Secondary programme
Where a session has been identified by the presenter(s) as suitable for multiple key stages, particular areas of focus are indicated in bold.
Essential themes and knowledge for teaching the British Empire at Key Stage 3
Abdul Mohamud, Robin Whitburn
UCL Institute of Education, London
This session explores effective strategies for crafting powerful enquiries on the British Empire at Key Stage 3. We will examine how to connect diverse stories of empire with overarching themes, drawing inspiration from historians like Caroline Elkins. The session will cover key events such as the Amritsar Massacre and colonial rule in Ireland, while also addressing the fundamental question: What essential knowledge should we impart about the British Empire?
Learning outcomes:
- to identify key themes and core knowledge essential for teaching about the British Empire at Key Stage 3
- to develop strategies for connecting diverse imperial narratives to overarching historical themes
- to critically evaluate the selection of content for enquiries on the British Empire across different geographical contexts
- to apply insights from current historical scholarship to enhance the teaching of imperial history
- to design more nuanced and comprehensive enquiries on the British Empire
Friday: 11:30–12:30
Suitable for: Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, Key Stage 5
Growing school historians: knowing when to emulate and when to deviate from the academic discipline
Hugh Richards
Huntington School, York
Richard Kennett
Excalibur Academy Trust, Bristol
This session explores the complex relationship between school history and academic history, focusing on the tension between students gaining the disciplinary knowledge of professional historians and adapting it appropriately for schools. We examine how the necessary simplification of historical thinking for younger learners can sometimes risk oversimplification or distortion. The session considers the pitfalls of blindly emulating academic history and the importance of knowing when to deviate to meet educational needs, exploring strategies for balancing rigour with accessibility. Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of teaching disciplinary thinking in pedagogically sound ways.
Learning outcomes:
- to understand the distinction between academic history and school history, recognising the opportunities and limitations of each
- to identify common pitfalls that occur when trying to emulate academic history in schools
- to explore effective strategies for teaching disciplinary knowledge, balancing historical rigour with accessibility
- to develop practical techniques for integrating more advanced historical methods, while ensuring that these remain engaging
Friday: 11:30–12:30
Suitable for: Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, Key Stage 5
The Theodore Abel papers: using autobiographies to explain Hitler’s rise to power
Jacob Olivey
Ark Soane Academy, London
In 1934, the American sociologist Theodore Abel travelled to Berlin. He wanted to explain why so many people had voted for the Nazi Party. With limited time to conduct interviews, Abel had a cunning plan to find answers. He organised a writing competition, complete with a generous 400 marks cash prize, for ‘the best personal life history of a supporter of the Hitler movement’. Remarkably, Abel’s competition was a success. The 683 autobiographies that he collected are now kept safe in the archives of Columbia University. They are a fascinating source for historians, giving a unique perspective on Hitler’s rise to power.
Learning outcomes:
- to share resources from a Year 9 enquiry built around the Theodore Abel papers
- to focus on ways in which to teach pupils about how historians use sources to understand the perspectives of people from the past
Friday: 11:30–12:30
Suitable for: Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4
The Reluctant Writers Project: helping students overcome the barriers to effective extended writing
Ben Walsh, Laura Howey
David Ross Education Trust, Loughborough
This session explores a trust-wide approach to extended reading and writing in history across Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4, involving a range of approaches, rich content, historical scholarship, storytelling, scaffolds to support thinking and writing and even some help from AI with marking and assessment.
Learning outcomes:
- to take away a framework of teaching and intervention to support students in history
- to come away with links to resources and approaches that should be replicable in most classrooms
Friday: 11:30–12:30
Suitable for: Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4
Using a range of voices to teach the early background to the Arab–Israeli conflict (c. 1917–39)
Rob Kanter
Manchester Metropolitan University
The Arab–Israeli conflict is a quintessential example of a controversial and sensitive history, with its highly prescient contemporary impact, especially since the latest crisis began on 7 October 2023, and its resulting impact on communal/political relations in Britain. The session will address the foundations of the conflict, including key political events and shifts in the period 1917–39. The key case study will focus on the Peel Commission of 1937 and its recommendation of partition, the first suggestion of a 'two state solution' in the British Mandate of Palestine. Using a conference-style approach and archival evidence from PhD research, the session will move beyond homogeneous notions of 'Arab' and 'Jewish' views and empower teachers to sensitively broaden students’ knowledge and understanding of a key historical episode and its contemporary resonance.
Learning outcomes:
- to enhance subject knowledge on the background to the Arab–Israeli conflict
- to gain practical teaching ideas to enhance student understanding
Friday: 11:30–12:30
Suitable for: Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, Key Stage 5, teacher educators, mentors
Turning the world upside down: making the seventeenth century exciting and relevant at Key Stage 3
Kat O'Connor
George Abbot School, Guildford
Culture wars, 'fake news', constitutional crises and ideological handwringing: the seventeenth century has never felt more relevant, but it's not always easy to translate the complexities of this turbulent time into accessible enquiries at Key Stage 3.
Learning outcomes:
- to provide practical ideas for intriguing and resonant learning experiences through fascinating sources, surprising stories and colourful characters from the age
- to allow the Stuart era to step out from the shadows of the traditionally more popular Tudors
- to showcase a variety of approaches to explore concepts such as authority, civil war, propaganda, revolution, identity and ideology, to better understand this crucial century
Friday: 11:30–12:30
Suitable for: Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4
Ten research-based, classroom-trialled ways to raise the attainment of all students at GCSE
Dale Banham
Northgate High School, Ipswich
How can we use key findings from cognitive science to improve the exam performance of all students at GCSE? This workshop will distil the main research findings and illustrate how the theory can be used to underpin curriculum design, interventions, homework and classroom activities at GCSE. All strategies have been successfully trialled in the classroom, and the workshop draws on international research from the 2024 revision census (completed by over 50,000 students) and strategies developed within the history teaching community over the last ten years.
