2011 November » Schools History Project

It’s impossible to imagine anyone better than Christine Counsell to keep the conference bubbling to the end – vitality, positive tone, body language, utter conviction. Impossible as ever for mere words to do justice to her session – unless I was transformed into John Milton at his ‘Paradise Lost’-writing peak.

The full title was “Disciplinary history for all: Why it matters, why it is so difficult and why we should not give up” – and the best I can do is just note down some of my jottings:

‘Knowledge is pivotal’
‘Sense of period, narrative frameworks, temporal perspective’ are all tough for students but that’s why we must work at them with all our being (and they are tough not just for students, also teachers. If only Christine had told me this earlier I might have tackled something easier over the last years).
‘A school’s assessment-driven culture can have a profoundly distorting effect, detracting from excellence and forcing teachers to seek reductive, quick fix solutions at the expense of deep knowledge. At worst, children have been short-changed in the interests of “raising standards”’
The central importance of the enquiry question and of carefully constructed puzzles, something they think they can answer straight away but then realise it needs unravelling

(sounds like a Christmas present which has been wrapped up to look like one thing but then turns out to be another – much more pleasurable and rewarding for working through the extra layers of wrapping paper

Insights into the nature of history: learning how valid claims can be made about the past and what makes some claims fragile or strong
The limited value of ‘bright ideas’ – no matter how bright the idea is, it has to be owned, tailored and thought through by every individual using it

(and bright ideas have to be integrated not isolated – how will they become part of the warp and weft of your course?)

Confusion is ok – real learning is impossible without facing up to bafflement. It takes effort to find a way through a puzzle. We learn a lot better if we see confusion as a springboard
Teaching history really well to the lower-attaining pupil is intellectually very demanding - it’s far harder than most politicians, historians and journalists realise. But all the more reason for us not to give up. We are RIGHT to keep trying to achieve that toughest of goals: to help struggling and disaffected children into strong historical understanding. ‘David Cannadine has confirmed what we already knew - that there is no golden age when such pupils knew a lot of history. We are therefore the pioneers’. Let us not give up in bringing rigorous history to ALL, even when our efforts are frustrated or vilified.
And finally the development of history teaching is work in progress, an on-going conversation amongst history teachers and history educators. Far more has still to be discovered and learnt than we currently understand.

As ever I was left feeling both inspire and humbled. I’ve seen George Best play football, David Gower score 100 and Ian McKellen on stage. And listening to Christine has the same effect – you know you’ll never match what you’ve seen but you’re inspired to have a go.

Ian

Why are people here on a Saturday in late November? No exam sessions, no functional reviews – the first two people I spoke to told me they’re here, hoping to leave ‘bubbling with enthusiasm’, inspired by ideas that will feed into their teaching, helping them inspire their students in turn.

The choice of Michael Wood to start the day has fitted this aim of ‘bubbling with enthusiasm’ really well. To be honest, I’d wondered about the advisability of beginning with a ‘non-teacher’ but I was wonderfully wrong. In describing the development of his recent TV series about Kibworth Michael bubbled with his own deep enthusiasm – for ‘history from below’, what the ‘local’ reveals about the national story, but running through everything he said was his total conviction in the value and interest of history, and his own love of history and his respect and empathy with the people of the past.

What also emerged is that it’s perfectly possible to create a strong sense of the overview of British history from a local perspective – and, importantly, this pattern is obscured by putting too much detail and too many events in – too many trees (too many dates, too many kings’ names, too many events) obscure the wood of the pattern of British history.

What else was memorable?

To 10^th century Saxons, England was a country of many nations, many peoples
Ridge and furrow was the deep bone structure of the world of our ancestors
The history of ‘Britain’ looks different from every locality – and the importance of looking for localities

Finally, one problem – how can we replicate stratification in the classroom – the exploration of layers representing Iron Age, Roman, Saxon, Viking etc.

So – verdict so far? Bubbling already.

Ian

History and Behaviour

Discussion, Principles Comments Off

Nov 152011

I’m sat at a government review meeting and must admit I’m sneakily tapping away writing this blog. This isn’t because I’m disengaged or disaffected. Rather it’s because I’m very engaged and very affected. You see, the review meeting is about the new teaching standards for behaviour, and we are being asked what we think about them and how they will impact upon teachers and, particularly, new teachers.

The reason these behaviour standards have piqued my interest is because I’m wondering if teaching history is an amazing vehicle for helping to “manage” behaviour (as the standard says). In my mind, perhaps in yours too, history is all about people’s behaviour. It’s about understanding why people behaved like they did (whether a king or a mere minion), and how their lives and behaviours were affected by events and issues of their day. And history is also about understanding people’s behaviours in the present - why we view the past in a particular way, why we regard particular past events as significant. So what possible better preparation for “managing behaviour” is there? If you love history, you love people’s actions, their thoughts, their behaviours! So by our very discipline aren’t history teachers incredibly well placed to understand student’s behaviour, because we have an incredibly broad and deep historical context to draw on?

