History Teaching

In a recent post I suggested five changes that could improve the current GCSE History. In this post I want to expand on one of those ideas: that all boards introduce a [...]

Pause, for a moment, and think back to your own school days, however distant those may be. Think back to your English Literature lessons, and see if you can produce a quick [...]

Around 2010, the history education community had a fairly cohesive view on what was wrong with history in schools. Pretty much everyone agreed that history did not get enough [...]

A while ago I ran a small online project to bring together a list of substantive concepts that we think children ought to learn in Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 3. Ashby and Lee [...]

As I set out in my last post, substantive knowledge concerns knowledge of the past, and in history curriculum theory can generally be seen as the counterpart of disciplinary [...]

In my previous post I focused on ability statements (which take the form “pupils can x”) and argued that it is problematical to incorporate these into progression models [...]

  Progression models are frequently constructed from ‘ability’ statements. Put simply, if you have an ability, it means you can do something. It is therefore quite [...]

What does it mean to get better at history? One of the problems we have in answering this question is that history is an incredibly diverse discipline: there are thousands of [...]

I argued in my previous post that existing models of ‘getting better’ at history have tended (a) to look for generic features of historical practice and (b) to break [...]

The dominant approach at present to defining progression in learning history is to make use of ‘disciplinary’ or ‘second-order’ concepts such as ‘causation’, [...]

One of the problems of the various iterations of the National Curriculum is that the statements they included were very broad and open to interpretation. This is true of the [...]