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…

Carolyn Massey describes history teachers as professionals who pride themselves on "a sophisticated understanding of change and continuity". Massey's article provides an example of how to embrace change, and to make something better than that which went before. She describes how she encouraged her Year 12 students to provide feedback for…

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…

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…

Pressures on curriculum time force us all to make difficult choices about curriculum content, but the eighteenth century seems to have suffered particular neglect. Inspired by the tercentenary of the accession of the first Georgian king and the interest in the Acts of Union prompted by this year's referendum on Scottish independence, Katharine…

Is it a good thing to have a lot of evidence? Surely the historian would answer that yes, it is: the more evidence that can be used, the better. The problem with this approach, though, is that too much data can be overwhelming for the history student--and, in Ian Phillips's experience, for the history student teacher. In this article Phillips…

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,…

Struck by the dullness of some of her students' essay introductions, Paula Worth reflected on the fact that she had never focused specifically on introductions. After surveying existing work by history teachers on essay structure in general and introductions in particular, she turns to the work of historians. Drawing on scholarly writing by…

Jess Landy's desire to introduce her pupils to a more complex narrative of the American West led her to the life story and work of a remarkable individual, George Catlin. In this article she shows how she used this unusual micro-narrative in order to challenge pupils' ideas not just about the bigger narrative of which it is a part, but about the…

As historians, we are dependent on evidence, which comes in many varieties. Rosalind Stirzaker here introduces a project which she ran two years ago to encourage her students to think about artefacts in a different way. They have examined randomly preserved artefacts such as those of Pompeii, and sets of artefacts which were deliberately chosen,…

Michael McIntyre and Vanessa Hull explain the work of Facing History and Ourselves, an education organisation based in the United States and working internationally. Facing History aims to engage students in reflection on why violence occurred in the past, on what this teaches us about the world today and on our place and role within that world.…

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…

Inspired by the growing number of history teachers who have sought to introduce younger pupils to academic historical scholarship in the classroom, Tim Jenner wanted to bring about his own reading revolution at Key Stage 3. But rather than simply develop one-off lessons or enquiries based on scholarship his goal was more ambitious: to integrate…

Rachel Foster shows how her own study of cultural history led to a new dimension in her planning. She wanted to show her students not only that historians are interested in many different kinds of topic, but that they ask different kinds of question about those topics. Foster also wanted her students to examine how civic traditions and rituals…

The relationship between knowledge and literacy is a central concern for all teachers. In his teaching, Palek noted that his students were struggling to understand complex substantive concepts such as "parliament" and decided to explore the relationship between students' understanding of a concept and their wider substantive knowledge…