New Resource: Romans Revealed for KS2 and KS3

Ideas and Activities Comments Off
May 312013

Brucco, one of the characters on the website

Frequent holidays on Hadrian’s Wall have made me an enthusiastic explorer of evidence from Roman Britain. One particularly intriguing aspect is the extent of travel around the empire which led to people from all regions of the empire spending time or settling in Britain. Sadly there’s never been enough space in the KS3 books I’ve written to explore this in enough depth. However a new website created by the Department of Archaeology at the University of Reading, provides a wonderful opportunity to investigate life in Roman Britain and particularly the issue of migration and the diversity of the Roman empire.

The website www.romansrevealed.com has been created in collaboration with the Runnymede Trust (an educational race equality charity) and Caroline Lawrence (author of The Roman Mysteries). It enables students to explore life in Roman Britain through four individuals, either through ‘excavating’ their graves or by following short stories written by Caroline Lawrence. Through videos, they can also hear from the research team and learn about the work of archaeologists. A teaching resource pack and activity sheets can be downloaded from the website.

In fact it’s a really interesting exploration of what recent archaeological research can tell us for people of any age. The department at the University of Reading examined more than 150 skeletons from Roman Britain, identifying a significant number of migrants, particularly in late Roman York and Winchester. Scientific analysis indicated that up to a third of the individuals sampled could be classed as non-local, with a smaller number possibly from outside the UK from both warmer and colder climates. Women and children were amongst these migrants, clearly contradicting the perception of ‘The Romans’ as just Italian soldiers.

Visit Romans Revealed [ HERE … ]

Ian

Posted by Ian Dawson at 2:38 pm

New Resource: Women in Nazi Germany

Ideas and Activities Comments Off
Apr 102013

An ‘engaging’ activity devised by Christina Pascoe to develop students’ understanding of the ‘ideal woman’ Nazi Germany - for the SHP depth study on Germany 1918-1945.

See the activity [ HERE ].

Posted by Michael Riley at 12:00 pm

New Resource: Spin Powerpoints

Ideas and Activities Comments Off
Dec 042012

From the TeachMeet session at the 2012 SHP Conference, find out how Lesley Ann McDermott uses Spin PowerPoints to add spice to GCSE revision.

Resources include a ‘How-To’ guide and some additional comments - as well as a Spin PowerPoint on Crime and Punishment Past Questions from OCR (1999-2012)

See the resource [ here ]

Michael

Posted by Michael Riley at 2:45 pm

SHP-BL 2012: Teaching with a purpose

Ideas and Activities, Principles Comments Off
Nov 242012

Reporting the opening plenary at the SHP London Day Conference …

Michael Riley and Jamie Byrom - ‘People, places and pictures: creative and rigorous planning in school history’.

History needs beauty. History needs people. (And history teaching needs to sow acorns like these that Michael and Jamie are planting now in their session)…

A beautiful building: the Taj Mahal. A wondrous person: Shah Jahan. A painting that captures beauty and people - the birthday of Shah Jahan. Shah is being weighed because it was customary to give out ones weight in gold and jewels on one’s birthday. What stories does this tell us? What wonders does this reveal? …and how on earth would we plan to use this, Mughal history, in our classroom?

First, they say, we should start with principles which should shape our planning:

1. We must teach with a PURPOSE - why bother?

2. We must ENGAGE with subject knowledge - the more we engage with the knowledge the richer our subject, and our lessons, become

3. We must wrestle with the ENQUIRY

4. We must exploit the PARTICULAR

So, 1: why bother with the Mughals, especially when we have such freedom to choose whatever we want? Let’s think of the end result: would someone observing our lessons be able to detect why we selected that series of lessons? If they can’t figure it out, how can our students? With the Mughals perhaps there is a rationale in the fact that British history is incredibly entwined with Mughal history…. Right up to the present day, where our school populations benefit from the cultural diversity of links with India. Or maybe we should bother because at its height the Mughal empire was 100 million people? Take that Romans! Or maybe because it provides a terrific seam of eye-popping gems - art, music, architecture - that could lead to a fascinating comparison between English and Indian culture. This latter idea is a good example of engaging with the territory, the stuff, the nuggets and the issues of history which can give such energy to the enquiry. But whatever the purpose we must share it, and it must be evident and meaningful to us and our students.

Which leads to 2 - engage with the subject. If you’re reading a Mughal history book where would you make a mark in the margin? How about against the nugget that Akbar delighted in pigeons… A pigeon fancier! So much so that pigeon roosts were built in the Red Fort at Agra. They used these pigeons as part of their control of the empire, carrying messages. Imagine getting students to write pigeon-sized messages relaying the history of the empire to fly back and forth in their history lessons? The students would love this! So when we immerse in the subject, we find nuggets which can lead to wonder, to engagement.

