Disciplinary concepts
Although history teachers, education researchers and curriculum designers may use different terms, all of them recognise that learning history involves the development of both substantive knowledge (the ‘stuff’ of history) and familiarity with the ‘second-order’ or procedural concepts, that shape the way in which the ‘stuff’ or ‘substance’ is understood, organised and debated, as well as the ways in which it is actually generated. Lists of these ‘disciplinary concepts’ have varied slightly over the years, but each of the following six areas of conceptual understanding are specifically named in the current National Curriculum and (individually or collectively) form the focus of specific assessment objectives at GCSE and A-level. None of them can be taught separately from the substance of history, but effective planning needs to encompass and address them all.
Cause and consequence
- Using metaphor to highlight causal processes with Year 13
- Film: What's the wisdom on... Consequence
- Using individuals’ stories to help GCSE students to explain change and causation
- Deepening Year 9’s knowledge for better causation arguments
- What’s The Wisdom On... Consequence
- Moving Year 9 towards more complex causal explanations of Holocaust perpetration
Change and continuity
- Lengthening Year 9’s narrative of the American civil rights movement
- How visual evidence reflects change and continuity in attitudes to the police in the 19th and early 20th centuries
- Learning from a pandemic
- Using individuals’ stories to help GCSE students to explain change and causation
- ‘One big cake’: substantive knowledge of the mid-Tudor crisis in Year 7 students’ writing
- Transatlantic slavery – shaping the question, lengthening the narrative, broadening the meaning
Similarity & difference
- Connecting past and present through the lens of enduring human issues: International Women’s Day protests
- Using the present to construct a meaningful picture of the medieval past
- Film: What's the wisdom on...Similarity and Difference
- What’s The Wisdom On... Similarity and difference?
- Cunning Plan 177: teaching about life in Elizabethan England by looking at death
- ‘Man, people in the past were indeed stupid’
Significance
- Three strategies to support pupils’ study of historical significance
- Exploring the relationship between historical significance and historical interpretation
- Developing KS3 students’ ability to challenge their history curriculum through an early introduction of significance
- Film: What's the wisdom on... Historical Significance
- What’s The Wisdom On... Historical significance
- Anything but brief: Year 8 students encounter the longue durée
Evidence
- Broadening Year 7’s British history horizons with Welsh medieval sources
- ‘Miss, what’s the point of sources?’ Helping Year 11 to understand the discipline
- Move Me On 191: using sources in lessons
- Using eighteenth-century material culture to develop evidential thinking in Year 8
- Fifties Britain through the senses: ‘never had it so good’?
- Practical demonstration: powerful and rigorous history teaching for all
Interpretations
- Bringing historical method into the classroom
- Exploring the relationship between historical significance and historical interpretation
- Helping Year 8 to understand historians’ narrative decision-making
- What Have Historians Been Arguing About... Histories of education – and society?
- Historical learning using concept cartoons
- Year 7 use oral traditions to make claims about the rise and fall of the Inka empire