Thanks to Sally Burnham for this blogpost. Sally is a history teacher at Carres Grammar School, history tutor at the University of Nottingham and incoming chair of the HA Secondary Committee. Here she shares her depth of experience of supporting A Level students to successfully complete the NEA. I love the History NEA! To me, the NEA is the part of the A Level course … Continue reading Helping Y12 tackle the NEA
Thanks to the teachers and academics of the HA Fellowship ‘The People of 1381’, the resources have now started to go ‘live’. Here is a short introduction and links to the resources. Downloadable classroom resources with teacher guidance Support for teacher knowledge, curriculum and teaching ideas The importance of The People of 1381 Why make time for the people of 1381 in a crowded curriculum? … Continue reading You might want to rethink your teaching of 1381!
Here, Jessie Phillips, History Teacher at Sawston Village College, takes her thinking about presentism in the history classroom further. She points out that this tendency to interpret the past through present values and concepts is used by historians as a conceptual scaffold. She challenges us to think about how presentism can help pupils make their own meanings out of history. She builds on David Armitage’s … Continue reading Smartphones and Mirrors: using presentisms constructively in the classroom.
Thanks to David Ingledew (@ingledew_j) for this blogpost reflecting on the powerful way that a HATF enables history teachers and teacher educators to learn from academic historians. On my way home from the Historical Association’s People of 1381 Teacher Fellowship programme residential at Mansfield College, Oxford, I was reminded of the mid-1990s advert for BT fronted by Oscar nominated actor Bob Hoskins. In a series … Continue reading 1381 HATF: it’s good to talk!
Thank you to Sarah Jackson, Head of Department at Sawston Village College in Cambridgeshire for this blogpost. Sarah has been imbibing the wealth of CPD on offer to history teachers. Here she explains how this has shaped her thinking, her experience of trying out ideas to reveal the constructed nature of the curriculum with her own pupils, and her current thinking about best ways forward … Continue reading Decolonisation in the history classroom: wider perspectives and more critical questions
Here, Anne Hudson and Gabrielle Reddington, who have taught pupils and trained teachers for decades, continue their reflections on teaching history well. In the first part of our blog, we shared our conversation about the importance of a rich diversity to our history curriculum. We have continued talking and, in this blog will share some of our conclusions based on our work as, with and … Continue reading 3-Dimensional history teaching for inclusion and diversity
Thanks to Warren Valentine (@warrenvalentine), head of history and politics at Mayfield Grammar School for Girls, for this blogpost about a day spent thinking about the teaching of historical interpretations. This is an area that has been extensively discussed and theorised about for many years. You can find more help with this tricky concept on the HA website. In June a collection of history teachers … Continue reading Teaching interpretations – maximising potential and avoiding pitfalls!
There is currently lots of really good practice around the use of historians’ work in classrooms. Last weekend at SHP a few of us were talking about how useful it would be to have a list of short clips of historians in one place. This list has been started and is shared here as a Google-Doc that can be accessed, added to and improved. Google … Continue reading Historians: short film clips
Historical interpretations are hard! Students and teachers struggle with the concept. Christine Counsell has been a leading light in thinking about and honing our practice in relation to this concept for many years. She recently posted a summary twitter thread to help newer history teachers to understand what teaching interpretations means and where we have come from. From June 2019 ‘Teaching History’ will have a … Continue reading Interpretations – the essential ‘how to’ for history teachers!
As Helen wrote in her previous blog interpretations are a tricksy concept for students to understand, but due to the more rigorous demands of GCSE and A-Level one that we cannot ignore as we might have done in the past. At both GCSE and A-Level, the exams want our students to unpick interpretations using their contextual knowledge of the period. In essence they want students to … Continue reading Interpretations: Tell the artist why they are wrong!
OBHD 