I won’t dwell on the enquiry question (I’ll leave that to Michael and Christine and Jamie who express it far better than I can) but I will touch on the particular. If we consider a particular place, person or moment these are the points in our classrooms when history most comes to life. Every child knows their own place (like home, or their town), a person (like Mum), and moments (when I got caught nicking sweets from my brother) and so starting with the particular provides a concrete foundation, a sense of familiarity in some respects, as they have something to pivot from, to compare to. It’s not like starting with something as decontextualised as ‘power’, or ‘what is democracy?’ So let’s start with the particular. Let’s explore a painting of Jahangir. Put yourself in the painting. Walk through it. What can you see? What can you hear? What can you smell? Starting with the particular this enables the children to find the familiar and by making connections it gives them further reason, the want, to know more: were these lot really so different? What mattered to them? Is it the same as what matters to me?

So, sow these acorns from Michael and Jamie, and watch beautiful oak trees of passion for history grow in our children. Teaching Mughal history, whilst at first seemingly ‘too’ foreign, is actually as familiar in planning terms as any topic we might consider. But it provides such a fascinating, rich flora that I think we would be hard pressed not to include it in our curriculums. Send that by messenger pigeon to your SLT, with a little acorn too.

Esther

Posted by Esther Arnott at 9:01 pm

New Guidance: Active Learning at A Level

Ideas and Activities Comments Off
Sep 082012

Dale Banham and Russell Hall describe their workshop at SHP 12, Active Learning at A Level:

This article provides a brief synopsis of an action research project between two schools in Ipswich. Our aims have been to promote curiosity, intrinsic motivation and a greater degree of independence amongst our A Level students. We recently shared the findings from the first year of the project at a workshop delivered at the 2012 Schools History Project Conference in Leeds. Our intention is to continue to analyse and evaluate the impact of the project over the coming year and to deliver a follow-up workshop at next year’s conference.

We would like to thank colleagues who attended the workshop at this year’s conference for their positive response to the strategies that have been developed over the last year. We look forward to hearing about how these strategies have been adapted for use by other History departments at next year’s conference.

See the workshop in full at:

BanhamHallALevel.htm

Pat

Posted by Pat the Webmaster at 7:29 am

New Guidance: Students as Movie Makers

Ideas and Activities Comments Off
Sep 072012

You may have missed Richard Kennett‘s resource that was added onto the site in July.

Describing his workshop at SHP12, ‘Students As Movie Makers, Picturing the past - helping students to communicate using visual media‘ he writes:

When I was a child ‘visual history’, on the whole, meant Ladybird books with their combination of text and illustrations, but in the words of Bob Dylan “the times they are a changing”. With video sharing sites like YouTube, students today have instant access to a vast array of audio-visual historical resources. Now is the time to take advantage of this revolution and, as history teachers, capitalise on these visual media to help our students communicate their understanding of history. Allowing students to make videos or slideshows that combine text, image and music can result in some truly outstanding outcomes.

See the resource at:

StudentsAsMovieMakers.htm

Posted by Pat the Webmaster at 11:04 am

SHP in London: Final Reflections

Events, Ideas and Activities Comments Off
Dec 022011

Saturday 26 November saw our first London conference in the excellent conference facilities at the British Library. This was a tremendous venue and our thanks go to the very helpful and supportive team at the British Library – we can certainly look forward to next year’s London event with great confidence.

It’s never easy to decide how best to report a conference and its workshops. Putting a workshop PowerPoint on-line is almost always unsatisfactory as the discussion that makes sense of it and brings it to life can’t be recaptured. There’s also the moral debate about whether it’s fair to those who paid to give away resources for free.

So this year we’ve experimented with a series of subjective ‘reflections’ on aspects of the London Conference:

• one was posted on the day - about Michael Wood’s plenary

• the second the following day - Christine Counsell’s plenary

• and the final review, the longest, a few days later – see these reflections

If you have any comments or responses to any of these reflections we’d be delighted to hear from you through the reply panel below.

Ian

Posted by Ian Dawson at 2:25 pm

SHP in London: Reflections on Christine’s Plenary

Events, Ideas and Activities 1 Response »
Nov 272011

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

Posted by Ian Dawson at 5:56 pm

SHP in London: Local History and the National Story

Events, Ideas and Activities 2 Responses »
Nov 262011

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 10th 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

Posted by Ian Dawson at 1:36 pm

Developing confidence at A level

Ideas and Activities 4 Responses »
Nov 012011

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:

  1. 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.
  2. it creates a context for the individual topics and questions
  3. 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:

  1. Don’t underestimate the importance of confidence for students’ learning.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. Experiment to see what kinds of activity work best in helping students understand an overview pattern of events.
  5. Revisit the overview during a module both for consolidation and to give coherence to the module.

Ian

Posted by Ian Dawson at 1:53 pm
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