Learning outcomes:
- to understand how key findings from cognitive science can be used to raise attainment at GCSE
Friday: 11:30–12:30
Suitable for: Key Stage 4
Using original documents to teach about the Holocaust and to develop independent thinking skills
Peter Morgan
The Wiener Holocaust Library, London
This session will aim to increase awareness within the teaching community of the potential for learning about the Holocaust and the Nazi era, using the collections and educational materials at and made available by the Wiener Holocaust Library.
Learning outcomes:
- to seek to add to the existing body of literature and practice regarding problem-solving approaches and cognitive learning, and how original documents can be used to engage and enthuse young people further in history
- to demonstrate how this can be done by taking an approach whereby students are encouraged to look, notice, question, hypothesise, use existing knowledge, test and develop bigger pictures
- to examine how this approach can be used to humanise victims, perpetrators and bystanders, and explore the potential of and issues around using this history to reflect on modern concerns
Friday: 11:30–12:30
Suitable for: Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, Key Stage 5, teacher educators, mentors
‘But how do we know?’: should all enquiries be interpretations and evidence enquiries?
Tom Allen
Ashton Park School, Bristol
Should ‘interpretations’ and ‘evidence’ be treated in the same way as ‘causation’, ‘consequence’, ‘significance’ and ‘similarity/difference’? Should we only focus on them in some enquiries or are they completely central to the way in which history works? Have textbooks and exam boards
presented interpretations and evidence in a way that truly enables students to understand how knowledge in history is constructed? Does the pivot towards stories at Key Stage 3 risk privileging content over deeper understanding? And what about mental load and student enjoyment? This session will ask some big questions and might even suggest answers to some of them...
Learning outcomes:
- to think about these questions, which one history department in Bristol has been grappling with as they replan their Key Stage 3 curriculum
- to share the findings and results from different enquiry models that the department has trialled in a year of experimentation (the failures as well as the triumphs)
Friday: 13:30–14:30
Suitable for: Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, Key Stage 5, teacher educators, mentors
Assessing progress in history
Sally Thorne
Montpelier High School, Bristol
Assessment – but make it 'history'. This session will provide formative assessment strategies for moving beyond the basics of checking for understanding, to help you to unpick student progress in their conceptual understanding and historical thinking. Drawing on over 20 years of experience in the classroom and recent learning from a master’s in educational assessment that I am undertaking this year, my session will provide lots of practical ideas, as well as opportunities to plan, discuss and share good practice with other colleagues.
Learning outcomes:
- to take away a range of formative assessment strategies that are tailored to the history classroom
Friday: 13:30–14:30
Suitable for: Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, Key Stage 5
'Wait, the NHS is free?' Teaching British thematic studies to multicultural cohorts
Gwendolen Da Sousa Correa
Brentside High School, London
One of the biggest challenges for students with non-British cultural backgrounds is that the cultural knowledge that the students possess is often not the cultural knowledge that thematic studies in Britain assumes of them. This means that the first hurdle for students of grasping the big picture is particularly challenging. Therefore, to teach effectively, we must incorporate a cultural understanding explicitly while also making sure that we link the curriculum to students’ own cultural knowledge.
Learning outcomes:
- to gain an understanding of the challenges that students face
- to come away with tools for how to help students to build up their understanding
- to consider how to use students’ existing cultural capital to access the curriculum
Friday: 13:30–14:30
Suitable for: Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4
This session is one of our featured workshops delivered by an Early Career Teacher
Still anonymous? Embedding women in the whole curriculum
Jake Unwin
Sutton High School; Girls Day School Trust, London
Virginia Woolf's oft-adapted words, that 'for most of history, anonymous was a woman', have hopefully been shaping our provision as history teachers for many years now. But how successfully have we delivered the inclusion of the oft-forgotten 50%? Perhaps, for instance, we struggle to embed women into topics in a way that is more than tokenistic beyond Key Stage 3.
Drawing on expertise from the Girls Day School Trust's network of 25 girls' schools, this session will help you to enrich your teaching of women in history, from Key Stage 3 all the way to Key Stage 5, and ensure that anonymous is no longer a woman.
Learning outcomes:
- to establish a framework to assess your current curriculum (Key Stages 3–5)
- to establish a methodology to incorporate women more effectively into your curriculum
- to take away case studies that would be immediately applicable
Friday: 13:30–14:30
Suitable for: Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, Key Stage 5
Frostquake!
Paula Lobo
Bristol Grammar School; University of Bristol
On Boxing Day 1962, Britain’s skies filled with snow. It would not stop snowing for ten weeks. By building a story about the winter of 1962–63, sometimes known as the ‘Big Freeze’, Paula is able to tell her pupils a bigger story: about changing politics, changing fashion, changing music and a changing climate. As district nurses ride bicycles through snowdrifts to attend to their patients, the Beatles steadily climb the charts and Betty Friedan asks, ‘Is housework the route to female satisfaction?’ At the end of this winter, the Swinging Sixties will begin.
Learning outcomes:
- to learn how to use the ‘Big Freeze’ of 1962 to tell an environmental story about Britain’s changing climate
- to learn how to use a rich storytelling approach to extend pupils’ learning beyond World War II and into the 1960s
Friday: 13:30–14:30
Suitable for: Key Stage 3
Clockwork classrooms
Carmel Bones
Consultant
Providing solutions for smooth-running history lessons, this is a highly practical pedagogical session based on over 30 years of classroom experience. A pic ‘n' mix of teaching takeaways, techniques and routines help to make learning sticky, build class camaraderie, develop classroom connoisseurs and encourage learner self-regulation. It is hoped that attendees will participate and experience 'the lesson/session' rather like their learners might!
Learning outcomes:
- to take away easy-to-implement pedagogical ideas with minimal teacher preparation, leading to maximum student participation
- to explore techniques to encourage recall, collaboration, a sense of community, high expectations, metacognition and autonomy
Friday: 13:30–14:30
Suitable for: Key Stage 2, Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, Key Stage 5, teacher educators, mentors
The future of history with AQA
Katie Hall, Emma Roberts
AQA History team
Join your AQA History team to hear about the latest updates on GCSE and A-level history. We would also like to hear your views on the ongoing government Curriculum Review as part of the session. What do you like about teaching our specifications? What could be improved? What are your experiences of successfully using sources and interpretations in the history classroom and how could we think about new ways of doing this? Come and tell us what you think!
