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…

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…

Jim Carroll relished the opportunity, in the new A-level specification he was teaching, to find an effective way of teaching his students to analyse interpretations in their coursework essays. Reflecting on the difficulties he had faced as a trainee teacher teaching younger pupils about interpretations, and dissatisfied with examination board…

Students find it difficult to join up the different things they study into a complex account of the past. Examination specifications do not necessarily help with this because of the way in which history is divided up into different "units", a problem exacerbated by textbooks being designed for particular exam topics. Stacey-Chapman…

Paula Worth presents in this article a means of challenging students' tendency to generalise even when they know that they should not. How can teachers encourage their students to say something meaningful about the past while avoiding making unwarranted generalisations? Worth takes teachers through the process of planning her own enquiry designed…

The Association for Historical Dialogue and Research (AHDR) is a Cyprus-based organization that works to foster dialogue among history teachers and other educators across the divide in Cyprus. In one of their UN-funded projects, AHDR members worked with UK colleagues to shape a lesson sequence and resources on the Ottoman period in Cyprus. Here…

What is a sense of period? And how can pupils' sense of period be developed? Questions such as these have troubled history teachers for many years, often revolving around debates over the role played by empathy and imagination in coming to know a period on its own terms. Rather than adopt a comparative approach, Dan Smiths decided in his teaching…

The overwhelming response of history teachers to the final version of the National Curriculum (2014) was one of relief that their insistent, penetrating critique of the first draft had been heeded. Jamie Byrom shares that profound sense of relief and celebrates the achievement of the history education community in making its voice heard. However,…

This paper describes an approach for supporting inquiry learning from source materials, realised and tested through a tool-kit. The approach is optimised for tasks that require a student to make interpretations across sets of resources, where opinions and justifications may be hard to articulate. We adopt a dialogue-based approach to learning…

The new history in Britain and the new social studies in the United States each grew out of a desire in the 1960s to reform education and to create an inquiry-based mode of instruction. Although the two movements shared many similarities, the British movement succeeded whereas the American movement largely failed. The failure of the new social…

What is the role of Citizenship? How can it be taught effectively? The fully updated second edition of "Learning to Teach Citizenship in the Secondary School" is an essential text for students training to teach Citizenship as a first or second subject, as well as experienced teachers who have opted to take responsibility for this vital…

Let's stop saying sorry for the Empire! Thus Mastin and Wallace introduce one of their lessons on interpretations of the British Empire. They develop Gary Howells's ideas from the previous edition of "Teaching History" to demonstrate exactly what we might get our students to do with interpretations of the past. They produce an enquiry…

Contributors to this journal have long recognised that success in public examinations is at least partly achieved by carefully teaching in Key Stage 3. A critical component of A-Level is that students who wish to access the highest grades need to be able to handle the work of "real" historians--analysing it, and using it to modify their…