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…

"Blackadder for real" is how the British journalist and broadcaster, Ian Hislop, characterised "The Wipers Time", the newspaper published on the front line by members of the 12th Battalion Sherwood, and recently brought to a new audience in Hislop's BBC dramatisation. Mary Brown and Carolyn Massey were immediately struck…

Local history, historical fiction, and one of the most significant events of the twentieth century come together in this article as Jon Grant and Dan Townsend suggest a way to enable students to produce better historical fiction and improve their understanding of the history of their own area. They develop the work on historical fiction…

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…

Mary Brown recognised that her A-level students were finding extended writing difficult, particularly in terms of guiding the reader through the argument with appropriate "signposting". To help her students manage this, Brown devised a metaphor to represent the construction of a piece of argumentative writing which she deployed over a sequence of…

How can history teachers structure learning pathways through historical content in ways that engage and challenge all pupils, that enable them to work at an appropriate pace and that also encourage pupils to self-assess and monitor their own progress? Stainer reports and reflects on classroom experiments in "Mastery Learning" that aimed to achieve…

McDougall found learning about Stephen and Matilda fascinating, was sure that her pupils would also and designed an enquiry to engage them in "the anarchy" of 1139-1153 AD. Pupils enjoyed exploring "the anarchy" and learning about it enhanced their knowledge and understanding of the medieval period considerably. However, McDougall argues, story…

The development of communications technology in recent years has not only changed the ways in which students can access their world: it also changes the way they think about it. Sheldrake and Watkin draw here upon work that characterises the way in which the "iGeneration" think about the world around them, and suggest ways in which history…

As proposed changes to the National Curriculum are furiously debated, and details of future changes to GCSE are anxiously awaited, history teachers in England are already wrestling with the implications of one change to the public examination system: the end of "modular" GCSE courses and a return to final examinations. Although modular courses and…

The history education community has long recognised that historical thinking depends on the interplay between substantive knowledge about the past and the procedural, or second-order, concepts that historians use to construct, shape and give meaning to that substance. While the nature of that interplay and the processes by which we enable pupils…

"Never again" is the clarion call of much Holocaust and genocide education. There is a danger, however, that it can become an empty, if pious, wish. How can we help pupils reflect seriously on genocide prevention? Elisabeth Kellaway, Thomas Spillane and Terry Haydn report teaching strategies that focused students' attention on what…