Friday: 13:30–14:30
Suitable for: Key Stage 4, Key Stage 5
Sponsored by:
Stories about cities: using stories about cities to build pupils' sense of historical place
Rachel Foster
University of Cambridge
Steve Mastin
Consultant
In this workshop, we will bring together two themes that are currently generating lots of debate among history teachers – how to cultivate pupils' sense of place and how to use and tell stories well in the history classroom – by exploring how and why we might tell stories about cities. What does it mean to tell the story of a city? What might be the curricular value of such stories? What are the challenges of trying to build stories around a place, and how might we do so?
Learning outcomes:
- to consider the curricular value and rationale for teaching enquiries about a particular place
- to consider the practical opportunities and challenges of planning enquiries based on cities and, in particular, how to tell stories about them
- to have access to useful resources such as maps, sources and pictures that can be used in your own teaching
Friday: 14:45–15:45
Suitable for: Key Stage 3
The same but different – how one trust has approached curricular commonality across its schools
Matthew Stanford
Comberton Village College
Jasmin Hart
St Ivo Academy, Cambridgeshire
There are many benefits to working within multi-academy trusts: the sharing of tasks, collegiality and the creation of common curriculum are among them. While aligning curricula across a MAT is fairly straightforward in some subjects, there are peculiarities about history that make this challenging – not least the problem of how to respond to the need to teach local history. The history that pupils in South Yorkshire need is not exactly the same as that for pupils in South Cambridgeshire. This is to say nothing of the need for our teachers to respond to changing scholarship and circumstance, nor the need for teachers to teachers undertake planning as part of their CPD.
Learning outcomes:
- to learn, from a former trust national lead and a lead practitioner, how one trust aimed to square the circle and reap the benefits of commonality while retaining the flexibility to serve the diversity of its pupils
Friday: 14:45–15:45
Suitable for: Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, teacher educators, mentors, Key Stage 5
Britain's forgotten colony? Why Hong Kong deserves a place in the story of the British Empire
Ollie Barnes
Toot Hill School, Nottinghamshire
Building upon my article published in TH 196, this session aims to explore Hong Kong as an alternative case study through which to explore the British Empire. Many history departments have improved the teaching of empire in recent years, with Hong Kong being often overlooked. From my school context, with 15% of our students originating from Hong Kong, I wanted to create a sequence of lessons for our students designed to explore the story of Hong Kong since 1839. This workshop will focus on these lessons in depth.
Learning outcomes:
- to explore the history of Hong Kong as a British colony
- to discuss teaching sensitive and controversial histories
- to discover how Hong Kong's history can provide opportunities for students to encounter concepts such as protest, democracy, communism, extradition and state control
Friday: 14:45–15:45
Suitable for: Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, Key Stage 5
Why we use open-book assessments
Swerupa Gosrani, Charlie Herring
Belper School
Over the last few years, our department has moved to a system of open-book assessments at Key Stage 3. By focusing our assessments on developing students’ essay-writing skills and disciplinary knowledge, we hope that this will improve their understanding of the substantive knowledge that they have been taught and how it all fits together. It is also something that we are rolling out to Key Stage 4.
Learning outcomes:
- to further explore the reasons for using this approach, examining the thinking and arguments behind it
- to explore the benefits that we believe this approach offers for both the students and us in assessing their historical reasoning
Friday: 14:45–15:45
Suitable for: Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4
Come together: putting popular music at the heart of historical enquiry
David Ingledew
Astra SCITT, Amersham
The presentation will set out the pedagogic value and purpose of using popular music in a wide range of secondary historical enquiries. It will offer practical guidance on using popular music to tell historical stories as sources and to develop learners’ disciplinary knowledge, e.g. interpretations, similarity and difference, continuity and change.
Learning outcomes:
- to explore the value of using popular music as part of a historical enquiry at Key Stage 3, GCSE and A-level
- to use popular music to support learners’ historical narrative and chronological and evidential understanding
- to use popular music to develop disciplinary knowledge and understanding, e.g. historical significance and interpretations
- to learn how to use popular music within existing historical enquiries and to how to create new enquiries with popular music at the core
- to take away practical guidance on accessing a wide range of music and lyrics to use in the classroom
Friday: 14:45–15:45
Suitable for: Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, Key Stage 5, teacher educators
A tale of two commodities: teaching African economic history through palm oil and cocoa
Holly Ashford
Shrewsbury Colleges Group
Joseph Cauldwell
The Mosslands School, Wirral
Building on our HA Teacher Fellowship in collaboration with the London School of Economics and Justice2History, this session will explore ways of teaching economic history – a generally neglected thread in the history of colonialism – through stories of two commodities: cocoa and palm oil. Using local case studies, practical experiments and ideas from geography lessons, secondary students of all ages can grapple with abstract concepts like labour, trade, indigenous agency and globalisation, while engaging with the rich history of Ghana and the Congo.
This session will suggest ways in which to take students beyond the ‘balance sheet’ approach to the teaching of colonialism – and popular misconceptions of all hues – and engage with current academic debates.
Learning outcomes:
- to move beyond the ‘balance sheet’ approach to teaching colonialism
- to make economic history vivid and accessible
- to use local case studies to illuminate global connections
- to build cross-curricular links
- to ensure that an enquiry’s ethic is central in its planning
Friday: 14:45–15:45
Suitable for: Key Stage 3, Key Stage 5
Teaching a Great War: how to get the most out of a historical site visit on the Western Front
Gareth Williams
Kingham Hill School, Oxfordshire
Alana Britton
NST; Beechwood School, Tunbridge Wells
This session is aimed at showing how to get the best out of a field visit to First World War battlefield sites. It will explore strategies for leading pupils in source research before and after the visit, allowing them to engage with the locations that they investigate on a much deeper level. It will include ideas from a case study of one school that uses an integrated, cross-curricular approach to teaching the First World War, where the conflict and its effects not only become a key part of the curriculum, but also fit into part of the school's DNA. There will be ideas on how this case study can be adapted to various school settings.
