Webinar: Causation

We’ve been talking to our secondary school members and we know how difficult life is for teachers in the current circumstances, so we wanted to lend a helping hand.

'What’s the wisdom on…' is a brand-new and already popular feature in our secondary journal Teaching History and provides the perfect stimulus for a virtual department meeting. 'What’s the wisdom on…' provides history teachers with an overview of the ‘story so far’ of many years of practice-based professional thinking about a particular aspect of history teaching.

To complement the journal feature, and to fit into a current need, we have produced a series of recorded webinars designed to support virtual department meetings. In each webinar (lasting approx. 45 mins), our experts Dr Katharine Burn, Helen Snelson and Christine Counsell use their professional expertise and experience of writing for and editing Teaching History journal to provide a structured discussion about a different concept or issue covering teaching the story before you attempt the analysis, thinking about the different types of sources, evidence, argument and approaches; what often goes right and wrong, getting your enquiry question right, and using historical scholarship to inform your approach.

These discussions will provide an excellent starting point for your own departmental discussions whether for curriculum or teacher development. Let us know how your departmental discussions develop after listening to the series via Twitter by tagging @histassoc into your tweets.

The first episode below explores 'What’s the wisdom on…Causation' and is open access. This episode discusses getting your enquiry question right, thinking about the different kinds of causal argument as 'shapes' or 'patterns', tackling 'what' before 'why' and story before analysis, and using historical scholarship to inform your approach. You can also view the original accompanying journal feature.

You can also now view other 'What's the Wisdom on' episodes including:

• Evidence and Sources
• Historical Interpretations
• Enquiry Questions (Part 1)
• Enquiry Questions (Part 2)
• Change and Continuity
• Similarity and difference
• Historical significance
• Consequence