History Resource Cupboard – lessons and resources for schools

History Resource Cupboard - lessons and resources for schools

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7 ideas for varying your settler tasks

Over the last few years, recall settler tasks have become the norm in most classrooms. They are used at the beginning  of the lesson. As soon as the pupils arrive they are given a task to complete, often in silence. This allows for an orderly start to any lesson. They[…]

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What is history? Interpretations of course.

History

There has been some debate recently about whether or not we should use textbooks to teach history in secondary school. And, if we should use such books, which one should be the ‘core’ text, the one that might provide the backbone of a school’s KS3 history course. Let me start[…]

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How do we decide what to teach in a curriculum: a blast from the past

Light bulb moments

So there seems to be some blather recently around the question: how do we decide what to teach in a curriculum? All of this got me thinking about curriculum design. We have blogged about this before and still stand by this to this day. However, I then vaguely remembered working[…]

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8 examples of big picture​ overviews

History teachers in England seem to agree that planning and teaching is best achieved through the Enquiry Question. And they are right to. A Rileyesque enquiry works (Riley 2000). Full stop! It is all very well to be looking for that killer enquiry question. But if you never show your[…]

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Don’t let the curriculum control your pedagogy

control

Some people say knowledge is power. Others say powerful knowledge is power. But that is another debate. But how is the history teacher being controlled? We know we are being controlled by Ofsted. SLTs react to what they think Ofsted are looking for.  This is then forced upon teachers through teaching[…]

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Barriers to teaching Wider World Histories (2)

There is a strong case for English pupils studying more Wider world histories. I outlined in the previous blog post on this topic. The National Curriculum at Key Stage 3 gives schools ample scope for such a study. Nevertheless, diverse world history units, in general, are somewhat hard to find[…]

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What strategies work best to boost learning?

Practised testing

What strategies work best to boost learning? This is the million dollar question that teachers and students need to answer to so they can be successful at school/university/ in life. Here at HRC we believe that the knowledge required to do well in history – the substantive ‘stuff” and disciplinary[…]

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15 Tips for Assessing at KS3

Assessment at Key Stage 3 has always been a challenge. And there always seems to have been a tension, a tug of war between doing what is right for the students, helping teachers assess the quality of their curriculum against doing what SLT require to please Ofsted and to report[…]

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