Medicine & Health Though Time

GCSE ‘Smarter History’
Resources for Medicine through Time

Series Editors: Dale Banham and Ian Dawson

Stop Press: All Student and Teacher's books have been published

This new GCSE series provides students’ books and TRBs, written by Ian Dawson and Dale Banham, for each of the three Medicine through Time specifications.

Our aim has been to provide a range of materials (student’s book, teacher’s resource book, E-Learning activities and website-based kinaesthetic activities) which help your students to succeed in their GCSE examinations. We have done this the obvious way, by providing detailed guidance on how to tackle the main types of exam questions but, equally if not more importantly, using the experience and lessons of teaching as the framework. This has meant identifying the problems students stumble over each year and then building the resources around our understanding of how students learn most effectively in Development Studies. However we also want these resources to be about more than examination success so we have also set wider goals, including an awareness of how the Development Study fits into the wider SHP course and how this kind of course provides perspective on today’s events. Our aim therefore is for examination success and to make a contribution to students’ broader education.

 

Smarter History Medicine – Top 10 Features

The main features of these resources are:

1. It’s not a “quick fix” book

It would have been easier and quicker to reproduce SHP’s ‘White’ Medicine book with some new pages tailored to the needs of new specifications. However that would have meant ignoring all that’s been learned about how to help students learn more successfully since the ‘White’ book was published in 1996. Therefore we decided on a complete re-write, re-using material when it has stood the test of time but adopting a fundamentally different strategy, building the book’s material from a strong teaching and learning base in conjunction with the necessary content and exam advice.

2. Big Story activities help students develop secure chronological understanding by charting key medical themes across time

One problem for many students is building accurate chronological knowledge. Experience shows that they need a strong grasp of the overview before investigating each period in detail. Therefore Big Story activities have been set at the beginning of the student’s book to enable students to work out the pattern of the whole course, using five full spread ‘Medical Moments in Time’ reconstruction drawings. Each chronological section then allows students to build up detail, consolidating this initial overview.

3. Meet the Examiner pages help students achieve better examination results

These pages provide detailed guidance on performing well in examinations. Pages are tailored to help with all the main question types. These pages identify common errors, showing students how to avoid them and write better answers, providing sample answers for analysis and guided activities. They also provide guidance on general exam skills such as time-keeping. These Meet the Examiner pages have been planned so they are integrated into enquiries, not bolted on artificially. They play a key role in concluding each section’s major enquiry while, at the same time, preparing students for exam success.

4. Smarter Revision pages help students build up revision materials from the very beginning of this course

Revision can be a hit or miss affair, especially for some boys and particularly when planning revision doesn’t begin until after the course has ended. Therefore we have included activities which develop revision material from the very beginning of the course so that by the time the course is completed students should have a full set of revision notes and materials. We have also provided a range of methods of recording information to suit different preferences and topics. For example Living Graphs are used to record the patterns of themes over time, Memory Maps record the key features of each period and Role of the Individual charts record the impact of individuals from Galen to Beveridge.

5. The student’s book is built around a central enquiry which creates coherence and helps deepen students’ understanding of how history is studied.

Enquiry is at the heart of Key Stage 3 History and its Attainment Target and should be at the heart of GCSE too. Students will not only tackle period-based enquiries but will use these to emerge from this Development Study with an answer to a much larger enquiry ‘‘Why do people today have better health and live longer than people in the past?’ This provides a unifying theme through the book and offers at the end a sense of satisfaction at having emerged with a clear though complex answer. Students will also have had the chance to reinforce what we mean by enquiry and how this relates to the world beyond the classroom.

6. Outline, depth and saving time - choices for teachers and personalization for pupils

Although we have included a lot less material than in the 1996 ‘White’ SHP book there is still more material in the books and on the CDs than some teachers and students will use. Therefore at the beginning of each section we provide an outline activity identifying the key features of medicine in the period and the balance of changes and continuities. That outline provides the core knowledge that may be sufficient for some students but which can be augmented by the more in-depth material that follows. In the in-depth sections we have created activities that can be tackled by groups working on different aspects of a topic, pooling their results to create a bigger answer. This will be important in saving some students from getting lost in the detail but they’ll still have a sense of the key overall developments.

7. Effective integration of students’ book, CD, TRB and websites

It’s easy to focus on the students’ book and see the CD and other resources as secondary support acts but we have used each for the things it is best at. For example, you will find decision-making activities (e.g. How would you have treated Charles II?) on the CD but not in the textbook where they don’t work nearly as well. The SHP and Thinkinghistory websites provide detailed descriptions of kinaesthetic activities, some of which are introduced by visuals in the students’ book.

8. Visual and kinaesthetic – varied learning styles and experiences

Every student benefits from variety. Some students respond better to visual and kinaesthetic activities, others enjoy reading and writing more. We have provided a wide-range of different types of activity and presentational styles, aiming at both variety for all and at meeting the particular needs of individual learning styles.

9. Give pupils a real sense of achievement

A sense of achievement comes from a good exam result. It also comes from understanding why you’ve been doing a particular course, in this case why the Development Study on Medicine is part of the GCSE History course and how it relates to the other parts of the course. Put most simply, we have tried to provide in the student’s book some answers to the age-old question ‘Why are we doing this?’

10. Enjoyment!

Nobody learns if they don’t enjoy what they are doing. All the activities, whether in the book or CD, have been created to maximise involvement and enjoyment and to help pupils care about the questions they are investigating. And hopefully you will enjoy the material too!

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