Session 5: Skills and resources for teaching the First World War

Introduction

This session was written by Stuart Mitchell.

This session has been designed to give practical guidance on a range of skills and resources that you can use to inform your teaching or encourage your students to adopt. Your skills may be advanced, in which case you can bypass some of the guidance here; or you may benefit from spending a bit longer on certain activities to develop and practise skills you have not yet mastered.

The session focuses on specific First World War examples and exercises, but the skills here will be transferable to other periods of history. They should be particularly useful for passing on to your students, especially for any non-exam assessment (NEA) projects that they may be producing.

We start by examining how to locate appropriate secondary sources, before moving to their assessment and use. The session then examines some of the more useful places to discover primary sources for the study of the First World War.