Awards

HEFCE National Teaching Award for university teaching, 2003
Honorary Fellow, The Historical Association, 2009
Honorary Fellow, Leeds Trinity University, 2017

In addition, my thanks to The Historical Association for establishing 'The Dawson Lectures' in 2022, an annual award for history educators to celebrate individuals who have made an extended and significant contribution to the development of history teaching.

Awarded an Honorary Fellowship at Leeds Trinity University, 2017

Teaching and Teacher Training

While my school teaching experience was relatively brief, teaching in a school struggling to achieve stability and progress was critical in making me think about how best to help students learn effectively. It was that which led me to use a wider range of teaching methods. At the same time, I was teaching the very new SHP course at O level and CSE and that too made me think hard about the importance of meeting students’ needs.

From 1981 I was actually working for SHP (wow!) but also juggling teacher-training and teaching on the history degree course. The degree teaching might seem very different from the other work but what I realised is that good teaching is the same whatever the age of the students – first and foremost I needed to identify the reasons why students struggled with individual topics and then develop teaching approaches to overcome those problems. And there were plenty of learning problems - the degree students often lacked confidence as independent learners because of poor A level results or because they were returning to education after leaving school at 16. Thus e.g. I introduced topics with structured role-plays to familiarise students with names, events and motives which then helped them read complex material with confidence. I then adapted these activities for use with school students and demonstrated them to my trainee secondary teachers and to teachers in CPD courses – and from there the activities ended up on the website.

All this led in 2003 to the award of a National Teaching Fellowship as one of the twenty "outstanding university teachers in the country". The funding that came with the NTF Project gave me time to set this website up and write a lot of the early material – which would have taken far longer without that dedicated time – and to produce the Active Learning DVD.

Another spin-off was running workshops for A level students on the Wars of the Roses and the Tudor period, including source-work, role-plays, decision-making activities and up to date historiographical analysis. These workshops were held at schools, museums and historic sites including the Tower of London where I had the opportunity to run council meetings in role as Henry VII to deepen A level students’ understanding of the decisions Henry faced and the choices he made – which you can find in the form of a decision-making activity on the site. Another activity on the site – Hot-Seating King John – also had its origins in ‘performance’! I wanted to help students understand why historians have reached different conclusions about King John so I started to run sessions in role as John, responding to questions from students, beginning by complimenting them on their intelligence and giving example of ‘my’ hard-work but then gradually sliding into paranoia and threats!

CPD and Allied Work

Working for SHP in the 1980s meant that I was thrown into delivering CPD before I had the teaching experience to do the work effectively. Over time, however, thanks to continuing to teach and learn about teaching I developed a distinctive approach to CPD, demonstrating teaching activities which engaged students of all ages though decision-making activities, structured role-plays etc. Those activities, honed at the CPD sessions, form the back-bone of the website and at their heart is the identification of students’ misunderstandings and why they struggle with particular topics and then creating activities and resources which directly tackle those problems. Je Suis Le Roi is just one example of this approach – and it does also explain the one-eared bear logo!

Between 1980 and 2020 I did a huge amount of CPD, travelling throughout the UK to run course for local authorities and other organisations and contributing each year to the major conferences run by the Historical Association and SHP.

Apart from CPD on teaching techniques I also ran many sessions on chronological understanding and on how enquiry creates a framework for learning for both secondary and primary teachers. I even ran occasional CPD sessions on effective teaching for teachers in higher education.

Sadly, halth reasons prevented me taking up invitations to run courses abroad (from the more predictable Australia, Canada, Norway and others parts of Europe to the more unexpected Chile and Japan).

Teaching and CPD also led to articles in Teaching History, Primary History, The Historian, Welsh History Review and elsewhere– and I added these articles to the website to make them accessible to as many teachers as possible.

