Substantive Knowledge
The focus of this section is the teaching and learning of substantive knowledge, sometimes referred to as ‘content’ or ‘historical content’. Material in this section addresses history teachers’ work of choosing and blending, as well as embedding and using, pupils’ substantive knowledge. It is called ‘substantive knowledge’ in order to distinguish it from ‘second-order knowledge’ (or disciplinary thinking and processes). Read more
Substantive concepts
- Film Series: Active Learning & History
- ‘Weaving’ knowledge
- Historical learning using concept cartoons
- Power, authority and geography
- Deepening Year 9’s knowledge for better causation arguments
- What Have Historians Been Arguing About... the long-term impact of the Black Death on English towns
Chronology
- Year 7 use oral traditions to make claims about the rise and fall of the Inka empire
- Cunning Plan 179: using TV producers’ techniques to make the most effective use of retrieval practice
- Widening the early modern world to create a more connected KS3 curriculum
- Using narratives and big pictures to address the challenges of a 2-year KS3 curriculum
- Structuring a history curriculum for powerful revelations
- ‘Man, people in the past were indeed stupid’
Long-term knowledge plans
- Anything but brief: Year 8 students encounter the longue durée
- Managing the scope of study
- New, Novice or Nervous? 167: Confidence with substantive knowledge
- Move Me On 167: Frames of reference
- Of the many significant things that have ever happened, what should we teach?
- New, Novice or Nervous? 162: GCSE Thematic Study
Sense of period
- Triumphs Show 193: Year 8 imagine the First World War trenches
- Maximising the power of storytelling in the history classroom
- Film Series: Active Learning & History
- Why history teachers should not be afraid to venture into the long eighteenth century
- Using the present to construct a meaningful picture of the medieval past
- Creating a progression model for teaching historical perspectives in Key Stage 3
Making knowledge secure
- ‘Weaving’ knowledge
- Dialogue, engagement and generative interaction in the history classroom
- Move Me On 186: trainee provides little scope for students to use their knowledge in analysis/argument
- Using individuals’ stories to help GCSE students to explain change and causation
- What Have Historians Been Arguing About... medieval science and medicine?
- Deepening Year 9’s knowledge for better causation arguments