My sense is what @apf102 says here is right. History, like all disciplines, doesn’t sit in a vacuum and is pushed by wider political, social, economic and cultural forces. To take a comparable example from another discipline, I was just...

https://twitter.com/apf102/status/1360258157302398978

...teaching my Y12s yesterday about how Soviet research into nuclear technology rapidly developed following the American bomb. See also the space race, climate change or improving battery storage power. Disciplines are there to answer questions about the world, and as the...

Starting to read @DavidDidau's Intelligent Accountability. I'll be adding tweets to this thread as I go. Having already skimmed through, this really is a book that senior leaders need to read. Even if you end up disagreeing, it'll make you aware of what some alternatives are. The initial problems identified, taken from Surowiecki, seem clearly right, but are widespread. A lack of diversity in leadership teams means no one sees the blind spots. Massive over-centralisation crowds out expertise of teachers. Teams in silos. Blind copying of other schools.

Currently enjoying @Justice2History and @Abdul_Mohamud's article on religion in Africa and particularly how some case studies of medieval religion might challenge pupils' assumptions about a 'barbaric and primitive' continent before the colonial period. As someone who is keen to do some work with pupils at some point on cathedral building, the example from Lalibela in Ethiopia is particularly useful. The manuscripts and art work produced in medieval Ethiopia might also provide a good way in for pupils.

blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-afri…

History involves interpretation, theories and the projection of our own experiences onto the past. But, crucially, history is an empirical exercise with a reasonably-high burden of proof tested against the crucible of critique. Without this, it’s simply the whims of the powerful. This is why many historians (e.g Guldi & Armitage) talk of “speaking truth to power”. There are so many claims made about the past in popular culture (and what might be called “public memory”) that we need people who take those claims to task, based on an empirical foundation.

A few brief comments on why disciplinary thinking is vital for history teachers dealing with issues such as racism and colonialism. We know all too well the preconceptions that pupils can bring to our lessons. They are not born with these preconceptions: they learn them... ...through a range of experiences. When we teach pupils things that can be uncomfortable for them to hear, it is normal in the classroom to get some pushback. Sometimes this even comes from parents. Questions such as "how do you know?" or "isn't this just your opinion?" might...

Spring bank holidays have traditionally been a good time to get up mountains and, with that not possible, I thought I might lighten my timeline with some photos of my journeys in the mountains over the last decade. We start up in Torridon in the summer of 2010. I was still fairly early on in the Munros at this point - currently on 202, and need to get back up to the Northern Highlands.

I don’t really want to join the Curriculum for Wales pile on, but having just looked at the ‘progression points’ I feel duty-bound to teachers and pupils to speak out. What is proposed is very much a return to the assessment model of the English National Curriculum of the... ...early 1990s. Short, competence-based levels (changing the name to progress points doesn’t change what they are) never worked in practice. To understand why, you have to read @daisychristo’s book Making Good Progress. They won’t tell you what you think they will tell you. But..

I've been writing and discussing quite a bit this week about the use of sources in school history. I'm always reminded of Tony McAleavy's imperative to go back to the history and start from what historians actually do: So I had a go this evening, not with a book off the shelf, but by picking the first article from most recent edition of the English Historical Review. Quite an interesting piece on Cardinal Beaufort. It's packed full of fascinating analysis of the sources. Take this passage: