In this article, Andy Lawrence returns to arguments made in "Teaching History 153" about the importance of teaching young people about other modern genocides in addition to the Holocaust. Building on those arguments with his own rationale, Lawrence also acknowledges the constraints on curriculum time that compel all departments to make…

It is almost 20 years since Michael Riley first invited Key Stage 3 history teachers to 'choose and plant' their enquiry questions. Many members of the history education community have taken up that invitation, making use of overarching enquiry questions to structure students' learning. But what is meant by enquiry in this context is sometimes…

Richard Harris draws on their own and others' research to take stock of where the history teaching community is in terms of curriculum thinking. Harris argues that despite a number of positive developments in recent years, certain issues continue to have undesirable effects on curriculum design. Such issues include inertia and unclear rationales…

In this article, Jacob Olivey describes his department's efforts to both diversify their Key Stage 3 curriculum and secure greater curricular coherence. Building on a large body of research and practice, Olivey sought new forms of curricular coherence through the selection and sequencing of substantive content across the curriculum. He reflects on…

Determined to do justice to the complexity of the seventeenth century, as a messy but crucial period in British history, and to develop their pupils' disciplinary understanding of how and why interpretations of the past are constructed, Dan Keates and his department set out to exploit the rich seam of interpretations of Cromwell. The quest to…

Is it structure or the selection of knowledge that makes writing historical narrative so difficult? Where does a conceptual focus on change, or causation, come in? James Ellis set out to explore the challenges his Year 9 pupils faced in writing historical narratives about change. Inspired by the work of Orlando Figes, he put together a scheme of…

In this article, Dan Lyndon-Cohen makes the case that history departments should move from diversifying the curriculum to decolonising it. After reflecting on some examples of how he made the content of his lessons more representative, he explores how the influence of writers such as Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Emma Dabiri inspired him to find…

Tom Bennett begins his article with a tale of a frustrating afternoon with Year 7. We've all been there. In his case, his frustration was caused by his finding a conceptual gap between how well his class wanted to do and the actual quality of their causal thinking. Bennett decided to use counterfactuals to improve their thinking. This article…

Medieval history is on the rise. Among the many recent reforms in the history curriculum is a requirement for medieval themes at GCSE and across the country the new linear A-level offers fresh opportunities for teachers to look beyond the traditional diet of Tudors and modern history. The huge divide between us and the medieval mind can make the…

In this article Kerry Apps introduces students to the significance of the witch-hunts in the modern era, at the time when they occurred, and in the middle of the eighteenth century. She presents her rationale for choosing the witch-hunts as a focus for the study of significance, and shows how her thinking about her teaching has evolved through her…

Verity Morgan took an unusual approach to the challenge of teaching the Holocaust, coming to it through the lens of environmental history. She shares here the practical means and resources she used to engage pupils with this current trend in historiography, and its associated concepts. Reflecting on her pupils' responses, Morgan makes a case for…

When planning a GCSE period study on the American West, Alex Ford wrestled with reconciling the content demands of the examination specifications with the need to provide his students with a memorable narrative. In this article, Ford shows how he drew on the latest academic scholarship to construct a rigorous, coherent narrative outlining the…

It is very common for people in politics and the media to make assumptions about what happens in history classrooms. Too often these preconceptions are based on little more than anecdote, examples from the Internet or memories of what someone experienced at school themselves. In this article, Catriona Pennell reports on an empirical study that set…

It has become a truism that Britain is a multi-cultural society yet, as Mohamud and Whitburn argue, there is still a great deal of thinking to be done by history teachers in accounting for this diversity in the classroom. Mohamud and Whitburn consider approaches to both curriculum and pedagogy when it comes to teaching about the Somali community…

Why do we teach about the Holocaust and about other genocides? The Holocaust has been a compulsory part of the English National Curriculum since 1991; however, curriculum documents say little about why pupils should learn about the Holocaust or about what they should learn. Tamsin Leyman and Richard Harris decided to use the opportunity presented…