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Reflecting on challenges that had surfaced in their own and others' efforts to get pupils to write historical narratives, Rachel Foster and Kath Goudie went back to the drawing board to consider the disciplinary purposes of narrative. They used both historical scholarship and theoretical works by historians on narrative construction. Their difficulty was how to create a space in which pupils have to think about narrative structure as deliberately constructed artifice, rather than relying on the shape of content exposition tacitly imbibed from teacher or text. The article sets out how they eventually achieved this, and how the side-benefits of a new knowledge security liberated pupils to play with alternative construct ons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on approach to history education by an educational organization Facing History and Ourselves National Foundation. It aims to understand important histories such as the Holocaust and strives to learn from the horror of mass violence and draw measures that can be taken to prevent it. It states that Facing History focuses on human and institutional decision-making and encourages students to relate to history or contemporary world

The article investigates the environmental approach in history education focused on the role of place and space in teaching and learning of controversial history about the Holocaust. It discusses the need to modify approach to teaching history for Year 9 pupil, with study of landscapes of the Holocaust, which provides alternative framework for understanding experiences of the Holocaust

The article focuses on an approach to curriculum in history education, which includes visits to historic sites according to the General Certificate of Secondary Education requirement. It discusses the experience of teachers who attended a residential professional development programme at Monticello plantation of Thomas Jefferson in Virginia, to demonstrate the effect of site visits, history expertise and archival research can foster student learning experience.

The article focuses on an approach to teaching history with use of detailed character cards as a tool to understand how different people responded in different ways to situations in the past. It discusses teaching design and concepts by Catherine McCrory and Elizabeth Carr to comply with General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) curriculum basis for teaching similarity and difference.

The article discusses the use of virtual reality to offer students immersive learning experience to interact with the historic environment. It focuses on the approach on history education as per General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) historic environment tour requirement. It presents example of creating an 360-degree VR tour of Hardwick Hall from Elizabethan era.

The article focuses on history teaching and history teachers. Topics discussed include lesson plan for teaching about Black Death to students, students' learning and subject knowledge. In addition, other topics which includes mentoring of teachers and lesson planning by teachers are also discussed.

The article discusses issues faced by history teachers in teaching history. Topics discussed include similarity, difference and teaching about British Empire to history students. In addition, other topics which includes development of conceptual knowledge in students and teacher trainees are also discussed.

The article discuses first world war and its interpretations. Topics discussed include history teaching, second world war and generalisation. Further, other topics which includes secondary education, history education community and studying historiography are also discussed. History students are also mentioned.

The article presents a situation in initial teacher education/training with an emphasis on helping students with poor levels of literacy within a mainstream history class. Topics discussed include a lesson plan for Year 9 students, the department head's critique of the lesson plan for Year 9 students, and some strategies to wean students off the use of writing frames.

The article focuses on the Harkness method, a teaching and learning method that involves students seated in a large, oval shape in order to discuss ideas in an encouraging, open-minded environment with minimal teacher intervention. Topics discussed include the use of the method with history students at the Manchester Grammar School in Manchester, England, helping students formulate their own academic arguments, and the integration of the students' arguments into their essays.

The author introduces an alternative to the Point, Example, Explanation, Link (PEE/L) model in teaching essay writing to students. Topics discussed include the history essay and the use of acronyms as scaffolding, the constraints imposed by the PEE/L framework, and the development of an analytical mnemonic for sizing up the essay question.

The article shows how to improve students' historical thinking and written argument by direct teaching of punctuation. Topics discussed include the reasons why poor punctuation is more than a literacy problem, the students' problem with historical thinking particularly the construction of claims, and tackling the problem through planning and through a focus on punctuation.

The article presents an analysis on the role of knowledge in teaching history to students in Great Britain. Commenting on the changes in the way history was taught, be it Schools Council History 13-16 Project (SCHP) or the National Curriculum, it focuses on the relationship between substantive knowledge and second-order understanding. Citing student comments on cold war, it shows a strong correlation between the two wherein substantive insecurity seems to affect the students' causal reasoning.

