In with the old

Posted on October 29, 2025 by sallythorne

I was prompted to return to my neglected blog this term by a couple of things – mainly some work I’ve been doing in school that is an update on work I’ve written about before, but most recently by a post I saw on LinkedIn. I feel as though LinkedIn has become something a little like Twitter was a decade ago. Yesterday, in ye olde Twitter style, I saw a post where someone disparaged their own work from, well, probably decade ago, inviting users to pick out what was wrong with it. It was one of those ‘Compose a tweet’ plenaries but with some cultural references that are now quite dated. Here are some issues I have with this sort of post –

  1. Pedagogy is still a fairly young science. We still (I don’t think it’s controversial to say this) know more about what doesn’t work than what does work and we’re all still experimenting, as we are likely to be for our entire careers. If you’ve been teaching a while, you’ll know that things are cyclical and that there has to be nuance in the way we interpret our teaching artefacts, so to speak.
  2. ‘Composing a tweet’ plenaries are not in the same category as thinking hats or learning styles, both of which appeared in the responding comments. Cognitive science research continues to indicate that summarising content, which is the substance of this plenary, is an effective teaching/learning strategy.
  3. I am very much not a fan of tearing something down to build oneself up (is this what I’m doing here though? How ironic) and this was the problem I very often had with discourse on Twitter. It’s fine to not like something, but too often that manifests as, ‘This is a load of old rubbish’ and the effect of that is to make people feel shamed and a little stupid, and to disengage with the debate entirely. This was evident in the chat people had in Facebook groups when Twitter was all a’twitter – many people saying that they didn’t find it friendly or helpful, and so stopped trying. A better approach: ‘I would probably do it this way instead’ – bring an idea. Create something. Don’t just sneer from the heights. It might get you lots of clicks because we know the algo loves unpleasantness over kindness, but it won’t change many minds.
  4. I feel like we’re gradually being influenced to weed out the whimsy from teaching and I am staunchly against that. Without whimsy, I would be a lot more bored in my classroom and my personal experience suggests it supports student engagement with my teaching. If you don’t want whimsy in your classroom, that’s fine, but don’t criticise mine. Not that this post did. It was a very benign post tbf. I am just very much not here for the idea that all aspects of teaching need to be uniform.

So onto the original plan for this post, which is a good example of something I created a long time ago that still proves to be good, in some respects, and even better with a couple of changes to reflect more recent research.

I developed a scheme of work called British Diet Through Time back in 2014, at my previous school. It retired at my currently school for a bit but it is now back as we teach the Migrants unit for GCSE, so it provides a ‘migration lite’ unit to year 8 that we can later pin the GCSE content onto. I haven’t taught it for many years, mainly because my timetable, now that I am a full Assistant Head, hasn’t provided me with any Y8 teaching. This year, however, I have two Y8 classes and I have revelled in slipping on this old unit like a favourite hoodie.

I should say that it is urgently in need of some updating, to reflect more recent scholarly terms and now that it serves a slightly different purpose to that it was devised for, but it still just about works. Maybe in my copious free time, I will update it for next year.

When it came to the assessment, three things made it even better this year.

Number 1: the visualiser

The assessment is an annotated timeline. I’m not sure students have got any better at drawing timelines than they used to be, but I have got better at teaching it. To be fair, actually, this isn’t about me but about a tool – the handy and increasingly ubiquitous visualiser. When it was timeline time, I did two things differently –

  1. I scripted my explanation of how to draw the timeline so that I could ensure I said all the necessary things
  2. I drew the timeline and displayed the process of me doing this on the board, for students to follow along.

This revealed some interesting things – that students found this much easier to follow than me using a metre stick and doing it on the whiteboard (this probably shouldn’t be a surprise to me); that students don’t all understand how to use a ruler – one or two persisted in trying to use the straight edge of their planner until I pointed out, on the visualiser, that the ruler provides measurements for you (this reminded me of the previous, ‘How do I draw a 7cm line?’ question that blew my mind back in the day); that provided with this model, every single child in both my classes was able to accurately draw the timeline, to the extent that I might have to take it off the marking sheet in the future, because as assessment criteria, it completely failed to differentiate between different levels of attainment in the task.

