We discuss an original study and two replications conducted over 18 years examining the impact of Teacher Study Group (TSG) in Vocabulary, a professional development (PD) approach for improving pedagogy and student learning. Study 1 focused on the design and development of the PD and included a small-scale randomized controlled trial to assess the…

Based on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) informed genre theory, this paper investigates the interplay between narrative and analytical representations of the past in texts used for history-educational purposes. In this paper, it is argued that the role of narrative merits further attention in history genre descriptions. Thirteen history…

Amid a growing national debate regarding the current health and future direction of the history curriculum in Britain, there have been numerous calls for an examination of its roles and purposes, and questions have been raised as to how far it engages an increasingly diverse student body. This article examines the perceptions and attitudes of…

Promoting Adolescents' Comprehension of Text (PACT) is a text- and discourse-based set of instructional practices that engage students with disciplinary texts as a means of building content knowledge and improving reading comprehension. PACT)s "efficacy" has been the subject of extensive previous trials. The purpose of this study was to…

Shifting to an inquiry-based practice can be challenging. How should teachers get started? How many times should teachers plan for inquiry? What do teachers do when students struggle with inquiry? How long does it take for students to buy in to the inquiry process? These kinds of questions, and the concerns that underlie them, can create an…

Making a passionate case for teaching Black British history in the secondary school curriculum, Hannah shares here the personal journey she has travelled in planning for Black British history in her curriculum. She cites her inspirations and offers striking examples to illustrate her rationale and approach to teaching this history. Hannah…

Few investigations of museums have examined the potential of varying displays as related to learning outcomes. This study focused on two museum spaces, presenting different historical events and featuring different objects' characteristics and arrangements, as related to seventh- and eighth-graders' learning and experiences during a self-guided…

The study of history as part of the social studies curriculum is an important component of K-12 education. Yet, past research suggests that students perceive history as less important than other subjects (Brophy et al., 1992; Schug et al., 1984), find it boring and without purpose (Zhao & Hoge, 2005), and are unable to articulate why they…

Alex Benger asks whether the mode of enquiry adopted by cultural historians, the construction of webs of past meaning from past perspectives, is underexplored in school history. Benger used a cultural history approach in his building of an enquiry for Year 9 around one man's experience of the First World War. Here he examines his pupils' efforts…

Jacob Olivey set out to design enquiries which would enable his pupils to reconstruct, using evidence, the perspectives of people in the past. In this article he shares in detail the planning and outcomes of two enquiries: one for Year 7 and one for Year 8. Olivey offers a example of 'the curriculum as the progression model', considering how to…

Place-based learning encourages students to explore their local communities, learn about history, and develop critical thinking skills. This article focuses on six middle school students who participated in a History Club and entered the National History Day competition and discovered how history and place liberates learning.

Frustrated by her students' glib use of catch-all terms such as 'militarism' in addressing causation, Alexia Michalaki wanted her Year 9 students to produce mature causal explanations of World War I. To encourage this to happen she went back into decades of pedagogical writing and research, teasing out the ways in which others have sought to…

Race shapes the policies and history of the United States. Current research shows that state-approved social studies content standards are written in a non-racial and colour-evasive whiteness language that reinforces racist policies and practices in education. This qualitative framework analysis study examines the language of social studies…

Developing disciplinary literacy is an emerging priority for secondary teachers as they prepare students for college, career, and civic life. One way to develop and assess disciplinary literacy in history is through source-based argument writing (SBAW) with multiple sources. SBAW requires students to synthesize information across texts and use…

Elizabeth Marsay wanted to ensure that her students were not hindered in their causal explanations of the abolition of slavery by being exposed to overly categorical, simplistic, and monocausal narratives in the classroom. By drawing on both English and Canadian theorisation about causation, Marsay outlines how her introduction of competing…