In the beginning, way back in 2004, my aim for the site was simple – to provide teachers, especially those early in their careers, with detailed examples of a range of teaching techniques they could use, adapt or copy.  This, I hoped, would help teachers extend their own range of effective techniques and create their own activities – which would both benefit students and add to teachers’ own professional satisfaction. In 2004 the still quite novel idea of a website offered far more space in which to describe teaching resources than did a book.

Since then, ThinkingHistory has grown significantly, from an initial ten activities to well over two hundred. However the website is now much more than a very large collection of teaching activities – there’s also a wide range of articles discussing many aspects of history teaching including curriculum planning, chronological understanding, the nature of enquiry and numerous other topics. Revisiting all this material when restructuring the site in 2023, I’m struck by the presence of two linked threads – the importance in teaching of curiosity about learning and teaching and of creativity in seeking solutions through both planning and teaching.

I think the reason why curiosity and creativity are so important is because, to my mind, teaching is in essence a problem-solving activity, the central problem being how to help students learn effectively. This means that students have to be at the heart of planning, whether of individual lessons or whole courses. It’s all too easy to see planning as related to covering a specification or body of content but more important are those planning questions born out of curiosity about how students learn – what are their preconceptions about topics and about the process of studying history? What aspects of topics do they often stumble over? Which topics and content contributes most to students’ understanding of the world around them and these need not be the most modern topics? Can students recognise themselves, their concerns and dilemmas in the actions of the people in the past? These are critical questions which need to be at the centre of planning with all ages and which require creative solutions.

The rest of this introduction explores these themes in a little more detail and, I hope, gives you a sense of the ethos and ideals that lie behind the development of ThinkingHistory.

Ian Dawson, 2023

Developing Effective Teaching

Firstly, those teaching techniques – what are they and why they are so valuable?

On the site you’ll find decision-making activities, living graphs, structured role-plays, physical maps, continuum lines (also known as washing lines), scripted dramas and more. What these techniques have in common, in varying ways and extents, is a degree of physical activity and movement in the classroom which gives learning a strong visual dimension and/or a requirement to ‘think from the inside’ of historical situations. This applies whether the activity is simple and brief, such as using students as ‘props’ to plot the growth of population across time or create a map of Europe showing the relative power of Henry VIII’s England in relation to other states or, on the other hand, sophisticated and complex such as Je suis le Roi, a structured role-play simulating the impact of the Norman Conquest – in French!

The reason these teaching methods are so valuable is that they have a very positive impact on students’ learning, enabling students of all ages to:

• acquire and retain more and deeper knowledge for longer and to understand more about the topics they study and about the nature of history.

• concentrate harder and for longer periods and so think more deeply

• be better motivated and prepared to undertake follow-up reading and writing, as a result of which both the quality of reading and writing improve

Teachers who learn to use and adapt these methods therefore have a wider range of techniques at their disposal and hence a better chance of matching them to the needs of their students and helping them learn more deeply and more effectively.

Those are large claims about the impact of the techniques on students’ learning but they are the product of my own decades of experience and of the work and experiences of many other teachers and are therefore based on extensive classroom practice. They are also highly effective with all ages, up to and including undergraduates. After all, it was using these techniques with degree students (including final year students) that led to me winning a National Teaching Award and the funding to set up this website.

Of course, any technique can be used badly and ineffectively but the website provides teachers with the detailed guidance to use these activities and resources effectively, especially those teachers in the early years of their careers who, understandably, may feel such techniques may be risky in terms of class discipline.

Three further points about the techniques described on this site:

1.  The prime aim of these techniques is to make the complexity of history more accessible and therefore help students learn more about the topics they are studying and about the nature of history as a discipline. Students are at the heart of what we do and it’s vital that teachers adapt their teaching to the needs of the students, to help them learn, not expect students to fit in with a teacher’s preferred way of teaching.  

2. Using these techniques doesn’t mean you don’t teach in other ways for a great deal of your time in the classroom. Like others who use these techniques, I also spent a lot of time talking and explaining, telling stories, asking questions, examining sources, even giving short lectures at A level – though never at the start of the course, only at the end when students could concentrate on listening to the arguments and weren’t trying to scribble down every piece of information.