Writing and Editing Textbooks

Another major influence on this website has been writing and editing textbooks as I’ve used the site to create more active, visual versions of material from the books. In addition, as some books went out of print, I made some of the content available via the site. Overall, I worked on over 100 books as author and editor, many of which contain resources which can be found on the site:

A level – some of the material I’m most proud of, beginning with writing The Tudor Century (1993), a ground-breaking 400 pages that used decision-making activities, a wide range of sources plus a lot of artwork and diagrams in parallel with text. The website includes four decision-making resources from this book which many teachers have found work very well. The Tudor Century then informed my editing of the SHP Core Texts series (John Murray 1998–2006), still widely used 20 years after publication. And eventually I got the chance to write a book on my favourite topic The Wars of the Roses while editing SHP’s Enquiring History series (2013-2015) – resources from that book are available in the Wars of the Roses section of the site.

GCSE – my favourite books were the earliest ones, the white-covered books on Medicine and Health and on Crime and Punishment, published in 1996 and 1999. Again I was able to create more physical versions of some of the material – both overviews and individual topics – which are on the site. Other GCSE series followed in 2009 and 2016, again feeding into the site.

KS3 – my first KS3 series was for Oxford University Press in 1991, so long ago that the idea of a website was … well, what was a website? Ten years later I co-edited John Murray’s This is History! Series and some of that material e.g. from the King Cromwell? book and the Riccall mystery (a long-standing favourite) from What is History? Y7 is here. However it was the 2008 NC series containing what’s often known as the ‘blue Y7 book’ that added lots of material to the site – activities and resources on Becket, The Black Death in Allton, the pattern of medieval wars etc etc and also resources from the other two books in the series.

You can read more about my experiences of writing and editing textbooks HERE …

In amazing company – a small place on Hachette’s ‘Authors’ Wall’.

This records some of the company’s authors since John Murray, the oldest part of Hachette, was founded in 1768.

The Historical Association and Medieval History

I’ve had a lengthy relationship with the HA – branch officer, member of Council and the Secondary Education committee in the 80s, contributor to conferences and branch programmes, Honorary Fellow, Associate Vice-President for medieval history – and it’s that work on medieval history that’s made the big contribution to the website HERE …

This began when I led the HA Teacher Fellowship on Teaching Later Medieval History in 2016, a nine month course bringing teachers and historians together to develop teachers’ subject knowledge and new resources for schools.

That led into commissioning and editing Exploring and Teaching Medieval History,140 pagesof articles by historians and teachers sent free to all secondary school in England and Wales – but 140 pages wasn’t enough to develop all the ideas so I built up the medieval section of the site to provide a range of sample chapters for classroom use and articles on various aspects of teaching medieval history – an ideal use for the site.

Why is there so much medieval history on the site?

I’ve been interested in medieval history since my early teens and managed to do five papers on the 15th century and one on 1066-1399 in my 8 Finals papers before doing my part-time MA on ‘Local History in the Pipe Rolls: Yorkshire 1154-1189’. Therefore, while I’ve enjoyed teaching almost everything I’ve ever taught – 19th century British history at A level, Medicine at GCSE, just about everything at KS3 – much of my degree teaching, writing and CPD for the HA has focussed on medieval history, especially the Wars of the Roses. And that’s why there’s a lot more medieval history on the site than you might expect. In retirement I’m writing about the Redmayn family of Levens and Harewood in the 15th century – so don’t be surprised if that turns up here too!

Museums and TV

This section is more CV than website explanation but I’ve much enjoyed working with museums to improve their support for schools. This began as consultant for the Thackray Medical Museum in Leeds prior to its opening, writing its resources for use by GCSE students in the museum. This led onto projects with the Galleries of Justice, Nottingham, Vindolanda Roman Fort, Segedunum Roman Fort, Kirkstall Abbey, Leeds, The British Museum Hadrian Exhibition and English Heritage.

TV work was less satisfactory! I was a talking head for five programmes on The History Channel (one on Henry VII and four on The Wars of the Roses – alongside some very eminent historians! Later I was an interviewee for a DVD production of ‘The Wars of the Roses’ made by Definition Media. However I had no control over how my contributions were edited so everything good I and the other interviewees said about the people of the period was edited out to focus on blood and battles. Grrr!

And with thanks to the generosity of teachers …

One final important point about the website – a good number of the resources were created by teachers around the country who wanted to share their ideas with colleagues and so sent them to me for the website.

This generosity has been a hallmark of history teachers as long as I can remember and I’m very grateful to all of them for sharing their hard work and creativity.