Who knew that a digital version of what was the coveted technology in 2002, the overhead projector, would become so powerful? It’s almost as if that extremely helpful tool of a bygone age just needed updating for the classroom technology of the current era. I’m sensing a theme here.

Number 2: student knowledge

For some reason, perhaps because they spent considerably less lesson time wrangling their rulers, students had a bit of time to think beyond my very tightly-bounded assessment task. They started asking me about other things they had studied and wanting to add this to their timelines. This led to some interesting conversations about whether these things were relevant to diet in England/Britain: the Black Death, for example, seems to live rent-free in many of my students’ heads and I chatted to some about how this affected the availability of food.

Now I look back at my previous posts and see my old colleague used to begin each year with a timeline, and now my students have demonstrated that they have an appetite for bringing in their prior knowledge, a la Carr and Counsell, and now that the visualiser has enabled a teaching episode that doesn’t make me want to claw my own eyes out in frustration, this is definitely something for revisiting.

Number 3: peer feedback

I’m undertaking an MSc in Educational Assessment at the moment. Over the summer, for an assignment, I read a lot of recent research about what makes the most effective feedback in the classroom. One of the most interesting articles I read was this one. In the experiment, Patchan et al’s Using peer assessment to improve middle school mathematical communication (2022), students received feedback either from their teacher, or from a small group of peers that had received some training on the rubric and how to give peer feedback. The findings did not show that the effect size for peer feedback was greater, but, fascinatingly, it did not indicate that it was significantly behind, either. Although students made errors in the peer feedback, the researchers suggested that the volume of feedback received, compared to feedback from just one teacher, made up for the errors.

This chimed in with another research study, Effects of the Integrated Error Correction Strategy on Senior High Schools Students’ writing proficiency, by Qu and Rahman (2024), where the experiment trained students on self- and peer-feedback, which was used in conjunction with teacher feedback and seemed to have almost the greatest effect size of all the studies I looked at. This interacted with something else I read, or heard, somewhere, about a teacher who had her students complete an assessment and then work in groups to produce a group ‘best and final’ response, which she would mark. I loved this: it cuts down the marking, highlights common errors, encourages self-reflection and error correction.

My brain has been ticking over about this for some months now and I am feeling a big peer assessment project coming on at school, but for the time being, I implemented it small scale with one of my y8 classes. Once they had finished their annotated timelines, students peer-assessed each other’s in pairs or threes, giving two-stars-and-a-wish feedback. Then I gave them ten minutes to fix things about their own work before they handed me in the final piece.

The impact this had on the work was quite noticeable. One of my groups were not keen to peer assess, voting to spend the time working on their own assessments instead, which meant I had something to compare to. The most notable thing was that students did a fantastic job of correcting each other’s spelling and this saved me a lot of time. In some cases, they had written some quite insightful ‘wishes’ and I was able to just tick and agree, rather than set a separate target. I didn’t yet see much change made to assessments following peer feedback, but I think this would be likely to improve as they got more practice.

Here’s some peer feedback I loved:

And here are a few timelines I enjoyed – the first received no peer feedback but the second did.

I have to say I love being back in the Y8 groove. It’s the best curriculum year, in my opinion. I’ve just started teaching a Stuarts unit brought in by my newish HoD and I have gone back to my original English Civil War lessons from circa 2004, to see if anything can be salvaged from them. I found that the first lesson contains a ‘Who wants to be a millionaire?’ activity which I had titled, ‘Who wants to be James I?’ At its heart, this is a multiple choice exercise where I spent a long time devising distractors to demonstrate to students the difficulties James I faced succeeding Elizabeth and keeping his subjects happy. I might ditch the game format because that cultural reference is going to be lost on my students now.

But I’m keeping some of the old in. There’s some gold in the old, still.

