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Elizabeth I: ‘less than a woman’?
Historian article
Tracy Borman examines the femininity of the Virgin Queen.
Elizabeth I is often hailed as a feminist icon. Despite being the younger, forgotten daughter of Henry VIII with little hope of ever inheriting the throne, she became his longest-reigning and most successful heir by a country mile. In an age when...
Elizabeth I: ‘less than a woman’?
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Triumphs Show 128: Speed-dating with Queen Elizabeth
Teaching History feature
Some of the most effective role play activities are those which draw on the common experiences of pupils to promote serious learning outcomes. Chris Higgins experiments with a number of situations and strategies that draw upon popular games and television show formats. These are used to engage, to provide structure...
Triumphs Show 128: Speed-dating with Queen Elizabeth
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Cunning Plan 177: teaching about life in Elizabethan England by looking at death
Teaching History feature
‘We already did the Tudors in primary school’ was the most frequent comment made by students about our Year 7 scheme of learning in our annual review. Students reported covering the Tudors at least once, sometimes twice, before reaching secondary school and they had clearly not faced extensive further study...
Cunning Plan 177: teaching about life in Elizabethan England by looking at death
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Building an overview of the historic roots of antisemitism
Teaching History article
‘But I still don't get why the Jews': using cause and change to answer pupils' demand for an overview of antisemitism
Research by the Centre for Holocaust Education has suggested that students need and want more help with building an overview of the historical roots of antisemitism and that they...
Building an overview of the historic roots of antisemitism
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Teaching History 189: Out now
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Read Teaching History 189: Collaboration
Teaching requires many kinds of knowledge, which has many different sources. One of those sources of knowledge is other professionals. But history teachers are not simply passive receivers of settled bodies of knowledge produced by others. As the pages of Teaching History attest, there is...
Teaching History 189: Out now
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Teaching History 193: Out now
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Read Teaching History 193: Mediating History
David Lowenthal writes that history is both less than and more than the past. It is less because ‘only a tiny fraction of all that has happened can ever be recovered and recounted’.1 Yet it is also more because ‘it is a new and...
Teaching History 193: Out now
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Using narratives and big pictures to address the challenges of a 2-year KS3 curriculum
Teaching History article
Faced with cutting her Key Stage 3 curriculum to two years, Natalie Kesterton and her department were determined to do more with less. Not only did they want to ensure that their pupils developed a secure, wide-ranging knowledge of British and world history, they also wanted to address deficits in pupils’...
Using narratives and big pictures to address the challenges of a 2-year KS3 curriculum
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Teaching History 197: Out now
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Read Teaching History 197: Public History
Public history is history facing outwards: engaging with the public sphere beyond the ivory tower of research and scholarship in universities. In a recent essay entitled ‘Glorious memory’, Hicks writes of ‘an explosion of new public histories’ in recent decades, ‘led by communities from...
Teaching History 197: Out now
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Polychronicon 170: The Becket Dispute
Journal article
‘The Becket Dispute’ (or ‘Controversy’) refers to the quarrel between Henry II and Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, which dominated English ecclesiastical politics in the 1160s. It was a conflict with multiple dimensions: a clash of Church and State; a prolonged struggle between two prominent individuals; a close friendship turned...
Polychronicon 170: The Becket Dispute
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Cunning Plan 167: teaching the industrial revolution
Teaching History article
‘Disastrous and terrible.’ For Arnold Toynbee, the historian who gave us the phrase ‘industrial revolution’, these three words sum up the period of dramatic technological change that took place in Britain across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We may not habitually use Toynbee’s description in the classroom, but it is...
Cunning Plan 167: teaching the industrial revolution
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Teaching History 177: Out now
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Read Teaching History 177
Building Knowledge
As regular readers will know, the theme for each issue of Teaching History is usually determined in response to the range of proposals that the editors receive. Given the current focus within the education system in England on how knowledge is built cumulatively over...
