Teaching History

Developing as a Reflective Secondary Teacher

Ian Phillips

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781446245385
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Secondary Education

Reflective practice is at the heart of effective teaching, and this book will help you develop into a reflective teacher of history. Everything you need is here: guidance on developing your analysis and self-evaluation skills, the knowledge of what you are trying to achieve and why, and examples of how experienced teachers deliver successful lessons.

The book shows you how to plan lessons, how to make the best use of resources and how to assess pupils? progress effectively. Each chapter contains points for reflection, which encourage you to break off from your reading and think about the challenging questions that you face as a history teacher.

The book comes with access to a companion website, where you will find:

- Videos of real lessons so you can see the skills discussed in the text in action

- Transcripts from teachers and students that you can use as tools for reflection

- Links to a range of sites that provide useful additional support

- Extra planning and resource materials.

If you are training to teach history, citizenship or social sciences this book will help you to improve your classroom performance by providing you with practical advice, and also by helping you to think in depth about the key issues. It provides examples of the research evidence that is needed in academic work at Masters level, essential for anyone undertaking an M-level PGCE.

Ian Phillips is course leader for PGCE History (and Teaching and Learning Fellow) at Edge Hill University.

1	YOU AND YOUR SUBJECT: A PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE

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This chapter considers the following issues:

• history as an academic discipline and a school subject

• developing a critical and reflective approach to your understanding of history

• the professional identity of a history teacher

• subject knowledge: doing history or learning history

• the components of subject knowledge

• understanding professional craft knowledge.

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A SUBJECT CALLED HISTORY: DEFINING A ROLE IN THE NEW CURRICULUM

During the course of writing this text, changing ideas about the nature and purpose of the school curriculum have had an impact on the emphasis and direction of some of the chapters. So much so that this opening discussion is the last part of the book to be completed: an introductory epilogue perhaps? Every aspect of the school curriculum is ‘up for review’ and history teachers face the prospect of beginning to introduce a new Key Stage 3 National Curriculum, coping with a reformed GCSE regime and a new A Level structure at the same time. History teachers therefore have tended naturally to focus on these curriculum changes at the level of the history department: how will the reforms affect the history we have to teach? There is, as ever, a bigger picture which has the potential to influence the nature and the role of history in the wider curriculum. An apocryphal account of Captain Cook’s first encounter with the coastal population of what is now New South Wales recalls that the aborigines living by the sea ignored HMS Endeavour. The ship was so large that it was beyond anything they had ever seen and was beyond comprehension. They therefore turned their backs on the large ship and continued with their lives. It was only when the crew embarked on smaller rowing boats that they could see something that was within the realms of their cultural experience and possibly recognize a threat. This may, or may not be an appropriate analogy but perhaps history teacher’s traditional commitment to the integrity of the subject, as well as trying to cope with the new reforms, has failed to recognize, yet again, more new threats; but as always there are also new opportunities. The PowerPoint of Mick Waters’s Curriculum Review at the end of 2006 would, on the face of it, appear to threaten, or at least marginalize, history as these extracts appear to suggest:

• ‘Let us finish with the traditional school curriculum in which subjects are served up as ends in themselves.’

• ‘Resist institutional and organizational habits.’

• ‘Support schools and settings in building their curriculum.’

• ‘A shared emphasis on “doing better”; raising standards in literacy, numeracy and ICT as well as citizenship, health, enterprise, creativity and internationalism.’

Mick Waters then as some latter-day Danton condemning the subject-centred ancien régime and its defenders as myopic and conservative, not fit to serve the needs of a new dynamic nation in a new exciting century. As historians we know how to respond in a typically ironic and cynical manner. We can recognize the new curriculum, forged in the white heat of the new technological revolution, which might more resemble a clapped out microwave or a VHS video recorder but let us not be too hasty to rush to judgement. There are real opportunities and it is time to recognize them and make the most of them. Let us resort to some neat rhetorical trickery and see what else Mr Waters has to offer:

• ‘Let us dig deeper and use subjects as the vast and inspiring resources they are for serving the educational goals we value. (Geographical Association)’

• ‘Rethink subjects from concern about subject content to concern about the nature and impact of subjects.’

• ‘Address difficult issues (that) affect the person(al) and (the) social.’

• ‘Do not shrink from controversy, deal with emotions and relationships.’

• ‘Help young people face fears.’

• ‘See things from different view points.’

• ‘Focus on the effectiveness of learning.’

Of course we could be cynical and claim that we have heard all this before but this response, in the end might be fatal and we could never know until it was too late. As history teachers we need to recognize that we perform a number of different tasks and take on a number of different responsibilities and just perhaps this new vision for the curriculum gives us an opportunity to define our role on our terms. A hedgehog-like response is no real defence, particularly when you are on the six-lane superhighway of the new curriculum. Does this prove that you can be ironic and enthusiastic at the same time?