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Mark Reviews

Posted on August 25, 2024 by sallythorne

As part of my exam role, at this time of year, I undertake reviews of marking. These are more commonly referred to as re-marks, which is a misnomer. Papers are not re-marked from scratch. Instead, they’re given to reviewers along with the original mark; the reviewer assesses whether the original mark can be defended. It’s not about what mark they would give it or even if they agree with the original mark: it’s whether, given what is written on the markscheme, the original mark can be judged as reasonable. As you might imagine, this results in far fewer mark changes than if somebody was marking from scratch, particularly on essay-based subjects where there will always be a small amount of subjectivity, as long as the papers are marked by humans, anyway.

Some things I have read and heard from colleagues this year about mark reviews include:

* Put them all in if they’ve missed by one mark.
* You’re only 5 marks from the next boundary so it’s worth a try.
* Buy the paper back and read it.
* I’m sure we can find her one more mark, it’s worth getting all the papers done.
* If they’ve missed a mark on each question that could be the difference between a grade.

All of these points demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of the mark review process and, every year, I find myself deeply frustrated by the amount of public money poured into what is essentially a gamble. Let’s take them one at a time –

“Put them all in if they’ve missed by one mark” – it makes no difference how many marks away from a grade boundary the student is. Depending on the way the mark review is done, it might even be less likely to move if it is only one mark that is needed. I realise this is common practice among lots of schools and I have strong Opinions on the sort of senior leaders who promote this method. One of those opinions is that they should spend the money they spend on mark reviews on things like teaching assistants and revision resources, instead. Why is there money to pay for reviews and not cover paid interventions?

“You’re only 5 marks from the next boundary so it’s worth a try” – possibly, but will the next grade up really make a big difference? I understand if it’s a 3 to a 4. When you’re talking about moving from a 7 to an 8, I’m less clear. A 7 is a great grade.

“Buy the paper back and read it” – excellent advice but please, let’s stop saying buy the paper back – all exam papers for English quals are free to view with the permission of the student and have been for some time. With this in mind – please consider doing this before asking for a mark review. You might be puzzled as to why a student scored highly across all questions except one and finding out that they only wrote one sentence for that one would save time and money. I’m never going to complain about having to review a blank script that scored 0 marks but the waste does make me want to cry a bit.

“I’m sure we can find her one more mark, it’s worth getting all the papers done” – the mark reviewer will not be looking for an extra mark. Their job is not to tip students into the next grade. Their job is to review the original marks and confirm the mark can be justified. I think we are also guilty of miscommunicating the process to students, who then feel very unfairly treated because ‘they only needed to find me one more mark’. No GCSE exams are marked like this – grade boundaries are set for whole qualifications and only after the marking is complete. There are always going to be cut-offs. It’s not personal.

“If they’ve missed a mark on each question that could be the difference between a grade” – this is obviously true but I have included it anyway. This is reiterated to all the examiners for the qualification I work on, in every meeting, every year, as a reminder that we don’t hold back marks just because we think a candidate should have written a specific fact or they’ve written one wrong thing in a long essay of right things. That said, if they haven’t made it up a mark across the board, the chances are, their grade is accurate. If a student consistently scores at a mid mark on all questions, a mid grade is the right one. It can be heartbreaking when a student has worked super-hard and hasn’t quite made it. But this is the system we have. It’s a system where 30% of students are not going to make it to a grade 4 or above. And a system where more accessible papers are going to lead to higher grade boundaries. That’s the system that was created following the Ofqual consultation on GCSEs a decade ago. Not many teachers engaged with it. I wonder if that will be the case next time?

There are times when you know a grade is wrong and that’s what mark review is for. I will be forever annoyed that I didn’t more strongly encourage an A-level student to get her mark reviewed on the Tudors paper a couple of years back: I know she did better than the mark she got and I am 99% certain the mark would have gone up. A few years before that, one of my year 11s converted from an E to the C we were certain he had been working at leading up to the exams. Past horror stories of whole sections of papers going unmarked are much rarer these days, with the advent of online marking, but technical mishaps do still happen; papers sometimes go missing; extra pages get paired with the wrong section of the paper. It’s important to have a process for mark review, to fix these things.