Friday: 14:45–15:45
Suitable for: Key Stage 3
Sponsored by:
‘But maps are geography, Miss!’ History in the context of time and place
Susan Townsend
University of Roehampton
This session will explore the importance of both location and time in understanding the complex interconnections of history – so it will be location, location, location. How is history shaped by where we live in the world and when? This interactive workshop will focus on how to use maps/plans/timelines with pupils from Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 3 and will include examples from a whole range of time periods and perspectives. Making connections, encouraging children to argue about change and continuity and considering first order concepts, such as trade, settlement, civilisation and empires, are just some of the ideas that we will explore. It will be a creative and action-packed session!
Learning outcomes:
- to explore examples of activities that can be adapted for Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 3
- to gain resources to use both in and outside the classroom
Friday: 14:45–15:45
Suitable for: Key Stage 2, Key Stage 3
Demystifying subject leadership: a panel
Gareth Owen (Chair)
Witchford Village College, Ely
This panel session will offer an insight into the subject-specific challenges (and joys!) of being a head of history. Comprising experienced and new heads of history, we'll aim to address topics such as:
- communicating curricular choices to SLT and school inspectors
- promoting history in schools
working with specialist and non-specialist colleagues to improve teachingThis is open to everyone, whether you're thinking about subject leadership, have just started as a head of department or are experienced in the role.
Learning outcomes:
- to demystify subject leadership
- to inspire classroom teachers
- to step up to subject leadership by sharing the hard-earned wisdom of our community of leaders
to reassure new heads of history that there is a network of peers standing by
Friday: 14:45–15:45
Suitable for: Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, Key Stage 5, teacher educators
When parts coalesce: strengthening coherence by reinforcing golden threads through your curriculum
Catherine Priggs
Consultant
Elizabeth Carr
Avanti Grange Secondary School, Bishop's Stortford
Curricular coherence, which makes a curriculum and its impact more than the sum of its parts, can be achieved in various ways. A department may seek to make their curriculum cohere by fostering big pictures of the past, by using overarching frameworks and questions or in their planning for progression in disciplinary thinking. These mechanics all establish ‘golden threads’, which allow pupils to make sense of the whole. In this workshop, we will consider the importance of substantive knowledge when establishing and reinforcing golden threads. We will consider how to use substantive knowledge to strengthen curricular connections within and between enquiries. Finally, we will share examples of how outcomes and assessment can be used to explore the big stories inherent in a curriculum, strengthening the curricular takeaways that students retain when they leave the classroom.
Learning outcomes:
- to understand the value of curriculum coherence and how substantive knowledge can be leveraged to achieve this
Friday: 16:15–17:15
Suitable for: Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, Key Stage 5
The poppy and the mulberry – the most powerful agent and the survivor: nature’s role in the classroom
Barbara Trapani
Orleans Park School, London
In his last book, Smoke and Ashes, Amitav Ghosh put forward the hypothesis that the opium poppy might be an agent of history much more powerful than humans. In this session, we will explore the importance of supporting pupils in our classrooms to recognise the role of nature in human history across different key stages.
Learning outcomes:
- to share the learning from an extra-curricular club for Key Stage 3 on the history of mulberry trees in London
- to explore the outcome of starting the teaching of the British Empire in Key Stage 5 with the history of the trade of opium
- to reflect together on how the agency of nature manifests itself in the history that we teach and learn and the importance of understanding it to build a fuller narrative of history
Friday: 16:15–17:15
Suitable for: Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, Key Stage 5, teacher educators
Teaching about Liverpool and transatlantic slavery
Katie Amery
Co-op Academies, North
Colin McCormick
Teach First, National
This presentation on Liverpool and transatlantic slavery will provide teachers with practical insights to integrate this complex topic into their short-, medium- and long-term plans. It will detail how we developed enquiry questions and organised the sequence of events to make the material accessible and cohesive. By exploring local connections to slavery, the presentation will emphasise that the impact of slavery reaches far beyond ports like Liverpool, Bristol and Glasgow, highlighting its national and global significance. Additionally, a concise overview of 250 years of Liverpool's history will illustrate the city's deep ties to slavery.
Learning outcomes:
- to develop strategies for embedding transatlantic slavery into lesson planning
- to gain ideas for framing lessons using enquiry questions
- to learn how to explore local slavery connections to weave into lesson planning
- to receive a concise historical overview of Liverpool's link to the slave trade
- to take away ten complimentary PowerPoint lessons as ready-to-use classroom resources
Friday: 16:15–17:15
Suitable for: Key Stage 2, Key Stage 3, teacher educators
Developing resources with libraries and archives: teaching medieval women at the British Library
Natasha Hodgson
Nottingham Trent University
Debbie Bogard
British Library, London
The medieval period remains one of the biggest challenges for teachers when it comes to including women’s history at school. This session aims to share resources and reflect on experiences from CPD sessions run by the Teaching Medieval Women group, in collaboration with the British Library, as part of the exhibition Medieval Women: In Their Own Words (October 2024 to March 2025).
Learning outcomes:
- to gain an understanding from representatives from academia, secondary teaching and the British Library of cutting-edge academic debates relating to medieval women and how they can be engaged in the classroom
- to gain knowledge of new textual examples and material objects made available by the exhibition to explore opportunities to enhance and co-create teaching materials
- to support inclusive teaching in medieval history
Friday: 16:15–17:15
Suitable for: Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, Key Stage 5, teacher educators
Fun and games in the history classroom! Teaching key skills in a creative and engaging manner
Natasha De Stefano Honey
Bishop Thomas Grant School, Streatham
This session aims to provide practical and easy-to-implement ideas for all key stages. Source analysis and essay-writing skills will be presented in engaging ways for students to enjoy, even on the gloomiest of Friday afternoons. As a teacher with ADHD, dyslexia and dyspraxia, my methods involve a lot of chunked learning and easy-to-differentiate practice. Games, creative ‘hooks’ and ‘out of the box’ thinking will be shown in this session. Takeaway tips and tricks will be presented so that you can easily use the examples given. Examples will largely be from Key Stages 4 and 5 (AQA) but can be easily adapted for other exam boards.