The article discusses the misconception of Year 11 students in the conceptual understanding of change in history, and resolving it through gradual learning. Taking Twentieth Century China as example, it suggests a simple visual time-line, and a short written piece to infer student responses, followed by a pedometer analogy to explain speed of change, its impact on different groups, and a word list. It concludes that the approach had a positive impact, as the final responses were holistic.

The article focuses on the compartmentalization of history by General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) and A-level students, which simplifies the complex past. Commenting that history is made of overlapping narratives, it recommends an enquiry based approach through real historical questions, structured chunks, and a double vision, which would help students to use knowledge flexibly. Suggestions include revision through card sorting, reading historian works and adding change enquiry.

The article discusses how the 18th century is studied in the education system of Great Britain, focusing on ways for teachers and students in Key Stage 3 to better understand the time period. Other topics of the article include Great Britain's National Curriculum, historians' thoughts on the most important aspects of the 18th century, and the various resources available to teach the 18th century.

The article discusses what a sense of period is, focusing on the importance of Year 7 British students gaining a sense of period to better understand the chronology of British history. Other topics of the article include the importance of clear lessons that use contemporary sources, the use of temporal comparisons to develop a sense of period, and the reduction in conceptual understanding when lessons are focused on chronology.

The article discusses the authors' experience of teaching students to approach controlled assessments, a formal requirement of the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) examination in history in which students demonstrate their skills in extended historical writing. According to the authors, the controlled assessment can provide students with an opportunity to explore enquiry-based learning and creative historical thought.

The author discusses how his British grammar school's history department attempted to utilize frameworks of knowledge to enhance the learning experience of Year 9 students concerning the history of the 20th century. It examines his use of storyboards to assist students in thinking about interrelationships between key historical events and how individual events fit into the framework.

The article presents a lesson plan for Year 8 students in Great Britain on the subject of shifting historical interpretations of the Battle of Rorke's Drift in South Africa in 1879.

In this article, the author discusses her methods in teaching her British Year 7 history students about the conflict between King Stephen of England and Empress Matilda in the mid-12th century, or the Anarchy. Her use of the inquiry method to teach the subject is explained, as is her requirement that students perform speeches arguing whether the period was characterized by true anarchy. Her wish that students would also learn about the origins of King Henry II's reign is also explained.

The article describes The Association for Historical Dialogue and Research's (AHDR) design of a lesson sequence on the Ottoman period in Cyprus, created in partnership with history teachers from Great Britain, Turkey, and Cyprus. Topics discussed include the development of an enquiry question for students, the building of historical narratives, and studying history through an examination of buildings and places.

The article discusses an educational game designed for Year 10 students in order to improve their causal reasoning through the study of Tsarist Russia. Topics discussed include the development of counterfactual reasoning, the use of a map of Russia in the game, and challenges based on the time taken to understand the game's rules.

The article discusses the redesign of lessons on the Romans for Year 7 students in Great Britain, focusing on ways to develop student's historical language. The author discusses developing and enquiry question for students and various lesson plans are described, including discussions of student's theories and writing skills.

The author, a history teacher, describes taking his students on a field trip to St. Mary's Parish Church in the Leyton area of London, England in order to complete a study of local history, highlighting activities carried out by the students during the trip and other lessons related to the church. The students' analysis of primary and secondary historical sources is described, and excerpts of students' work are provided.

History curriculum reform proposals and debates are a persistent feature of the contemporary educational landscape in England and, very probably, a 'sign of the times' that can reveal a great deal about contemporary predicaments and concerns. History curriculum controversy is also a global phenomenon and one that can fruitfully - and, perhaps, only truly - be understood in a comparative context. In Teaching History 137 Peter Seixas reported on recent controversies and developments in British Columbia. In this article, Stephanie Burley provides a narrative of recent curriculum reform :controversies and processes in Australia and an account of key features of the emerging Australian National History Curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Weaknesses in pupils' grasp of historical chronology are a commonplace in popular discussion of the state of history education. However, as Blow, Lee and Shemilt argue, although undoubtedly necessary and fundamental, mastery of chronological conventions is not sufficient: the difficulties that pupils experience when learning history are conceptual, as much as chronological and conventional, and relate to thinking about time and, in part,to tensions between temporal understanding in historical and in everyday contexts. How are history pupils - and history graduates - thinking when they tie themselves in temporal and terminological knots? Learning to think historically entails mastering conventions and, crucially, Blow, Lee and Shemilt argue, learning to think about concepts such as duration, sequence and concurrence and about relationships between them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides history teachers' advice for a trainee teacher who is reluctant to engage in historical narration in the classroom. These teachers note that while this lack of narrative teaching is problematic, she has still developed positive teaching methods focused on student engagement, activity programs, and group discussions. Suggestions include increasing subject knowledge to gain confidence, developing non-verbal ways of engaging in narrative, and observing other teachers.