But pouring what amounts to thousands of pounds worth of education funding into a punt? I do not think this is a priority, given current funding levels in education. I think it undermines the exams system by suggesting that the original marking is of such poor quality that it should be challenged en masse. I think it tacitly teaches our children that better results can be paid for. It creates a further layer of inequality between schools that can afford to channel their money into endeavours like this and schools that can’t.

I’ve been involved in mark reviews for well over a decade now. Every year, the number of reviews I am allocated has gone up by a small amount – a few dozen, 50 at most. Last year, it more than doubled. Nobody is going to complain: exam boards make money, schools receive a small handful of positive changes and chalk the negative changes up to bad luck. I just wish there was somebody who was looking more closely at this practice.

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HA Conference 2023

Posted on May 28, 2023 by sallythorne

I was delighted to be able to co-present at the HA Conference this May, with the perennially amazing Alex Fairlamb, on the subject of progression in sourcework. Sourcework is a field crowded with big names so it felt a bit daunting, but having spent much of last year really focusing on curriculum and getting it into a progression model that satisfied both myself and Ofsted, I’d spent a lot of time reflecting on how I could keep the consultant happy when she was asking how we were showing progression in ‘history skills’. I realise there has to be a certain amount of genericism when you’re consulting, but the conversation became circular pretty quickly as I flatly refused to entertain the idea that skills exist in history outside of the content you’re using to exemplify it and that any attempt to map progression of skills through our curriculum was a pointless waste of time. In the end, in an attempt to meet the poor consultant in the middle, I thought hard about how we progress students in source skills – from simple inferences onwards – and, though I came to much the same conclusion (that the way to get better at working with sources is to look at more sources, rather than attempting to come up with a one-size-fits-all-sources approach that invariably fails to fit when it’s most needed), I was able to develop a few phrases and exercises that, oft repeated, should lead to the progression we so desire to see. It’s been working quite well so far.

Happily, Alex had been working through much the same process at her through school and I think we managed to put together something helpful. Here are the slides for those who fancy a nosy through.

This should have been the highlight of the conference but then Rich and I did a Friday night pub quiz for the dinner and Mary Beard was on one of the teams, so that was hard to beat. I went to some superb workshops and lectures that fired my enthusiasm all over again. And what a lovely place Harrogate is! I stayed an extra night so I could fully appreciate it. The History subject community really is the best.

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The Greasy Pole

Posted on May 27, 2023 by sallythorne

Nearly six years ago, I wrote this post about being a mainscale teacher, holding a middle leadership responsibility for a long time and being happy with that. This week has given me cause to revisit it, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I interviewed someone very experienced for a HoD role this week who felt she needed to explain, in the interview, why she wanted to move sideways, and I felt compelled to tell her that she was preaching to the choir; secondly, because I have, this term, accepted a promotion to Associate Assistant Head, filling in for my AHT line manager, who is now on maternity leave. Feeling slightly traitorous, I have been reflecting on how I got to the point of applying for this role.

I’m now coming to the end of my 20th year in the profession. In 2020, I was promoted to Head of Humanities, a new role created by the previous principal that offered me the privilege of being able to build a faculty of subjects of my choosing and work more closely with an absolutely inspiring bunch of women and man. The job arrived at a good time for me: I had just applied for my first non-teaching education job, had been stunned to reach the interview stage and, while not disappointed not to be offered the role, a little disappointed that there would be no new challenge. The new challenge was instead provided at school. When the principal exppressed her understanding of the HoF roles as extended leadership team posts, I was clear with her that I was not interested in an SLT role.

But she was wily, that principal, and she knew what she was about. The act of managing subjects and specialists outside of my own specialism taught me a lot of new things. I enjoyed the new challenges, mostly, and I started to see how my impact could be scaled and how I could grow as a practitioner by looking outside of my own beloved subject. It taught me more humility and highlighted how I could better use my skillset. Gradually, I started to come round to the idea that being SLT was something I could do, which in my professional life I prefer to come before ‘I want to do’. I duly signed up to complete my NPQSL, mainly because I had a faculty issue I felt I needed more training to solve, but of course this only added to that growing can-do feeling.