Learning outcomes:
- to make you rethink the way in which you teach key skills in the classroom
- to remember that fun can still be had in a content-rich curriculum
- to provide and test easy-to-use (and set up) creative methods
Friday: 16:15–17:15
Suitable for: Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, Key Stage 5, mentors
Drawing conclusions: using graphic scaffolds to start and end essays successfully
Morgan Robinson
The University of Sheffield
Whoever popularised the ideas that introductions 'set the scene' and that conclusions merely summarise has a lot to answer for. When tackled effectively, introductions and concluding judgments can be the difference between a fully analytical, synthesised argument and a collection of disparate ideas. Yet they seem to receive very little attention. This session will demonstrate that graphic scaffolds can be used to support pupils to visualise and dual-encode their understanding of not only the vital purpose but also the process of constructing introductions and concluding judgements. They're essential for meeting the demands of any question.
Learning outcomes:
- to leave with a set of practical tools for visualising the purpose and process of starting and ending essays
- to demonstrate ability to apply pupil-friendly success criteria for writing introductions and conclusions effectively
- to take away a set of pupil-friendly 'measuring sticks', bespoke to each second-order concept, with which to make convincing concluding judgements
Friday: 16:15–17:15
Suitable for: Key Stage 4, Key Stage 5, teacher educators
Pearson Edexcel History: discussing future history qualifications and reform
Mark Battye
Pearson Edexcel
This workshop will provide delegates with the opportunity to discuss the ongoing Curriculum and Assessment Review. It will recap the latest information about the review, before giving teachers the opportunity to share their thoughts on some of the key messages and recommendations from the history education community, such as reducing the volume of content, approaches to the assessment of substantive and disciplinary knowledge, and the role of coursework at A-level.
Friday: 16:15–17:15
Suitable for: Key Stage 4, Key Stage 5
Sponsored by:
Exploring coherent curriculum design: from legislation to classroom practice
Yvonne Roberts-Ablett, Lloyd Hopkin
Welsh Government, Cardiff
This session will illustrate the role of co-construction in developing the National Curriculum for Wales Framework – a curriculum for teachers, by teachers. The development of a purpose-led curriculum is at the heart of work across Wales, one that is closer to the classroom than ever before, including mandatory inclusion of Black, Asian and minority ethnic histories.
Learning outcomes:
- to understand what Curriculum for Wales is and isn't
- to understand co-construction – the process of the teaching profession in Wales designing the national Framework
- to understand the purpose of history as a vehicle to realising the four purposes of Curriculum for Wales
Friday: 16:15-17:15
Suitable for: Early Years, Key Stage 1, Key Stage 2, Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, Key Stage 5, teacher educators, mentors
Professional wrestling with environmental history in the curriculum
Sally Burnham
Carre's, Sleaford; University of Nottingham
As we revisited our curriculum after reading Teaching History 194, we had so many questions: Should we incorporate environmental history into our already full curriculum? How do we do this without it simply being a 'bolt on'? What should the disciplinary focus be? How do we enable the curriculum to help students to find hope in the current climate crisis? Do we focus only on Key Stage 3 or do we look at Key Stage 4 too? These are just some of the questions with which we have wrestled. This session will look at our journey to developing our curriculum to incorporate environmental history.
Learning outcomes:
- to explore and evaluate enquiries, scholarship and stories that have helped to engage our students in thinking about ways in which history can help them to respond to the climate crisis
Saturday: 11:15–12:15
Suitable for: Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4
Teaching the Caribbean: centring the lived experiences, cultures and knowledges of Caribbean people
David Rawlings, Bethan Fisk
University of Bristol
This workshop will introduce participants to a unit exploring the history of the peoples, communities and cultures of the three largest islands of the Caribbean – Cuba, Hispaniola (the Dominican Republic and Haiti) and Jamaica – from 1491, the eve of the Spanish arrival in the region, to the Haitian Revolution.
Learning outcomes:
- to learn how to centre history lessons on Caribbean people’s lived experience and the cultures and knowledges that they created in the face of colonial violence and enslavement across the boundaries of language and empire from 1491 to 1805
- to explore how to teach the collision between indigenous peoples and new arrivals in the Caribbean
- to explore how to teach the trade movement and migrations of peoples from Europe and Africa and the formation of colonies
- to explore how to teach the development of distinct systems of slavery and the making of new cultures, traditions of autonomy, resistance and revolution
- to explore how to teach self-emancipation from slavery and colonialism, and the creation of Haiti
Saturday: 11:15–12:15
Suitable for: Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4
How do you know they have learnt that?
Martyn Bajkowski
Pleckgate High School, Blackburn
A case study around how we have created a golden thread between on-the-spot, diagnostic, formative and summative assessment and homework, to ensure that we have an accurate impression of how well all learners are learning. The talk will discuss some of the strategic decisions taken at a departmental level, as well as the CPD delivered to enact the strategy successfully. It will also feature how we have incorporated technology to reduce teacher workload, while having a deeper insight and more robust assessment mechanisms.
Learning outcomes:
- to increase understanding of assessment for all pupils and how to strategically deliver this
Saturday: 11:15–12:15
Suitable for: Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4
The historian's apprentice: using literacy to enhance the disciplinary knowledge of our students
Alex Dickens
Harris Federation, London
This session will explore how teachers of history can create literacy-rich classrooms where language, reading, writing and speech are used to develop the conceptual and disciplinary thinking of our students. Often, we as history teachers attempt to teach our students to argue without demonstrating the full range of methods that historians employ when composing an argument. We ask our students to analyse an interpretation without first teaching them how to identify its component parts. We want students to think conceptually, without first sharing the rich conceptual language that is the gateway to complex historical thinking. This session will share some practical ways in which historical literacy can be used to exemplify the discipline of history and develop historical thinking.
