Becoming an Outstanding History Teacher

Sally Thorne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351261944
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Becoming an Outstanding History Teacher will take the practitioner through the process of improving their practice from start to finish. It offers a wide range of approaches and techniques for teaching and learning that will help to keep students stimulated and engaged when studying history.

With history regularly topping public polls of important school subjects and among the most popular subjects to be studied at GCSE, this book considers the components which make an outstanding history teacher and how best to ensure students are motivated and maximise their potential. Focusing on all aspects of teaching history, it provides a step-by-step discussion of the development of lessons and covers a wealth of topics, including:

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• long-, medium-, and short-term planning
• the classroom environment
• managing all student abilities
• dealing with interpretations and sources
• arranging history fieldwork
• formative and summative assessment
• setting meaningful and effective homework.

Packed full of tried-and-tested strategies and activities that are easy to implement, this is essential reading for both newly qualified and experienced history teachers who want to ensure outstanding teaching and learning in their classrooms.

Part I
History building blocks

Chapter 1
Preparing for learning

It’s important to engage your students from the start of the lesson, to capture their interest and imagination. This will promote positive behaviour from them and encourage participation in the learning. In an ideal world, every student will arrive at every lesson eager and keen to learn, with no intervention from you. As teachers, we all recognise the intrinsic rewards of working hard in school – that’s partly why we’re teachers. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for all students. There could be any number of reasons why students don’t feel much like engaging with the lesson on any given day, and you can control very few of them; so, I like to take the line of least resistance by working on the thing I know I can control in the classroom: my planning. It’s possible to waste a lot of energy grousing about how students should behave that could be spent creating the best conditions for them to engage with the learning.

Early in my career, I undertook some training to prepare me for working with severely autistic children on a summer playscheme. During this course, we were taught to look for the root cause of poor behaviour rather than tackling the behaviour itself: the children we were working with didn’t communicate verbally and could rarely be reasoned with, which limited our options to physical restraint, which everybody, obviously, wanted to avoid. The motto of the training was, ‘The bad behaviour is the solution, not the problem’, and the aim was to tackle the root cause and thus prevent the bad behaviour. When the bad behaviour might include attacking another child or running out onto a main road, it really sharpens the mind to focus on preventing it from happening.

This is something I have carried with me throughout my teaching career. Although it should be up to the child, in an ideal world, to manage their own behaviour, as the adult and the professional in the room, it is my role to ensure conditions promote the most positive behaviour that can be mustered. The best way for me to achieve that is by planning stimulating lessons, providing help and challenge where needed, finding ways to engage students with the topics and giving them opportunity after opportunity to be successful in the classroom, so that they begin to recognise the intrinsic rewards that I am so familiar with and they enjoy and love history as much as I do.

Planning for learning is, therefore, at the very heart of everything you do as a history teacher. Consider how students will build their understanding of history as they move up the school; how you will structure the learning across the schemes of work you are teaching so that their understanding and knowledge of the past grows throughout the lessons; and how you plan individual lessons so that that child on that day is able to forget about that unpleasant situation outside of your classroom and lose themselves in history for an hour.

Outstanding teaching needs a solid grounding in effective and intricate long-and medium-term planning. Deciding on the right topics and taking the time to read around them and think carefully about what questions are being asked provides the necessary foundation to become outstanding on a daily basis.

Planning in the long-term: writing a programme of study

Arguably the greatest responsibility we bear as history teachers is selecting the topics that will be included as part of the curriculum.

Let me use, as an example, the Key Stage Three curriculum.

2013 National Curriculum at a glance

Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0

Pupils should be taught about

• The development of Church, state and society in Medieval Britain 1066–1509
• The development of Church, state and society in Britain 1509–1745
• Ideas, political power, industry and empire: Britain, 1745–1901
• Challenges for Britain, Europe and the wider world 1901 to the present day – to include a study of the Holocaust
• A local history study
• The study of an aspect or theme in British history that consolidates and extends pupils’ chronological knowledge from before 1066
• At least one study of a significant society or issue in world history and its interconnections with other world developments

The National Curriculum sets out a broad expectation of what students will study, without being too prescriptive, allowing schools the flexibility to create something bespoke for their students. In addition to setting out the desirable range of time periods, the National Curriculum also recommends teaching a mixture of depth and overview units and enabling students to work with sources and tackle interpretations as part of historically valid enquiries.