The article provides a number of historians' perspectives on the importance of narrative in the study and teaching of history in light of forthcoming changes to Great Britain's national history curriculum. The advice offered is targeted at history school teachers. Topics discussed include the presence of narrative in the construction of national histories, national identities, and history as storytelling.

Struck by what he saw as the complexity, artistry and cognitive achievement of historians' narrative accounts, Robin Kemp decided to explore ways of teaching his pupils to write narrative and to analyse the role of such writing in developing various kinds of historical thinking. Working with Year 8 and Year 10 he designed a research project that would probe the quality and nature of pupils' learning during two narrative-rich enquiries. Each enquiry was designed to culminate in pupils' own narrative accounts. Using a hermeneutic theming method to analyse his pupils' writing, Kemp also sought to define emergent properties that might be useful in future efforts to find ways of assessing written narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of using 'little stories' to illuminate the 'big pictures' of the past was creatively explored in Teaching History 107, which offered teachers a wealth of detailed vignettes with which to kindle young people's interest and illuminate major historical events. Paul Barrett builds on the ideas explored in that issue in two important ways. The first is to locate the little stories that are studied within children's own families, encouraging his students to explore records and share the war-time experiences of their relatives. The annual event which his school hosts for the grandparents of Year 7 students offers an inspirational example of the curiosity and enthusiasm generated by personal history. Barrett's second contribution, carefully developed through the sequence of lessons that he outlines here, is to make such personal stories an integral part of a rigorous historical enquiry, thereby expanding students' conceptions of historical diversity and alerting them to the contingent nature of historical significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robin Conway's interest in student led enquiry derived from a concernto encourage his students to take much more responsibility for their own learning. Here he explains how his department gradually learned to entrust students with defining the enquiry questions and planning the kinds of teaching and learning activities to be used over the course of their final Key Stage 3 unit on the Holocaust. Although the process is undoubtedly daunting, he argues that the risk is well worth taking; and his account demonstrates how allstudents can play a full part in such aprocess, learning not only how to set shared lesson objectives or individual targets for their final assessment,but also how to evaluate the appropriateness of those objectives and the quality of their learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current National Curriculum for history requires pupils to 'identify and investigate specific historical questions, making and testing hypotheses for themselves'. While Kate Hammond relished the encouragement that this gave to her pupils to engage in the process of historical enquiry, she was keen to develop a much clearer sense of what successful pupil-led enquiries would involve and to ensure that all the pupils in her class - not just the higher attainers - could succeed in this endeavour. Here she outlines a provisional list of attributes that might characterise successful practice and explores in detail how two of these attributes- generating worth while historical questions and recognising the need to keep testing a hypothesis- can be effectively developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author discusses the teaching of causation as a concept in history education and argues that the chronological dimension of this concept is often overlooked by both students and teachers. He provides an outline for a teaching method he devised which uses causation maps to ensure that chronology is incorporated. Examples of causation maps he used for lessons on the history of gunpowder and the causes of World War I are also included.