Learning outcomes:
- to come away with a clear understanding of how history-specific approaches to reading, writing and speech can be used in the classroom to enhance the historical thinking of students
Saturday: 11:15–12:15
Suitable for: Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, Key Stage 5, mentors, teacher educators
Individualising and contextualising the Holocaust: teaching about pre-war Jewish life
Jenny Carson, Charlie Wranosky-Mills
Holocaust Educational Trust, London
A key pedagogical principle of teaching about learning about the Holocaust is to 'give learners opportunities to see those persecuted by the Nazis as individuals... with a life before the Holocaust, existing in a context of family, friends and community'. In this session, we will explore the pedagogy behind teaching about pre-war Jewish life and its importance in contextualising and humanising the Holocaust. Over the past few years, we have seen a desire from teachers and educators to go beyond mere snippets of geographical information exploring where Jewish communities lived pre-war, and to engage in diverse micro-histories as they relate to politics, sport, religion, culture and nationalism (and more).
Learning outcomes:
- to explore recommended pedagogical principles for teaching about the Holocaust
- to learn about pre-war Jewish life and the importance of contextualising and humanising the history of the Holocaust
Saturday: 11:15–12:15
Suitable for: Key Stage 2, Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, Key Stage 5, teacher educators
How can we help our students see that 'history is literally present in all that we do'?
Eleanor Nicholson, David Hibbert
The Cherwell School, Oxford
Building a curriculum around powerful knowledge with explanatory power has been at the centre of discourse in history teaching. However, we felt that we needed to support our students to see the lasting legacies of the past in the world today and create spaces for deeper exploration of them. We felt that this was particularly true in relation to delicate and contested histories. This session will reflect on our work in this area in our Key Stage 3 curriculum over the last few years.
Learning outcomes:
- to consider conceptual and theoretical approaches to this issue
- to come away with some practical approaches and some specific examples or starting points for teachers that want to apply the ideas in the session
Saturday: 11:15–12:15
Suitable for: Key Stage 3, teacher educators, mentors
Finding fragments of change on Endell Street: an interdisciplinary approach
Gemma Hargraves
The Crypt School, Gloucester
The first page of Endell Street by Wendy Moore states that 'they had been living in a world peopled by men. Now they entered a world run solely by women.' Building on other interpretations of the First World War and women’s suffrage campaigns (including David Olusoga and Fern Riddell), this session will discuss how Moore's interpretation of a First World War hospital in London can be used to teach Key Stage 3 and 4 students about change and continuity. The story of the 'trailblazing' women of Endell Street, alongside contemporary artwork, will be explored to show how students can both appreciate and write meaningfully about 'the brilliance and bravery of an extraordinary group of women'.
Learning outcomes:
- to share practical strategies to promote analysis of interpretations, and change and continuity (which could be useful from Key Stage 3 to 5)
- to take home ways in which to enable participants to develop an interdisciplinary or cross-curricular approach within their existing curriculum
Saturday: 11:15–12:15
Suitable for: Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, teacher educators
Conceptual confusion: why planning for conceptual understanding is so difficult
Victoria Crooks
University of Nottingham; History Teacher Educators' Network
Beginning history teachers find it hard to identify disciplinary concepts and even harder to understand how pupils make progress in their disciplinary understanding. However, they are frequently told to ensure that their planning prioritises the disciplinary over the substantive. This can lead to conceptual confusion. This session will explore beginning teachers’ assumptions, preconceptions and misconceptions and make practical suggestions for how to support them to overcome their conceptual confusion.
Learning outcomes:
- to understand why beginning teachers find articulating the purposes and development of conceptual knowledge so challenging
- to consider how the assumptions made about beginning and early career teachers' understanding of the role of conceptual knowledge can create misconceptions
- to know how beginning teachers can be supported to plan for the development of conceptual knowledge and therefore improve pupils’ understanding of history as a discipline
Saturday: 11:15–12:15
Suitable for: Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, Key Stage 5, teacher educators, mentors
Laura London
University of East Anglia, Norwich; 2History Teacher Educators' Network
‘Why is there a Northern Ireland and a Republic of Ireland’? Teaching Irish history in English schools
Emmy Quinn
Newminster Middle School, Morpeth
Irish history has long been neglected as part of standard Key Stage 3 history teaching, but the history is unavoidably entwined with English and British history. This workshop will look at the ways in which we can incorporate Irish history into Key Stage 3 curricula in non-Irish schools. It will explore the barriers, solutions and practical ways in which to introduce pre-colonial Irish history. The workshop will introduce examples of teaching Irish history as part of empire and including Ireland in local studies.
Learning outcomes:
- to provide a rationale for introducing more Irish history into Key Stage 3
- to take away ideas of how to weave this into existing curricula
- to take away ideas of how to create units based on Ireland
- to take away ideas for teaching Ireland as part of empire
- to come away with examples of local studies
Saturday: 12:30–13:30
Suitable for: Key Stage 3
Remembering Rosa right: deconstructing the popular memory of Rosa Parks with Year 9
Ed Durbin
Yate Academy; Greenshaw Learning Trust
Rosa Parks was more than the quiet seamstress who refused to give up her seat on the bus in Montgomery. But what if we want to do more than just correct our students' misconceptions? What if we want to help them to explore the reasons why popular memory in both the UK and the USA has departed so far from Parks' life story? In this session, we will explore possibilities for teaching the concept of popular memory in the classroom, and Ed will share an enquiry based on the work of Parks' biographer, Jeanne Theoharis.
Learning outcomes:
- to feel more confident in planning your own enquiries around the concept of popular memory and to have ideas for doing so
- to build subject knowledge of race relations in twentieth-century America
Saturday: 12:30–13:30
Suitable for: Key Stage 2, Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, Key Stage 5, teacher educators, mentors
‘Powerful stories’ – a story-based approach to teaching GCSE history
Pete Jackson
Ryedale School, Nawton Beadlam
Ben Bassett
Villiers High School, Ealing, London
Stories are ‘psychologically privileged’ in the human mind. By encoding information through stories, you can enable students to engage more in their learning and discover an even greater passion for history. In this session, we will explore how we have worked collaboratively to create historical stories to teach our GCSE curriculum. Such an approach helps to do the ‘heavy lifting’ in terms of content for any of the major GCSE exam boards, while inspiring learners.
