• Teaching Strategy: Which Portrait Should Stay?

    Helping students to define and justify significance Students imagine they are re-organising a gallery. They have to choose between the portraits of two well-known individuals – only one of them can stay on the wall. First, they write down what they think they already know about the two. Then they look at sources to find…

  • Teaching Strategy: Analysing People’s Motives

    Helping students to compare and contrast motives Where many historical actors are involved in the same event or change, the skill of multiperspectivity can be trained by analysing the motives of each of them very carefully. This brings out for students the common goals as well as the factors that distinguish the motives of some…

  • Teaching Strategy: Developing a Sense of Place

    Helping students to develop a sense of place and period, a crucial part of thinking historically Students often have problems thinking historically because they do not know enough about the time and place they are trying to think about. For example, how can we expect a student to analyse propaganda posters from World War One…

  • VR in the History Classroom

    Previous experiences of VR compared to VR today I remember my first experience of virtual reality. It was in the early nineties and I’d have been about twelve. I went to a computer games arcade and they had a virtual reality machine. You had to put a ridiculously heavy helmet on and these weird smelly…

  • Understanding Political Cartoons

    Helping students to understand how political cartoons are constructed and how every part of the image, and the way the parts relate to each other, are important when analysing such cartoons Students often struggle to identify the main message of a political cartoon, because they do not know how to read the different aspects of…