Mike Hill was concerned that his students were unable to genuinely inhabit the historical places they encountered in his lessons. Drawing on fields as varied as history-teacher research, philosophy, and literary and media theory, Hill identified ways to curate his students' constructions of 'secondary worlds' in the historical past, including…

Inspired by the work of the social and cultural historian Tim Cole, Stuart Farley decided to look again at the way he teaches the Holocaust. He wanted to focus on the geographical concept of place as a way of enabling his Year 9 students to build far more diverse narratives, which took full account of the chronological diversity of people's…

History teachers have frequently made recourse to character cards as a device to help young people, each assigned specific roles, to understand how different kinds of people responded in different ways to particular situations in the past. Edward FitzGerald builds on this tradition, demonstrating the value of using rich historical accounts to help…

Readers of "Teaching History" will be familiar with the benefits and difficulties of cross-curricular planning, and the pages of this journal have often carried analysis of successful collaborations with the English department, or music, or geography. Harry Fletcher-Wood describes in this article a collaboration involving maths,…

One of the challenges facing students who want to make sense of a source or an interpretation of the past is the need to place it in its context. Various research studies have shown that students tend instead to approach sources and interpretations with a form of "presentism" resulting in a number of misconceptions and misunderstandings.…

The first year of the government's First World War Centenary Battlefield Tours Programme is now under way, allowing increasing numbers of students from across Britain to visit Western Front battle sites. As its Programme Director, Jerome Freeman has sought to encourage teachers to make these visits meaningful and historically rigorous. He tackles…

Year 9 think they know a lot about the First World War. After all, they read Michael Morpurgo's novel Private Peaceful in their English lessons all the way back in Year 7, they have seen Blackadder so many times they can recite it, and in the centenary year of the war's outbreak, they can hardly avoid it on television. But their view of the war…

Focusing on students' attempts to explain the relative significance of different factors in Hitler's rise to power, Catherine McCrory explores the vexed question of why students who seem able to express necessary historical knowledge on one occasion cannot effectively reproduce it on another. Drawing on a detailed analysis of what it actually…

Steve Garnett, a senior teacher in charge of Teaching and Learning at Garibaldi College of Maths and Computing in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, shares some of the techniques that he uses to involve different kinds of learners in his post-16 lessons, and explains how he arrived at these approaches after reflecting on problems in his own early…