Learning outcomes:
- to learn why stories work as an approach for GCSE
- to consider the key ingredients for a great historical story
- to consider what scholarship and historical fiction can teach us about storytelling
- to work collaboratively to create historically authentic stories
- to provide a range of case studies that can be used across exam board specifications, covering diverse topics such as migration, the Norman Conquest, Elizabethans, the American West and Nazi Germany.
Saturday: 12:30–13:30
Suitable for: Key Stage 4
Is engagement the forgotten key element to success in the history classroom?
Richard McFahn
University of Sussex, Falmer
Aaron Wilkes
University of Warwick
In an age where retrieval, multiple-choice tests and GCSE practice questions seem to be the usual focus of many history lessons, maybe we sometimes forget to engage our pupils to inspire them to want to learn more. Aaron and Richard feel passionately that engagement should be highly encouraged in history lessons. In this practical session, they will build on research and survey data to share with you numerous ideas and approaches aimed at engaging all pupils, sustaining curiosity and ultimately improving attainment in the history classroom.
Learning outcomes:
- to learn what research and survey data tell us about engagement
- to consider how engagement has been defined and what it might look like
- to take away numerous practical ideas and strategies that will help to engage pupils to want to learn more in the history classroom
Saturday: 12:30–13:30
Suitable for: Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4
Delivering history: understanding work and health in the nineteenth-century British Post Office
Francesca Dickson
Crickhowell High School, Powys
Kathleen McIlvenna
University of Derby
David Green
King’s College London
This session will introduce the Addressing Health project, which examines the health of UK postal workers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, using records of over 19,000 individual workers, both women and men.
Learning outcomes:
- to explore how their online Data Mapper can be used in the classroom to investigate the role and significance of the service industry during the late industrial period, opening up conversations around the impacts of work on health and livelihoods, as well as life and society in Victorian and Edwardian Britain
- to guide participants through a free, fully adaptable enquiry that helps students to see the work of historians and engage directly with primary evidence
- to explore the historical thinking that emerges to look at the ‘silences’ that exist around narratives seen as more significant and universal (here the ‘mills and factories’ of the Industrial Revolution)
- to look at how we can use technology in a subject-specific way to actively develop critical thinking and support cross-curricular skills in numeracy, oracy and digital literacy
Saturday: 12:30–13:30
How exploring stories of colonised people can improve A-level approaches to economic history
Emma McKenna
The King's School, Grantham
Barbara Trapani
Orleans Park School, London
This session will share the learning and materials from the HA Fellowship on the Economic History of the British Empire. It will focus specifically on our reflections of the difficulties of teaching the economic history of the British Empire, in an area that can often be reduced to trade statistics and in which students can lack the contextual knowledge needed to formulate meaningful analyses.
Learning outcomes:
- to build on the work of other teacher researchers who have been working to include marginalised histories in the Key Stage 5 curriculum
- to share case studies about infrastructure, agriculture and the experiences of colonised people across the British Empire and our attempts to develop the understanding and written work of A-level students
Saturday: 12:30–13:30
Suitable for: Key Stage 5, teacher educators
What does an enquiry question do?
Christine Counsell
Consultant
The idea of a sequence of lessons shaped and driven by an enquiry question is now over 25 years old. Since then, numerous history teachers have explored, evaluated and published on principles for designing ‘enquiries’ in this sense. The approach is invaluable in blending substantive and disciplinary learning, but it requires careful training and practice. All too often, an ‘enquiry question’ is invented as a heading but not really used. Using Hodder’s Changing Histories, this workshop examines principles for optimal use of ‘enquiry questions’, teasing out their potential for sustaining curiosity in pupils, and systematic teaching of the disciplinary that doesn’t slide into tokenism.
Saturday: 12:30–13:30
Suitable for: Key Stage 3, teacher educators
Sponsored by:
Teaching queer history and expanding our students' historical horizons
Claire Holliss
Reigate College; University College London
This workshop will focus on my teaching of queer history within the broader context of a unit on twentieth-century British social and cultural history at A-level. I will discuss the impact of the distinctive disciplinary demands of queer history on the design of the course and how the interplay between individual stories and substantive concepts helped students to think about unfamiliar historical questions. I will also explore how the experience of teaching this course changed my approaches to teaching about evidence and interpretations.
Learning outcomes:
- to take away ideas about how to devise schemes of work that feature queer history
- to consider approaches to teaching queer history specifically, and social and cultural history more broadly
- to look at examples of the kinds of work that students can produce in response to questions about these historical topics
- to consider different perspectives on current pedagogical questions concerning the use of stories and concepts and debates over how we construct the discipline in our classrooms
Saturday: 14:30–15:30
Suitable for: Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, Key Stage 5, teacher educators
Adventures in time and specs: planning and teaching enquiries at Key Stage 4
Mike Hill
Ark Soane Academy, London
Enquiry questions are a staple in history teaching, but they can often be squeezed out by the pressures of exam specifications in Key Stage 4. In this workshop, we will explore hard-nosed and pragmatic reasons for teaching GCSE courses through enquiries. We will consider how enquiry questions can make content-heavy specifications more understandable and 'stickier', and I will also share some ideas and examples of how teachers can translate content specifications into immersive and story-driven enquiry journeys. We will primarily use the history of medicine as an example in this workshop, but the principles should be applicable to a range of topics and exam papers.