When a child tells us “I hate you and hate school” aren’t we privileged in that with our historical context we can appreciate that this is not a personal attack but rather an attack on establishment… And how dull history would be if there hadn’t been attacks on establishment! Now, of course, if we told that particular student this, he or she would be incredibly narked off and we would probably get an expletive or two, so I’m certainly not advocating this idea. But, at the heart of SHP - at the heart of good history teaching - is the principle that we should connect history to young people’s lives. If we are to live out this principle, history should be the hotbed which helps students to recognise their behaviours are in many ways very similar to those who have gone before. Not as a measuring stick, or a way to say ‘get over yourself’, but rather as a way to show our students that they are human, and it is very ok to be human! Perhaps there is some chance that history will help move them on.

I don’t claim that history is thus a cure all for student’s behaviour, or a discipline in which we don’t need to ‘do’ behaviour management. I am instead musing out loud whether teaching history and learning history makes you better able - socially, emotionally, mentally - to understand behaviour. I distinctly remember as I was going through a particularly gruesome time of teenage angst when I realised that so too had thousands of other teenagers. For example, working in a mill can’t have been easy when mixed with teenage mood swings, parent arguments and so on. I realised I didn’t have the monopoly on being a cow! My behaviour didn’t alter over night, but I did gradually mellow. My history teacher was the vehicle for this - the amazing Mr T who fascinated me with stories of children in the industrial revolution. He helped me connect myself, and my angst, to the past. Strangely, my future became possible. It didn’t seem like I’d have an interminable drag of angst.

But perhaps I’m incredibly naive. I’ve faced behaviour issues, sometimes that don’t go away with some classes, but would my theory apply to schools where you perceive there to be major behaviour difficulties? Would it apply to students with significant emotional and social needs? I’d love to hear your thoughts: are history teachers actually well placed to “manage behaviour” or is this my own experience applied too widely?

Esther

Timelines, Time-stories and developing confidence at A level

One of the most important – and hardest things – for A level students to do is to develop an overview of the content of a new module. An overview is vital because:

it creates confidence and confidence is critical in learning effectively – just think of the opposite, how uncertainty niggles and undermines the ability to work effectively.
it creates a context for the individual topics and questions
it starts to give a module a unity that can be lost amidst a sequence of individual topics and questions.

How best to help students develop an overview?

One method which is not very effective is to provide a timeline of events for students to look at or copy. The problem with a timeline is that there’s no pattern or story in it. It’s just a disembodied list of events and that makes the content hard to take in. It’s much more helpful to use what’s often called a living graph but which may be more usefully called a Time-story, a two dimensional representation of events.

The Time-Story that’s linked in below provides an example - a small part is also shown in the image.

Wars of the Roses Time-Story

It’s a draft from SHP’s new A level series, from the book on The Wars of the Roses (take a look even if you don’t teach it – it’ll make the point better than a topic you are familiar with!). Imagine what this would have looked like as a timeline – a list of kings in sequence showing the length of each reign. The weakness would be that such a timeline contains no story and yet it’s the story or pattern that makes it possible to remember the detail (for all of us bar a few blessed with remarkable memories). A timeline just showing reigns has the added negativity of looking arid and uninteresting and may develop anxiety, not confidence, among students.

So why is the Time-story more likely to be effective? The critical feature is the list of qualities of good kingship at the top (and bad kingship at the bottom) – the story is how close English kings came to reaching those qualities after the peak of Henry V. It’s the story of slow decline, plummeting as Henry VI reached adulthood and descending to complete failure as civil war broke out. Henry VI was replaced by Edward IV who twice (see second spread of attachment) looked as if he was building royal success, only for problems to start again. The first occasion was Warwick’s rebellion, the second Richard III’s seizure of the crown. The period ends with the English monarchy again showing many of the signs of failure described along the bottom of the page.

It’s the graph that’s important. For many the shape of the visual line will be much easier to remember whereas disembodied names by themselves can be tough to take in.

Equally important is the activity that goes with the graph – asking students to retell the story in their own words in a fixed time or word limit. It’s the transference of what’s on the page into their own words that makes learning really effective – just looking at this and reading the text won’t be nearly as effective. I don’t expect students to include and remember all the detail that’s on these pages by any means but what will be possible will be to tell an outline based on the shape of the graph and then, as their knowledge and confidence develop, they can then begin to add more details to the curves and trends of the graph.

And it will be so much more effective again if they think about how to retell the story as well as what goes in it – props, visuals, a graph of their own – anything that requires thinking about how to tell this story – that’s what cements it in the mind. Repetition at monthly intervals will help too.

Do you have time for this kind of initial activity? Given its importance for developing students’ confidence can you afford not to do this, whatever the topic?

So in conclusion:

Don’t underestimate the importance of confidence for students’ learning.
Spend time creating an effective overview – don’t race past to get to the ‘important’ first topic. The overview saves time in the long run.
Value the two-dimensional and visual presentation – it helps students who find text alone difficult. Knowledge and understanding is no less worthwhile for being developed through non-text media.
Experiment to see what kinds of activity work best in helping students understand an overview pattern of events.
Revisit the overview during a module both for consolidation and to give coherence to the module.

Ian

SHP in London: Reflections on Christine’s Plenary

SHP in London: Local History and the National Story

History and Behaviour

Developing confidence at A level

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