In this powerfully argued article Paul Salmons focuses directly on the distinctive contribution that a historical approach to the study of the Holocaust makes to young people's education. Not only does he question the adequacy of objectives focused on eliciting purely emotional responses; he issues a strong warning that turning to the Holocaust in search of universal moral lessons - 'lessons' that merely confirm what we already believe - risks serious distortion of the past. Citing widespread use of the Holocaust as a rhetorical device, Salmons' contention is that failure to engage with its historical and highly complex reality in fact leaves young people open to manipulation and coercion from those who would use the past to push their own social or political agendas. What he offers here is not merely a justification for the Holocaust's position as a compulsory element of the school history curriculum - but a fundamental defence of the place of history in school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Holocaust imagery is very familiar, clichéd even. How can we get pupils thinking about it in novel ways and seeing differently? Phillips reports work completed with his PGCE students, proposes a scaffold of questions with which to deconstruct images and applies it to archive images and to Hollywood representations. Images are actions - interventions in particular contexts. Phillips' scaffold aims to highlight a number of important features of images in order to draw attention to the tacit or explicit intentions behind them. In what ways does a ghetto image, taken by German soldiers on leave, enact relationships that enabled the Holocaust and how can we help students appreciate this dimension of such photographs? How do Hollywood images of the Holocaust make use of perpetrator photographs and how can we get pupils debating the ethics of representation? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After a Fellowship in Holocaust Education at the Imperial War Museum, Andy Lawrence decided that something was missing in normal approaches to teaching emotive and controversial issues such as genocide, a deficit demonstrated by recent research by the Holocaust Education Development Programme. As part of his fellowship, Lawrence created an on-line exhibition builder, which allowed students to use their creativity to construct an exhibition, using original source material, about the Holocaust. Lawrence used his exhibition builder to demonstrate that teaching potentially difficult topics need not come at the price of creativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. Students are required not merely to recall and list, but to select and justify their choices, to design and arrange a pattern, weaving together the threads that carry their argument with the evidence that best substantiates their claims. Here Jannet van Drie and Carla van Boxtel systematically explore the ways in which these processes can be supported by on-line collaboration, and the use of various forms of visual display. The value of their work lies particularly In the rigour with which they test claims about the ways in which the use of computer technologies and processes of visual representation can support genuinely historical reasoning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Empathy with edge' was the editorial description given eight years ago to the kind of historical fiction that Dave Martin and Beth Brooke first argued history students should be writing (TH 108). The winning entries from the annual 'Write Your Own Historical Story Competition' to which their work gave rise have more than vindicated their faith in the creative combination of rigorous historical research and literary skills. In this article Gary Hillyard explains how his department built on Martin and Brooke's inspirational work, even establishing their own historical novel competition, with publication for the winning entries. While their approach displays the same respect for historical rigour and careful attention to style and genre, Hillyard's account of how the scheme was developed and refined over successive years also provides a richly detailed explanation of how his department supported the necessary development of all students' literacy skills while still allowing them — as 'independent enquirers' and 'creative thinkers' — to direct and shape their own learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jamie Byrom is well-known to readers of Teaching History, not least for introducing us to the concept 'professional wrestling' in the history department (Teaching History, 133, Empire Edition). That article, authored with Michael Riley, focused on the challenges of planning engaging sequences of lessons and coherent sets of activities to build broad and coherent knowledge on the British Empire. The article suggested that wrestling was part of being a history teacher. Now Jamie Byrom has taken his talents in this area to a new level by introducing wrestling between disciplines, in this case science and history. If cross-curricular work is to be rigorous and learning is to be effectively scaffolded then thorough planning is paramount. This article sets out the details of a cross-curricular day that brings two subjects together in one place: Baghdad. However, this piece goes much further in problematising such cross-curricular planning and gives guidance on the detailed process that needs to underpin such initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A trip to the battlefields of the First World War throws into stark relief the challenges presented by work on interpretations related to historical sites. Andrew Wrenn first drew attention to the difficulties of promoting 'objective enquiry' alongside the 'emotional responses' that such locations — and the monuments designed to memorialise them — tend to evoke.1 While Wrenn shared some of the strategies that he used to support conscious reflection on the creation of the memorials, Barnaby Nemko here demonstrates just how important such strategies are. Using a visual assessment approach which requires pupils to construct their own interpretations he discovers just how much power the memorial sites exert on an emotional level, blunting analytical skills that have been well developed in relation to other kinds of historical account. Nemko not only reveals the value of taking a visual approach to assessment, he also demonstrates how two different research-based models of progression — one developed by Lee and Shemilt in relation to understanding the nature of historical accounts, and the other by Seixas and Clark, specifically in relation to the understanding of historical monuments — can be used to help teachers both in assessing their pupils' existing conceptions and in planning for progression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concerns about our ability to equip young people with a frame of reference that they can actually use to orient themselves in time are widespread. The challenges were extensively debated within the last issue of Teaching History, with teachers, researchers and historians not only exploring the merits of different kinds of framework, but also questioning the extent to which pre-determined structures might actually inhibit the development of students' own historical thinking. In light of this exploratory research, the new thematic schemes of work and the classroom experimentation being conducted in England, it is fascinating to read here about dramatic decisions taken in the Netherlands. A complete framework of 'orientation knowledge' has been introduced into the secondary curriculum, comprising ten clear-cut 'eras' each with associated labels, and a small number of 'characteristic features'. This article explores the early impact of this curriculum reform within the exam system as attempts are made to assess students' knowledge, understanding and use of the new framework. Teachers themselves are finding it difficult to let go of questions that only ask for the reproduction of knowledge, making the framework almost a goal in itself, while students currently show few signs of actually using it to support their reasoning about chronology. Clearly two years of working with the new curriculum is not enough. Nonetheless, the research methods and analytical categories developed by van Drie and her colleagues are of tremendous value both in illustrating the value of listening very carefully to the ways in which our students reason together, and in suggesting how we might define and measure genuine progression in students' capacity to use historical frames of reference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses teaching a sense of time period and modeling history to students in Year 7, Year 8 and Year 9 levels in England. The author discusses how to draw generalizations about certain periods and recognizing diversity within that period. The author suggests alternative approaches to teaching a sense of period.

