Reflecting on challenges that had surfaced in their own and others' efforts to get pupils to write historical narratives, Rachel Foster and Kath Goudie went back to the drawing board to consider the disciplinary purposes of narrative. They used both historical scholarship and theoretical works by historians on narrative construction. Their…

David Hibbert and Zaiba Patel decided to work together after becoming concerned that school history curricula might not enable students to interrogate popular British mythologising about World War II. Building on these pre-existing concerns, their collaboration with the historian Yasmin Khan yielded an Interpretations enquiry which asked students…

Sam Pullan explains how a chance encounter has helped him to improve his introduction to the modern themes and founding documents of US politics. Working with a professional historian whom he met, by chance, over dinner, he was able to produce lessons at the cutting edge of subject knowledge to grab the attention of his Year 11 pupils. This…

After reflecting on the difference between his study of source extracts at university and how he was using source extracts in the classroom, Jonathan Sellin went in search of a new way to help his pupils to situate sources in context. Finding inspiration in the work of intellectual historian Quentin Skinner, Sellin decided to show his Year 9…

Young children can engage in close reading, critical thinking, and historical thinking when age-appropriate texts are coupled with discipline-specific tasks. Prior knowledge is an impediment, though. Primary elementary learners simply do not have much of a historical schema. Because of primary elementary students' familiarity with Thanksgiving,…

Narrative has begun to take its place alongside the essay, for so long the stereotypical currency of the history teacher and student. In this work, based on his experiences as a PGCE student, Alex Rodker argues powerfully that it is time now to consider how to help students to produce not just narratives, but better narratives. He builds on the…

The approaching bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo has stimulated debate about how it should be commemorated. This article reports a collaboration between the Waterloo200 Committee and Tom Wheeley, history teacher, to create a lesson sequence analysing the causes, consequences and significance of the battle. The article adds to a long-standing…

Teaching student to construct causal argument is a staple of history teaching and, in this year, questions about the causes of the First World War are particularly pertinent and once again the public eye. Claire Holliss, however, became dissatisfied with existing approaches to teaching students about the causes of the First World War. In…

Scholars often define historical reasoning as constructing defensible interpretations of past events. Drawing on critical theory, this article suggests that it also entails consciously framing one's topic of inquiry. The article examines an instructional unit that aimed to foster this expanded view of historiography. Forty students, ages 14-15,…

For the author, teaching history has become a double challenge: to help students understand both "History" (the narrative crafted by the historian, based on documentation, supported by previous scholarship, and bound together through logical argument) and "history" (the real events that occupied real lives that are largely…

The Battle of Bull Run is routinely cited as the first land battle of the Civil War. This battle between Union and Confederate forces took place near Manassas, Virginia, on July 21, 1861. But was this battle really the initial skirmish between the North and the South? Historians today concede that the first land battle actually took place on June…

In scholarship on the Holocaust and the history of slavery, historians and other academics have, over the years, developed both abstract concepts and concrete activities. Teachers and developers of educational materials have translated complex events into digestible entities fit for use within and outside the classroom, often including new…

Slavery in the pre-Civil War United States is a hard topic to teach, not only because it raises issues of racism and injustice, but also because students assume so much. Often, they think all northerners were abolitionists or "good guys" and southerners were "bad guys" who enslaved African Americans because they viewed them as inferior. England,…

The Civil War novel for children has come of age. Although Civil War novels with little substance remain in print, more recent novels are serious in tone and readily available for classroom use. This article briefly summarizes a few Civil War novels that would be good in the classroom.

History instructors working in a community college face two major challenges. First, to make history interesting and relevant to the students, many of whom have to take history courses as a requirement. And second, to fulfill one of the missions of a community college which is to forge a connection between the school and the people in the local…