What probably accelerated this process was the crushing by Ofsted that my school received last year. A 12-year gap between inspections led to a catastrophic fall from top to almost-bottom (no measures but still down there) and there’s nothing like seeing your school in dire need of assistance to crystallise your thinking. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I think I’m Batman, but I’ve had seven years of this school supporting my career and lifting me up, so if I think my skills could be helpful, I’m going to offer them. This year at school has been one of extreme hard work, deep frustration and, if I’m honest, a little boredom. It feels ridiculous to have worked so hard and say I’ve been bored, but that about sums it up. It’s been 20 years, yknow…everything really is just cyclical.

I’m pleased to say that this is the most junior of senior roles. It’s an Assistant Head role, split among four of us, for a year. I’ll be responsible for ECTs, ITT and Professional Learning: what a joyful thing to take on! We’ve got a new head starting after half term and she will doubtless want to make her own decisions and appointments, so I feel quite secure in the insecurity. We will see how it works. I’ll keep hold of Team Hums for the time being and always feel immensely proud of the work that I have done alongside Marianne, Sophie, Hazel, Katie, Gemma, Claire, Maggie, Nat, Sheila, Luke, Elaine, Emma, Tamsin, Nabiha, Bethan and a few other supporting cast members over the past few years. We really are the best team.

So, here we are. I didn’t expect to get here. It’s exciting and nerve-wracking. It’s amusing other people have already started to refer to me as being in this role when I just feel like I’m just pootling along, doing my usual thing. I expect that amusement will quickly fade once I’m added to the SLT email group.

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Retrieval Practice for Year 13

Posted on March 31, 2022 by sallythorne

Following on from my last post, I wanted to share what I have been doing with Year 13 to help them with the knowledge recall for the A-Level. I currently teach the uber-popular AQA 1C Tudors unit and I’m attaching my revision quizzes at the end of this post, if you’d like to pinch them.

I started using these quizzes last year with the aim of setting them once a month in Year 13, though I never quite got that far because, covid. I read Mary James’s chapter Assessment and Learning in ‘Unlocking Assessment’, which sets out three different forms learning can take and therefore be assessed, and I was particularly interested in the section describing cognitive constructivism (p25 in my copy) – that is, that learning is an active process of meaning-making, rather than a simple absorption of knowledge.  I therefore wanted to do something a bit meatier than any of the retrieval exercises I use lower down the school and to test something more than just regurgitation of key dates and facts – though somehow to include that as well, because that detailed knowledge does seem to make the difference at the top end. I was reading Jonathan Grande’s post on checking different types of understanding recently and it reminded me that I was going to share what I’ve been asking students to do with these quizzes and what I learn from what they do.

The quiz begins with some short answer, surface knowledge questions – what is x, when did y happen etc.

It then moves on to ask students to identify five different key figures from the course, with a follow up question to ask them which figure they would use for each of five different question types and the reasons why they would use them.

quiz-shot

When I initially set the quiz pictured, I had forgotten how I formulated this question and ended up with something much less useful. In the event column, I had written a description of the person – so, for Cranmer, I wrote ‘Archbishop of Canterbury under three monarchs’ and, thus, a few students wrote this fact in against Cranmer in the question above (and one against Wolsey, smh). This was minorly useful to me as a diagnostic because it indicated to me that I needed to spend a bit more time reviewing Cranmer, but it did not do what I wanted, which was to encourage students to match key individuals to the themes from the course that, presumbly, drive the questions on the exam paper, thus assessing their application of the knowledge they have learned, as well as just their regurgitation of it.

I also hope that, by process of elimination, they will match up individuals they might not necessarily think of when considering the themes. Using Foreign Policy as my example here, my students always seem to struggle with this as a theme: in their essays they love to write about the minutiae of treaties and battles, making judgements about each one individually, rather than drawing out themes over a period. So, I put Margaret Tudor in here to represent the idea of marriage as a foreign policy tool, something I feel like I am endlessly banging on about but never seems to settle in student consciousness as well as I’d like.