Learning outcomes:
- to share examples of enquiries and enquiry questions that I use in my own GCSE teaching (overviews and sample lesson resources)
- to tease out wider principles that participants can apply in their own planning of other exam specifications
Saturday: 14:30–15:30
Suitable for: Key Stage 4, teacher educators, mentors
Teaching the colonial impact on the environment
Nini Visscher, Nebiat Michael
St Claudine's Catholic School for Girls, London
As the urgency of climate change grips our attention through various aspects of our life, so too does the need to educate our students for a future of tackling it. Thus, we created an enquiry to invite the conversation into our history classrooms. The enquiry, which stemmed from our 'Teaching colonial environmental histories’ working group, examined the environmental impact of various colonial enterprises. Through the enquiry, students evaluated the impact on New Zealand’s land ownership, consequently leading to deforestation and animal extinction, alteration of India’s farming practices due to the increased demand for opium, and Kenya’s cultivation of maize to feed British soldiers. These changes to the centuries of agriculture practices had a lasting impact on the land and the culture of the indigenous population.
Learning outcomes:
- to gain an insight into how to engage students with the history of environmental destruction by bridging a seemingly recent climate problem with centuries of human intervention
Saturday: 14:30–15:30
Suitable for: Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, teacher educators
This session is one of our featured workshops delivered by an Early Career Teacher
Scolds, pickpockets, fraudsters: the GCSE thematic study as a blended approach to women's history
Jenny Turner
Queen Elizabeth School, Kirkby Lonsdale
In this session, we will look at the opportunities presented by the GCSE Crime and Punishment unit to tackle the dearth of female voices in GCSE specifications. The session will cover how regular, routine representation of female case studies (as both perpetrators and victims of crime) can balance out the curriculum and ensure that GCSE history is more diverse, engages all learners and better represents the academic discipline.
Learning outcomes:
- to take away an up-to-date understanding of the arguments for including more women in the history curriculum, including those related to social, emotional and mental health, as well as curricular argument
- to be equipped with a range of case studies and strategies to use in your own lessons, particularly at GCSE but adaptable to other key stages
- to consider examples of useful scholarship to incorporate into lessons, including Phillipa Gregory’s Normal Women and other interpretations
Saturday: 14:30–15:30
Suitable for: Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, Key Stage 5
'Curriculum is never finished': revolutionising, rebuilding or refining your Key Stage 3 curriculum
Ashley Bartlett, Lianne Moore
Castle Mead Academy, Leicester
Much maligned at its inception, the current National Curriculum for history provides freedom to craft a history curriculum with a unique intent tailored to your school's context. We will share our journey of curriculum construction in a new free school, providing clear curriculum design principles and practical strategies to apply to your own setting, in order to ensure a broad and representative offer, with opportunities to share under-told stories that are woven throughout the better-known knowledge of our past. We will explore the 'golden threads' that tie together our knowledge-rich curriculum, to provide a coherent journey that has been recognised by external bodies, including Historic England and the Historical Association.
Learning outcomes:
- to consider a curriculum model recognised as good practice
- to examine case studies to incorporate into your own curriculum
- to come away with strategies to ensure curriculum cohesion
- to consider suggestions for implementation rooted in research-informed pedagogy
- to consider suggested partners for collaboration moving forward
Saturday: 14:30–15:30
Suitable for: Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, teacher educator
Violence, exploitation and colonialism at Key Stage 3: on teaching sensitive history sensitively
Fred Oxby
Wales High School, Sheffield; Leeds Beckett University
This session will explore how sensitive histories are taught in the secondary classroom. By sensitive history, I am referring to stories involving genocide, colonisation and war. Far from suggesting that teachers avoid these topics, I believe that teachers must teach these sensitive histories to students but must do so in a thoughtful and intentional way, safeguarding students from unnecessary trauma. By drawing on student experience, decolonial thinking and contemporary theories on history teaching, this session will set out how history can deliver sensitive content to heal and build student identity and belonging, especially for those from minority groups in society. The session will explore these topics through the teaching of the Holocaust, colonialism and enslavement.
Learning outcomes:
- to gain a robust, research-driven understanding of student experience in the classroom when learning sensitive history
- to come away with a clear set of guidelines and strategies for teaching sensitive history appropriately and rigorously in the classroom
Saturday: 14:30–15:30
Suitable for: Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, Key Stage 5, teacher educators
What next for K culture? K history of course! It’s time to be more global; it’s time for Korea!
Michael Maddison
Consultant
Aaron Wilkes
University of Warwick
You’ve listened to K-pop, you’ve watched K-drama, you’ve tasted K-food and you’ve admired K-fashion. Our fascination with Korea, both North and South, has increased enormously in the last few years. But how much do you know about Korean history, beyond the Korean War? This workshop introduces you to a history of Korea through ten amazing objects. They include the largest collection of gold crowns ever discovered, the oldest surviving astronomical observatory in the world, the oldest surviving example of a book printed using moveable metal type, and the world’s first armoured ship. Join us to learn about these objects and more and how you can incorporate Korean history into your curriculum.
Learning outcomes:
- to broaden your knowledge and help you with ideas and strategies to enrich your pupils’ and students’ learning and expand their understanding of world history
Saturday: 14:30–15:30
Suitable for: Key Stage 2, Key Stage 3, teacher educators
How to enhance your curriculum without breaking the bank or drowning in paperwork
Deborah Hayden
Trinity Catholic School, Leamington Spa
This session will focus on how to meet teacher standard 8, contributing to the wider life and ethos of the school via extra-curricular activities. A variety of extra-curricular activities will be covered to enhance both your curriculum and your students’ experience. Examples will include national and local projects, outside speakers, online workshops, competitions, clubs and trips. Practical tips on how to implement these strategies will also be covered.
Learning outcomes:
- to take away details of a range of potential extra-curricular activities that could be implemented within the curriculum
- to gain tips on how to implement the activities
- to learn details of the impact of these activities for students
Saturday: 14:30–15:30
Suitable for: Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, teacher educators, mentors
Dawson Lecture
Michael Riley
UCL Institute of Education, London
History around us: why teaching about the historic environment matters more than ever
Engaging children and young people with the history around them is one of the great joys of history teaching. Studying the buildings and landscapes of the past can deepen our understanding of the lived experience and mental world of people in past societies. More profoundly, it can help us to understand ourselves in time. In an age of environmental crisis, engaging pupils with the history around them matters more than ever. Michael’s lecture will reflect on the power and potential of learning about the historic environment.
Saturday: 15:50–16:50
Suitable for all key stages
