A History Teaching Toolbox: Volume Two: Even More Practical Classroom Strategies

This second volume of A History Teaching Toolbox is an ideal handbook for busy classroom teachers eager to try out fresh strategies with their students. More than 65 tried and tested activities and approaches are organised into helpful categories and explained with step-by-step instructions and topic-specific examples to illustrate how they can be immediately employed. A History Teaching Toolbox Volume Two is written for both new and experienced classroom practitioners keen to bring history alive for their students and is written by award-winning history teacher Russel Tarr.

Chapter outline

1. Imparting knowledge to students

• Escape the room
• Three effective role-play techniques
• Hand gestures to reflect changing relations between groups
• Unlock the box
• Mysterious moments
• Image flash
• Time-wipes

2. Debate and Discussion Strategies

• Chat-show challenges
• Tell us something we don t know
• Protest placards: design, anticipate, react
• Brilliance or Baloney?
• Guess the statistics
• Sticky notes for silent presentations
• Boxing match debates

3. Transforming and applying knowledge

• TripAdvisor graphics showing impact in various places
• Design a theme park based around the topic
• Convert statistics into infographics
• Design / destroy a banknote
• Create a Google Doodle
• Produce a board game
• Guess who?

4. Comparing, contrasting, linking

• Sports commentaries
• Crime boards
• Dialogue poems
• Speed dates / Blind dates
• Top trumps
• Which one doesn't belong?

5. Judgments and interpretations

• Relationship webs
• Living graph
• Factor auction
• How would geographers approach this question?
• Design a DVD Inlay
• Time travel agent: complaint letters v. advertising blurb

6. Group work approaches

• Destroy or deploy?
• Random name picker
• Re-enact a conference
• Which part of the body were you?
• Image jigsaw
• Peer assessment slips

7: Tests and revision

• Takeaway mark scheme
• How certain are you?
• Plot holes in history
• Spiced-up cloze exercises
• Alphabet challenge
• Rhyming timelines
• Exam questions from hell

8: Classroom display

• Knowledge cubes
• The big picture
• Rice above the statistics
• Affordable props
• Meme posters
• Turn the topic into objects

9: Essay skills

• Sketch-noting and beyond
• Backward rainbow essays
• Student vocabulary bookmark
• Biased words knockout challenge
• Online essay-writing tools
• Compare opening paragraphs of several books

10: Other ideas

• Build history into the school calendar
• Wheel of emotions
• Using Emojis
• Dream sources
• Fake news
• Breaking news / Click bait
• Biographies beyond the syllabus
• Five ways to use music effectively

About the Author
Russel Tarr has a degree in Modern World History from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University and a PGCE from Birmingham University. He is currently Head of History at the International School of Toulouse, France. He is author of the award-winning www.activehistory.co.uk, which provides innovative resources and online simulations for the history classroom, www.classtools.net, which freely provides online game generators and learning templates, and www.tarrstoolbox.net, which shares practical classroom strategies for teachers. Russel delivers training courses to history teachers in the UK and Europe, writes regularly for the national and international press on historical and educational issues and is a prominent figure in the educational community on Twitter (where he tweets as @russeltarr / @activehistory / @classtools).