Following on from that, I have a few questions that invite students to name a number of different things in different categories – three – followed by a few ‘Describe’ questions, which I score out of five, and a couple of ‘Explain’ questions, which I score out of ten. This is not particularly scientific and I don’t have a markscheme, I just tick where there is good evidence of learning. It doesn’t necessarily reflect the sort of questions that they get in the exam but it does allow me to ask some quite interesting things that give me insights into how the material is organised in student minds. An example of this is on Quiz 4, where I ask which Tudor monarch is most similar to Henry VII and why. I know what I think the answer to this is (I would say Elizabeth I – thrifty, preferred to avoid war) but the range of answers that came back was exciting and kicked off some excellent discussion when we did the feedback. There were also some helpful errors in there that I was able to pick up – that Henry VIII was as good with money as his dad, for example – that I’m not sure I would have come across otherwise.

I also invite my students to provide graphic representations to answer these questions if they would prefer it over writing paragraphs, which produces some really good insight for me into their understanding of another core theme of the course – change and continuity over time. It is unlikely that they will get away with covering just one monarch in all three questions they attempt in the exam and the ability to draw contrasts between the different reigns is therefore likely to be of great importance.

img_20220331_144744

This image is a student’s description of the process of the Reformation. At a glance, I can tell that they know the general story of the Reformation – what caused it, some of the events, one of the impacts. The chronology is OK. The Act of First Fruits and Tenths is something I repeat often as an example of Reformation legislation so I am not surprised to see it. I am a little surprised not to see a mentioned of the Act of Supremacy. I am less convinced about their grasp on what happened after the Dissolution and, indeed, maybe need to revise my idea of what I think of as ‘the Reformation’ – did I confuse the issue by stipulating 1540? Perhaps it would have been better to ask students to describe the actions of the Reformation Parliament, although I still think that, in a breadth unit, that level of knowledge is probably superfluous for most students. So, lots coming out of that quiz for me and this was a quicker way of assessing than a long essay.

img_20220331_144836

This was the last question on the last quiz. It is bigger in scope than an exam question would be because it spans the whole Tudor period, but ever since attending a workshop with Steve Mastin at SHP, I have tried to write questions that are more expansive than what they might bump into on the exam, since if they’re done something harder than that to practice, the exam should be a walk in the park. Interestingly I didn’t stipulate in the question that a chart would be a good way to organise but this is one of a few students who chose to lay out a plan in a more graphic way, following up with a conclusion. Once again, this question is doing a lot of heavy lifting for me in terms of understanding their mental models. When you’re judging the threat of rebellion over a longer time period, that judgement is stronger when made comparatively or as a generalisation, rather than looking at each rebellion in isolation, and this charting has helped my student to draw out the different criteria for judging threat – for example, motive, just seen in the paragraph, for example. It opened the conversation about how we make these judgements and provided an insight into where my teaching had been most effective (probably need to go back over the Amicable Grant and Lady Jane Grey…)

As promised, the quizzes – with the caveat that I am not particularly formal in the way I write for my students, so you may want to adjust some of the wording. This is my last whirl through with 1C so I expect I will be doing the same with the OCR Britain 1930-97 course for next year: drop me a message if you fancy collaborating.

Tudors Subject Knowledge Quiz 1

Tudors Subject Knowledge Quiz 2

Tudors Subject Knowledge Quiz 3

Tudors Subject Knowledge Quiz 4

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Retrieval Practice in History

Posted on February 18, 2022 by sallythorne

Storm days are the new snow days. It’s been three years since most of us prepared a full cohort of students for a full suite of public exams, so I’ve been revisiting my old lessons and revision planners. Here are my best retrieval practice activities, presented without exemplars because most of them are not currently fit to be seen and if I have to wait until they are, this post won’t be published until March winds – early or otherwise – have well and truly flown.

Please do add your favourites in the comments. I’m always looking for new things and we have more revision lessons than usual this year.

1. Find and Fix grids

This provides a series of nine statements that students correct. I include a mixture of SPAG mistakes, date mistakes and factual mistakes. Students are told how many mistakes there are across the grid. My top tip here is to keep a list of common errors from marking assessments and mocks, so that you can test these twice as often as other facts.

