Mike Murray shares a lesson sequence in which his students examined changing interpretations of the Battle of Rorke's Drift in 1879. Building on earlier work on teaching interpretations across an extended chronological period and the work of Wheeley et al on Rorke's Drift in particular, Murray develops new emphases, fresh ways in to the puzzle and…

Elementary school students' knowledge of history appears to be at an all-time low as evidenced by the 2010 NAEP scores that indicated only 20% of fourth-grade students scored at the "at least proficient" level in a test of historic knowledge. Many culprits are being blamed for this dismal performance of U. S. students, such as No Child…

History Professors and instructors have a lot to do. They are supposed to "cover content," introducing students to the main events in history. They also need to teach skills, such as historical thinking, source evaluation, argument construction, and research techniques. Particular "student learning outcomes" or assessments are…

In "Teaching History 157, Assessment Edition," a number of different teachers shared the ways in which their departments were approaching the assessment and reporting of students' progress in a "post-levels" world. This article adds to those examples, first by illustrating how teachers from different schools in the Bristol area…

This paper presents an analysis of teachers' questions and students' responses in content and language integrated learning (CLIL) classes of history. Through the combined application of genre theory and a typology of CLIL teacher academic questions, the study aims at contributing to the understanding of how CLIL students use the foreign language…

Historians use a range of genres in presenting their subjects, yet educators have increasingly privileged argumentation to help novices to reason with historical content. However, the influence genre and content knowledge are relatively unmeasured in this discipline. To learn more, the authors asked 101 eleventh-grade students to compose an…

Elizabeth Carr writes here about a new scheme of work she developed to teach students about diversity in Victorian society. When dealing with a concept such as diversity, it can be easy for students to slip into stereotypes based on simplistic understandings of the experiences of people at the time. To resolve this, Carr argues, teachers need to…

Education systems worldwide have served as a nation-building apparatus and national consciousness facilitators since the appearance of the modern nation-state. With the emergence of globalization in recent decades, however, a growing presence of cosmopolitanism and internationalization can be traced in education policy and school curricula.…

This article examines the relationship between literacy and play in six- and seven-year-olds' engagement with non-fiction writing. I draw from a year-long ethnographic study (Erickson, 1986) of a US classroom's "writing time", intentionally structured on children's own interests and enquiries. Rather than strict adherence to monolithic…

Since its first appearance in 1947, "The Diary of Anne Frank" has been translated into sixty-five different languages, including Welsh, Esperanto, and Faroese. Millions and perhaps even billions of readers, scattered throughout the globe and now spanning multiple generations, are familiar with the life and work of this young Jewish…

This article presents an approach that teachers can use to strengthen students' ability to make sense of the past at museums. Specifically, we propose a photography exercise to help students to learn from museums and to view museums critically, weighing both the objective realities and subjective interpretations offered by museums. To get the most…

This paper uses a trial audit of history programs undertaken in 2011-­2012 to explore issues surrounding the attainment of Threshold Learning Outcomes (TLOs) in an emerging Australian national standards environment for the discipline of history. The audit sought to ascertain whether an accreditation process managed by the discipline under the…

Background/Context: The Common Core State Standards Initiative reveals how little we understand about the components of effective discussion-based instruction in disciplinary history. Although the case for classroom discussion as a core method for subject matter learning stands on stable theoretical and empirical ground, to date, none of the…

In Guatemala, three centuries after Spanish conquest and in the wake of more than three decades of internal conflict, the framers of the 1996 Accord for a Firm and Lasting Peace placed educational reform at the center of efforts to make peace with this contentious past. This article, based on a multisite qualitative study, describes how Guatemalan…

Lee Donaghy was concerned that his GCSE students' weak contextual knowledge was letting them down. Inspired by a mixture of cognitive science and the arguments of other teachers expressed in various blogs, he decided to tackle the problem by teaching and testing knowledge more intensively. The result was a rapid improvement in secure factual…