Teaching History 177: Out now
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From human-scale to abstract analysis: Year 7. Henry II & Becket
Teaching History article
Tim Jenner was working on a causation enquiry with his Year 7 students when he noticed that weak conceptions of change were limiting their ability to produce powerful and period-sensitive arguments. He therefore decided to digress into a temporary but explicit focus on analysing historical change. He created a deceptively...
From human-scale to abstract analysis: Year 7. Henry II & Becket
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Teaching History 188: Out now
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Read Teaching History 188: Representing History
History teachers are familiar with the challenges that arise as we try to help our students make historical sense of past worlds. Building historical representations of the past is imaginatively demanding – it requires ‘world-making’ and narrative expertise. The challenges are probative, not merely...
Teaching History 188: Out now
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Cunning Plan 94: Study Unit 2: Crowns, Parliaments and Peoples, 1500-1750
Article
Flesh and blood people bring history to life. Capture the interest of our Year 8 pupils by making sure they engage with human dilemmas and dangers. A focus on individual people as the starting point for enquiries helps pupils to tackle the ‘big' stories (overviews) and difficult concepts.
Cunning Plan 94: Study Unit 2: Crowns, Parliaments and Peoples, 1500-1750
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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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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 194: Out now
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Read Teaching History 194: Climate and Environment
The current ecological and climate crisis is, without doubt, human-induced. Even those who previously disputed this claim have switched from outright denial to arguing that the threat is exaggerated.1 Meanwhile, many young people are responding to the crisis with strong emotions, such as...
Teaching History 194: Out now
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Modelling the discipline
Teaching History article
David Hibbert and Zaiba Patel decided to work together after becoming concerned that school history curricula might not enable students to interrogate popular British mythologising about World War II. Building on these pre-existing concerns, their collaboration with the historian Yasmin Khan yielded an Interpretations enquiry which asked students to consider...
Modelling the discipline
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Cunning Plan 174: creating a narrative of the interwar years
Teaching History feature
The major aim of this sequence of lessons was to teach Year 8 how to create and refine a narrative. I chose a period I was substantively confident on, which lent itself well to the narrative form, had a number of prominent academic narratives published about it and followed neatly...
Cunning Plan 174: creating a narrative of the interwar years
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Teaching History 180: Out now
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Read Teaching History 180
The start of a new academic year, with all its comfortingly familiar rituals and routines, also brings with it a set of familiar feelings: the adrenaline rush that comes with last-minute preparations, the thrill (and nerves) of meeting new classes, the sheer pleasure of being back...
Teaching History 180: Out now
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Teaching History 185: Out now
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
Read Teaching History 185: Missing stories
In their prologue to What is History Now? (published earlier this year to mark the 60th anniversary of E.H. Carr’s seminal work), Helen Carr and Susannah Lipscomb both admit to owning a ruler of rulers: a list of monarchs of Britain from the year...
Teaching History 185: Out now
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Polychronicon 151: Interpreting the Revolution of 1688
Teaching History feature
John Morrill, one of the foremost historians of the British civil wars, has described the events of 1688-9 as the ‘Sensible Revolution'. The phrase captures the essence of a long-standing scholarly consensus, that this was a very unrevolutionary revolution.
The origins of this interpretation go back to the late eighteenth...
Polychronicon 151: Interpreting the Revolution of 1688
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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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Two Realms and an empire: history, geography and an investigation into landscape
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
The idea that subjects should abandon their ‘silos' and work together is bandied about currently a great deal - ‘subjects' and ‘silos' alliterate after all and so, of course, does the word ‘slogan'. What might...
Two Realms and an empire: history, geography and an investigation into landscape
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Communities of inquiry: creating the conditions for meaningful collaboration
Teaching History article
When Will Bailey-Watson (a history ITE tutor) and Charlie Crouch (a history PhD student) worked together to improve a history undergraduate course at their university, they realised that the benefits of collaboration between teachers and historians can flow both ways. In this article they offer an account of how they sought...
Communities of inquiry: creating the conditions for meaningful collaboration