2. Find and Fix paragraphs

As above, but students have a paragraph to correct instead of a grid. This allows for targeted essay practice – spot the mistake in the structure, improve the analysis, have the right facts been selected etc. If you’re printing it for all students, you can differentiate by creating a few different paragraphs. The sample answers in examiner reports are a goldmine for this because there are plenty of pre-written paragraphs to choose from, usually of varying quality, and then you just have to add a few mistakes as you type them. Or dictate them – I’ve taken to using the voice-to-text function for things like this now.

3. Piggybacks, but make it History

I picked this one up from a Science teacher, who explained that students are given a retrieval quiz that requires knowledge recall from 3 days ago, 3 weeks ago and 3 months ago – and these are called piggybacks because pigs gestate for 3 days, 3 weeks and 3 months.

I can’t usually be as precise as 3 days, 3 weeks and 3 months (hats off to you if you can) so I tend put together a grid of nine recall questions that cover content from the current topic, the previous topic and the one before that. It’s scored on a sliding scale, so students get 1 point for the most recent knowledge and 3 for the most distant.

4. Expand the answer

Something pinched off my old HoD, Ian, who would put the briefest of answers to an exam question on the board and invite students to add 20 words to improve it. The word limit helps keep them focused on recalling relevant knowledge, rather than faffing around with stylistic devices, and has the added bonus of fitting onto a mini whiteboard for easy whole-class checking.

5. Threes

A starter for when I am tired and in a hurry. Students are invited to name three of something in several different categories, which I usually select from the spec. So, for Medicine on the Western Front, I might have the categories places on the Western Front; common ailments; common wounds; effects of gas attacks; treatment areas; new medical techniques; context of medicine in 1914; and sources available about the Western Front. Depending on the class, I might use this same set of categories a few times but shorten the amount of time students have to complete the exercise as their recall improves. The first time, I might ask them to write their answers and then add to them when we feed back; later, they might just have to write down any they couldn’t remember.

6. This time or that time (or, this factor or that factor)

I provide a list of key facts and students have to organise into the correct time period. This is particularly helpful for revising the thematic study, where students often seem to stumble on the chronology. Similarly, providing a list of changes and/or continuities and inviting students to categorise into the different factors affecting change (for Edexcel Medicine these are Individual and Institutions, Science and Technology, and Attitudes in Society) is another way of giving them the basics and asking them to do a slightly more sophisticated recall task.

7. ‘Two features’ tag teaming

This one is based on the ‘Describe two features’ question from the Edexcel qual. Students begin by identifying two features for a list of topics, again usually taken from the spec (as in example 5) and usually from across a range of topics – even those where the ‘Describe two features’ question doesn’t appear on the exam. Once they’ve identified two features, they swap with a partner, who has to add supporting information for each one. I quite like this one, because students get competitive with each other and scrape the dustiest recesses of their mind palaces for the most obscure features they can think of.

8. Choose your source

I’ve a habit of trying to put sources into as many GCSE lessons as possible, even for topics where sources aren’t on the paper, just to ensure that practice is regular and confidence grows – ‘miles under the skis,’ as a ski instructor once told me, is the best way to get better and I apply this advice liberally in teaching. Just lots and lots of the same thing. Sourcework is a retrieval practice activity as well, because students need knowledge to contextualise the sources they’re seeing. I frame this as, ‘Which source would you use for an enquiry into xxxx and why?’

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2021-2022

Posted on January 3, 2022 by sallythorne

It’s been another one of those funny old years.

There’s much to reflect on, in terms of pedagogy; this time last year, it had just been announced that we were going online for teaching, a situation that lasted until March. Now we’re trying to get y 11 students read for exams when they haven’t had a normal school year since they were in year 8, and y13 students who’ve never sat a GCSE, which is presenting its own set of head-scratching challenges. As in my last entry, now 18 months ago, the frustrating feeling from all of this is the fleeting nature of it. When am I ever going to need to use these techniques, that I am working so hard to develop, again?