Citizenship appears to be written into the new curriculum like never before, Mick Waters’s presentation has two Curriculum Outcomes which appear to be citizenship-led: civic participation and responsible citizens. Lord Adonis, in response to requests for history to stay in the curriculum to the age of 16 muttered something about history being delivered through the citizenship curriculum. This prompted a comment to the effect of: ‘great, the best taught subject in the curriculum is given up to be delivered by the worst taught subject in the curriculum’. This is one area where the new direction for the curriculum offers opportunities for history teachers and history departments but not, perhaps in the way that Lord Adonis might think.

History and citizenship as discrete curriculum subjects have always enjoyed an ambiguous relationship. In the early years of citizenship it was viewed by some as a means of salvation. There was a hazy assumption that much of the curriculum could be delivered through history. Political literacy would be covered by studying the Parliamentary Reform Acts, the Chartists and the suffragettes; while topics such as the slave trade and the Holocaust would obviously deliver the human rights ‘bits’. Finally, modern-world GCSE could deliver international co-operation by studying the League of Nations and the United Nations. Citizenship is beginning to define itself as a subject in the school curriculum, but as Peter Brett readily admits: ‘there are important lessons to be learned by citizenship educators from developments in History pedagogy’ (2005: 16). This distinction is important, citizenship is not a defined academic discipline and as such it does not work within distinct conceptual and methodological frameworks. If you were to compare the citizenship and history key concepts and key processes you would see that the former might best be described as aspirational rather than embedded in the tradition of an academic discipline. This doesn’t mean that ancien régime historians should feel superior to New World citizens. It demonstrates one of the key points in Waters’s curriculum review: how the nature of history has an impact on the wider curriculum. The new curriculum is all about thinking differently and thinking creatively, perhaps responsible citizenship does not have to be shorthand for citizenship. What we need to define, and be clear about, is the way that history teaching itself contributes to ‘responsible citizenship’. It might also be appropriate to consider how the clarity of purpose and direction embedded in the history key concepts and key skills can provide flesh and bones for the very amoebic concepts and skills slopping about on the pages of the citizenship curriculum. In other words if you are a beginning citizenship teacher is the academic rigour which underpins the study of history going to give your teaching more sense of direction? Chapters 2 and 3 explore the key concepts and key processes in further detail and explore ways in which these can be used to provide a focus for students’ learning. As you develop this understanding it would be worthwhile looking at the equivalent structures in the citizenship curriculum and trying to work out how you can turn liberal ideals into learning objectives. In a similar vein the focus in Chapters 4 and 5 on thinking and learning provide a more substantial diet for citizenship teachers who might want some practical advice about what constructing ‘Critical thinking and enquiry tasks’ might actually involve.

It is important that as your understanding of history teaching and the history curriculum develops you keep the larger curriculum model in mind. As a history teacher you have to accept that your ‘day job’ is more complex and involves more than simply teaching your subject. Even from the narrower standpoint of your subject you need to accept that teaching history is concerned with the transmission of cultural values and the curriculum has a socializing role. There will always be discussion and disagreement about the nature of the cultural values and the purposes of socialization but that is tied up in the notions of civic participation and responsible citizens.

BECOMING A HISTORY TEACHER: DEVELOPING A PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY

Beginning a course in teacher education is a daunting prospect, from the start you are entering a new and a very different professional world. If you have come straight from university you probably spent the previous three years in the company of other history undergraduates in a history department which had a clear sense of its identity. You might still be at university, but an education department, school or faculty is quite distinct. If you are used to the world of work and have decided to become a history teacher after a few years, or many years of experience elsewhere, again the differences between one world of work and the professional world of the teacher are very different. Your group of fellow (beginning) history teachers will undoubtedly develop a sense of identity but for most of your PGCE year you will spend a significant amount of time in the company of other beginning teachers, or associate teachers, or interns, or trainees, as novices in history departments and schools. Your PGCE year is important for any number of mainly obvious reasons but one which is probably less obvious at the start of the course is the idea of developing a professional identity.

To develop your ideas about professional identity and to get you into ‘reflective mode’ it is worth starting with what you feel knowledgeable about in order to provide a practical framework or background for your critical reflection. It is more than likely that you understand how to take a critical, analytical and reflective approach to researching and writing a history dissertation. In the different world of education you will inevitably find yourself in an unfamiliar or challenging situation: having to justify the position of your subject in the school curriculum. Your first task as a beginning history teacher might be to develop a critical and reflective perspective on your subject, you need to be able to articulate clearly why you think history is important. This is not just an exercise; as a member of a university history department you were probably never challenged in this way; there was, after all, strength in numbers. In schools, history departments are small, history teachers are a minority – in some places an endangered minority. History is not like mathematics or English or science; pupils apparently need to stu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• How to use this book
• 1 You and your subject: a personal perspective
• 2 You and your curriculum: a public perspective
• 3 Planning to teach and learn
• 4 The elements of teaching and learning history
• 5 Managing teaching and learning
• 6 Assessing for learning history
• 7 Teaching across the ages: GCSE and A level
• 8 Inclusive history teaching
• 9 Information technologies and history teaching
• 10 A diverse and controversial subject
• 11 Where do you go now?
• Bibliography
• Index