3. Teachers also benefit from extending their range of teaching methods and so developing their own creativity. Creating your own activities, using them and seeing them work is a joy – great for confidence as a teacher and makes going into the classroom exciting. Creativity refreshes teachers, making them more curious and excited about how to help students learn effectively.

Keeping the bigger pictures in mind:

Ethos and Ideals

Turning to the numerous articles and discussions on the site – on curriculum planning, enquiry and independent learning, chronological understanding, the teaching of individual topics etc – what are the ideals that lie behind them? One reason it’s important to identify these ideals is the difficulty of keeping them in view in the midst of day-to-day priorities. One story of history education in the last fifty years is of teachers constantly scrambling to change the minutiae of their teaching in reaction to changes in the National Curriculum and assessment at GCSE and A level – but in the midst of this scrambling the really important aims and ideals have been in danger of getting lost.

The most important of these ideals is helping students appreciate how studying history can inform, contextualise and enhance their lives. This aim was what attracted me to the new Schools Council History Project in 1973 and it’s tragic that so little progress in this area seems to have been achieved over the last fifty years. If students don’t understand why they are studying history – how it can inform their own lives – then there is no point them studying history. Asking ‘do students understand why history is worth studying?’ and ‘Have students had the chance to unravel the historic context for events they can see happening in the world today?’ should be a part of every end of year review.

This aim and ideal then leads into three other related issues that have played an important part in developing this website:

1. History, particularly the process of enquiry, has a major part to play in enabling students to study independently and effectively, to prepare them for further study post-18 and for many aspects of their working lives. Enquiry is about far more than coming up with the ultimate enquiry question for a Year 7 class – it’s about giving students access to a process of study that enables them to learn effectively and independently. This means making the processes of learning visible to students – the route to more effective learning and higher attainment in assessment requires students and teachers to discuss how to learn. This is why the website sections on Raising Attainment and on Enquiry and Independent Learning are so important – they demonstrate how to make learning visible to students.

2. History is about people – real, individual people, people like you and I but who lived in the past – and students can only study the past effectively if they think of those people with respect, as being as intelligent, caring, inventive, courageous as people today and being as vulnerable, capable of mistakes and prejudice, thoughtless as we are also. If students can be helped to respect people of times that were very different from our own, then perhaps there is more chance of them respecting people from different cultures today rather than instinctively interpreting difference as being inferior or a threat.

3. We need to continually re-think what we teach as society develops in order to help students see the value of understanding history for their own lives. As one example, this site contains a radical reappraisal of how we might teach about the Middle Ages at KS3 – I’m not advocating that more time is spent on the Middle Ages but that whatever time you have should be used to create an interpretation of the period that both matches the work of historians and helps students see even this distant period of history as informing their own lives. Such in-depth questioning and reappraisal of how we approach periods and topics continues to be needed.

Coping with transitory fashions in education:

Learning from the Middle Ages

Dame Fortune’s Wheel was one of the best-known metaphors of the Middle Ages – a warning and reminder that the fortunes of individuals were subject to change, often rapid change. Good fortune could turn to disaster at one spin of Dame Fortune’s Wheel.

It’s worth remembering Dame Fortune and her Wheel when experiencing developments in education and teaching. Over the last fifty years I’ve seen the wheel of fortune spin and spin again in history teaching – fashions in teaching come and go, arguments that seem to be ‘winning’ disappear from view, old ideas are revived (though often with fancier terminology that make them appear novel).

Dame Fortune's Wheel

The teaching techniques on this site are a case in point – interest in them has waxed and waned over the years – but for many teachers they continue to pass the ultimate test i.e. they enhance students’ learning to a degree unmatched by an unchanging diet of ‘stand and deliver’ methods. The same is true of my big picture ideals – the need to help students understand the value of studying history, of how to study effectively, what they can learn about their fellow human beings and the world around them. These goals transcend the occasional changes in National Curricula and awarding body specifications.

One final ideal …

The history teaching community is at its best and strongest when it is collaborative. The development of history teaching can be defined as a continuing conversation between history educators and one of the aspects of ThinkingHistory that I’m most proud of is being able to include numerous contributions from other teachers who have sent me resources and activities that they developed for use with their students.

I do hope this website continues to play a part in carrying that collaborative conversation between history educators forward.