The article discusses the incorporation of psychology into history. The authors examine how psychology can be used to explore meaning-making in history. They also discuss how students can explore ideas about diversity and significance by asking questions concerning remembering and forgetting. Several visuals are provided to illustrate their argument.

As an Advanced Skills Teacher, Denise Thompson has often been at the forefront of experimental developments. Five years ago, she reported on trials of an online discussion forum used to sharpen A level students' historical thinking. Two years later she shared her department's experiences as one of the first to pilot a shortened, two-year Key Stage 3. That pioneering spirit has been vital to her latest initiative: two years' work as an advisory teacher in Uganda. With no classroom access to the internet, and few other teaching materials on which to draw, she re-discovered the immense oral resources that skilled teachers themselves bring to the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventionally, students learn to read before they come to secondary school. As a result, for the majority of our students, reading can be taken for granted. Yet sometimes, as history teachers, we can find that we assume too much. Although our students are often able to read the words of the text in front of them, do they read with understanding? Can they get behind the text and between the lines in order to interpret meaning? How can we inspire students to want to read in a critical, but constructive manner? These are questions raised by Martin Loy throughout his varied career in history teaching. He recognised that preceding the challenge of teaching students to write good history was the underlying need to motivate students to read. Inspired by articles in Teaching History 111, Loy has developed a range of approaches to challenge his students not just to read, but to read well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an enthusiastic musician, Alison Meikle is always looking for ways to use music in the history classroom. While Teaching History has seen plenty of articles on using musical sources as evidence (e.g. Mastin in Teaching History 108 and Butler in Teaching History 111), we have seen fewer examples of encouraging pupils to compose and write their own songs as an alternative way of constructing and presenting their own accounts based on evidence. In this article, Meikle's focus is using sources as evidence but she is not using music as source. Rather, she is interested in using musical language as a tool for thinking, talking and constructing an evidence-based account. Meikle leads into this with an initial focus on historical interpretations by getting pupils to deconstruct the musical language of a modern popular song first. Pupils then move into evidential thinking, proceeding to re-interrogate the contemporary sources about King John, and writing a song to convey their conclusions. As they prepare for this, Meikle makes them articulate their choices and judgements through the language of music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the creation of an informed debate about the character of teaching-training, teacher education and professional development. It offers practical help to all concerned in training new history teachers. In addition, it presents a situation in initial teacher education/training that emphasizes a particular history-specific issue.

The article discusses the methods on how to make a good historical question concerning the pupils' ability to learn history specifically the topic of Islamic Civilization on Grade 7. It highlights two issues which are absolutely crucial for history teachers. First is how best to give the pupils ownership of what they are studying and the second is on how to enable the students to frame and evaluate their own questions.