enquiry for a National Curriculum area of study - Britain 1066-1500. The strong message in this article is that the learning in each enquiry is only as good as the planning and teaching of the enquiries that precede it. Byrom's model...
Why go on a pilgrimage? Using a concluding enquiry to reinforce and assess earlier learning
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How can I improve my use of ICT? Put history first!
Teaching History article
What is the difference between using lots of ICT and using it well? Dave Atkin draws upon work in his own department and with other Gloucestershire teachers in order to identify criteria for effective ICT use. These boil down to ‘putting history first' and getting maximum value out of the...
How can I improve my use of ICT? Put history first!
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Chatting about the sixties: historical reasoning in essay-writing
Teaching History article
An article about essay writing may not seem the most obvious choice for an issue of Teaching History devoted to creative thinking. Yet, as Christine Counsell so richly demonstrated in her work on analytical and discursive writing, the process of crafting an argument is a highly complex and creative challenge....
Chatting about the sixties: historical reasoning in essay-writing
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Expertise in its development stage: planning for the needs of gifted adolescent historians
Teaching History article
The Director of the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth (NAGTY), Deborah Eyre, is one of the foremost advocates of gifted and talented children, and their education, in the UK. She plans to improve the education of the most able students by asking subject communities to work on how...
Expertise in its development stage: planning for the needs of gifted adolescent historians
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Equiano - voice of silent slaves?
Teaching History article
Andrew Wrenn shows how a study of the life of Olaudah Equiano can support pupils’ historical learning in a number of ways. Not only is this a ‘little story’ that can help to illuminate or raise questions about the the ‘big picture’, it can also help pupils to reflect upon...
Equiano - voice of silent slaves?
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Seeing, hearing and doing the renaissance (Part 2)
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
In the last edition of Teaching History, Maria Osowiecki described in detail the fourth lesson in a five-lesson enquiry entitled: What was remarkable about the Renaissance? She also shared her resources for two lively, interactive...
Seeing, hearing and doing the renaissance (Part 2)
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Camels, diamonds and counterfactuals: a model for teaching causal reasoning
Teaching History article
In the last edition of Teaching History, Arthur Chapman described how he uses ICT to develop sixth form students’ conceptual understanding of interpretations, significance and change. In this article, he turns his attention to causal reasoning and analysis. Drawing on the work of historians such as Evans and Carr, he...
Camels, diamonds and counterfactuals: a model for teaching causal reasoning
