Described by the author Monica Ali as a building that 'sparks the imagination and sparks conversations', 19 Princelet Street, now a Museum of Diversity and Immigration, captivated the imagination of teacher David Waters. He was struck by the building's potential not merely for exploring the diverse histories of migrant communities…

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…

Although history teachers frequently work with academic historical writing, direct face-to-face encounters with academic historians are rare in secondary history classrooms. This article reports a collaboration between an academic historian and a history teacher that aimed to engage 13-14 year-old pupils with developments in contemporary…

While marking some Year 11 essays, Kate Hammond found her interest caught by significant differences between one kind of strong analysis and another. Some scored high marks but were less convincing. The achievement in these essays was superficially high, but somehow fragile. But in what way? And why? Putting GCSE mark-schemes to one side, Hammond…

Year 9 think they know a lot about the First World War. After all, they read Michael Morpurgo's novel Private Peaceful in their English lessons all the way back in Year 7, they have seen Blackadder so many times they can recite it, and in the centenary year of the war's outbreak, they can hardly avoid it on television. But their view of…

Bridging a twenty-year gap in their practice, Elizabeth Carr and Christine Counsell bring out the similarities in their use of timelines in their planning, teaching and assessment. What they also have in common is the fact that their experimentation with timelines as a way of strengthening cumulative knowledge emerged in remarkably similar policy…

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…

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…

Paula Worth draws on three professional traditions in history education in order to build a lesson sequence on the Crusades for her Year 7s. First, she draws on the growing tradition of classroom practice using historical scholarship, not only to inform the teacher's knowledge but to deepen her pupils' direct acquaintance with scholarly…

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…

Ten years ago, two heads of department in contrasting schools presented a powerfully-argued case for resisting the use of level descriptions within their assessment regimes. Influenced both by research into the nature of children's historical thinking and by principles of assessment "for" learning, Sally Burnham and Geraint Brown…

When Michael Fordham was introduced to Dr Seuss's "Butter Battle Book" he immediately recognised its potential value in the classroom as a popular interpretation of the Cold War. Wanting his Year 9 pupils to explain how and why the past has been interpreted in different ways he shows the potential pitfalls inherent in asking pupils…

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…

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…

What do 14 Year 7 students, an art teacher, a history teacher and the Victoria and Albert Museum have in common? They are all part of the "Stronger Together" Museum Champion project run by The Langley Academy and the River & Rowing Museum and supported by Arts Council England, designed to engage students, teachers and museum staff…