Beyond this, teachers are given free rein to develop their curriculum in a way that is meaningful within their context and plays to their strengths. However, developing that curriculum can be daunting. I can recommend reading Michael Riley’s article ‘Into the Key Stage 3 History garden: choosing and planting your enquiry questions’ (Teaching History 99, Historical Association, 2000) for further advice on this topic. Here, also, is a suggested route through it.

Step 1

Decide what you want your students to know by the end of the Key Stage Three course, be that Year 9 or Year 8. This list will probably include specific events and periods of history – the Battle of Hastings and the Renaissance, for example. It should also include key concepts – empire, communism, revolution.

Some of these might be your personal non-negotiables, but think also about what is important for students to know when they reach the end of their compulsory history education. Each unit you teach has an opportunity cost that needs to be weighed up. As a new teacher, I lovingly planned an interpretations unit for Year 7 on Vlad the Impaler, based on some of my favourite degree work, but in the end recognised that a solid understanding of the differences between capitalism and communism was going to be of greater benefit to my students than understanding the delicate political balance of the fifteenth-century central Europe.

Some of your students will stop studying history at the end of Key Stage Three: what must they absolutely know and understand to become good citizens and have the cultural capital they need to succeed in life? Some (hopefully the majority!) will go on to study history at GCSE and beyond: what underpinning knowledge and conceptual understanding will they need to help them achieve?

Discussing this with members of your department will help you to get a good idea about what is important to everybody. Everybody has an opinion about what students should learn about history, but with around 150 hours of history lessons across Key Stage Three, if you’re lucky, it is impossible to cover everything on that should list. Make some hard choices about what to include but be clear on your reasoning so that you’re prepared to defend your choices.

Step 2

Consider how and when you will tackle second-order concepts across your curriculum:

• Causation
• Consequence
• Change and continuity
• Similarity and difference
• Significance

The most common type of unit at Key Stage Three, in my experience, is causation. It’s something teachers seem to feel most confident delivering, perhaps because they have had most practice with it, and so it becomes self-perpetuating. However, outstanding programmes of study will expose students to a range of different types of enquiry across their history lessons, not least because they will need a reasonable understanding of all the second-order concepts to complete their GCSE studies.

Some topics lend themselves very easily to a particular second-order concept: many schools will, for example, look at the significance of the Norman Conquest, the causes of the First World War and the consequences of the Industrial Revolution. Other topics might take a little more thought, and this is where you can start playing to your strengths and interests: I’m currently mulling over a similarity and difference enquiry into the eighteenth- century British lives, since more resources are becoming available for this time period.

I think the least commonly taught second-order concept from the above list is change and continuity. Thematic studies are sparse for Key Stage Three, partly because the paucity of textbooks which offer this type of study makes it time consuming to resource. I note that a lot of departments choose to cut down a GCSE study and teach that at Key Stage Three to familiarise students with change and continuity. My preference is to teach students something better suited to Key Stage Three: the problem with cropping a GCSE study is that it is meant to be taught over a period of about 20 hours, when I have 8 or 9 per unit, and the concepts don’t hang together quite so well when over 50 percent of the content has been removed. Thematic units I have taught instead include

• Entertainment through time – this one also provides some excellent opportunities for similarity and difference, by comparing the leisure activities of rich and poor in each time period.
• British diet through time – an excellent way of teaching about where the British went and, later, who came to Britain and what they brought with them.
• Art and history – my Year 7 students begin with this unit, where we look at artworks to provide an underpinning notion of how Britain changed from the year 1000 to present day.
• Democracy through time – I teach this at the end of Year 9, where it picks up topics they have studied from Year 7 onwards – Magna Carta, English Civil War etc. – and places them all on a continuum leading to our present government system.

Step 3

Once you have matched second-order concepts with the key content that you want to cover, spend some time arranging and re-arranging the order in which you will teach them. Sometimes it will be obvious: a study of the Holocaust is unlikely to fit well before a study of the First World War, for example.

Here are some points for consideration.

• Which units are likely to take a little longer? These are best matched to the start or end of the year, when the terms last a little longer. I keep my development/overview studies for these slots.
• How will you build knowledge across the key stage? If you’re planning to teach about the Reformation, for example, it would be helpful for students to have studied the role of the Church in Medieval England.
• Will you follow chronology strictly? While my curriculum is always broadly chronological, I do jump around a little, according to what I’ve found fits best. A study of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I History building blocks
• Part II History lessons
• Part III History in context
• Index