So enough of that. I’ve been prompted to write today, instead, by the existential crisis lots of people seem to be facing in terms of their careers. I had a drink with my friend Tracy before Christmas and she bluntly described this as wondering what the point of work is. It’s clear that this is happening in all types of careers and maybe this is just a forced speeding up of something that was already in motion: flexible hours, the gig economy and so on. I remember my beautician telling me some years ago that it was very normal now for people to not work full time. I’m quite interested to see how this plays out in terms of teaching.

Schools seem generally quite resistant to part time staff. I work in a place that is not resistant to it. Flexible working is granted whenever it can be, which is really comforting to witness. The school has a low staff turnover (in my limited experience) and retains excellent teachers who know their students well. That said, as a full-timer and HoF, it is also interesting to see the impact this has on the school: lots of children looking for staff members who aren’t in school; difficulty getting everyone together for a meeting; missed CPD time; delays in making decisions; uncomfortable splits in classes and scheduling of teaching time. I can’t square this away. There’s no denying that flexible working doesn’t suit schools, which is a paradox, when you consider that most school teachers are women and women are more likely to want to work flexibly.

I’ve been thinking about flexible working for a while. So long, in fact, that I can’t remember when I started. In the autumn of 2019 I stayed with an old work friend I hadn’t seen in 5 years and told her I was thinking of requesting part-time hours; ‘You were saying that five years ago,’ she scoffed, ‘when are you actually planning to do something about it?’ A good point, well made. I have terrible work FOMO about going part time, though, and no concrete reason to do so – I don’t have children or caring responsibilities. The best idea I can think of is to request a 0.7 or 0.8 contract but agree to be in school all the time, so I don’t miss meetings and can respond to emails; I’d just (in theory) have more time in the day so that I don’t need to bring anything home. That would be winning, in my book.

But then why not go further? I could stop teaching altogether. It would be risky but not impossible. I think this might also be something I think every year, especially in the holidays, hence my plan to note it here so I can come back and remind myself it’s probably just cyclical malaise. Why not just quit? The simple answer to this is, I don’t want to. I like my job too much. I love talking T&L and curriculum. I enjoy being in the classroom and in front of students: something completely reinforced by the pandemic, when I wilted at home behind my monitor and didn’t really come back to life until I was back in front of class. I remember the exact moment of peak joy, in front of my year 11s, rubbing whiteboard marker off the board with my hand. In spite of the long hours and longer to-do lists, I enjoy turning up every day and doing the work, which seems like a good enough reason to stick with it.

Well….that and the pension, obvs.

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Handy History Teaching Tips Podcast

Posted on July 15, 2020 by sallythorne

hhttAnother school year is coming to a close. It’s been unique; every year is unique but this one has been significantly different. I’m not reflecting on it much yet because, if I’m honest, I don’t know how helpful it will be to reflect on this unprecedented year because – will it ever happen like this again? I think not. Even if schools close again, we will not be closing for the first time ever. We will be bringing our experiences of the last six months to the table. So, I feel like I need a bit of distance from the events before I can properly reflect on it.

Instead, I wanted to share something else I’ve been doing this year. A few years ago, I had an idea about doing a history teacher podcast, since there seemed to be a gap in the market. After a while I mentioned it to a couple of people, including Helen Snelson, long-time History teacher, History PGCE lead in York, Chair of the Historical Association Secondary Committee and superwoman, who were enthusiastic but, my goodness, we are all so busy! A year passed. Helen was a good friend and kept nudging me back to the project and we finally managed to get it off the ground in November. We started with a long series on using sources in the classroom, and intended to move on to History-specific revision tips, though ended up shelving this as the exams receded into the distance, and have instead spent the past term recording episodes looking at the different second order concepts in History.

This has been a joy of my year. I really enjoy chatting away with Helen about nerdy history topics and always, ALWAYS come away knowing more than I did at the start. It’s great watching the number of listens creep up each week and getting feedback from people that are listening, that it is a helpful thing or that we’ve helped them to tweak something in their classroom which now works better. We’ve got a long list of ideas for the future but have also been able to respond to listener suggestions – that’s where the idea for a series on second order concepts came from.

Some practicals – we try to keep our episodes short – 10-20 minutes is ideal, but we do often gab on a bit longer. We share our ideas on a GoogleDoc and script it to a greater or lesser extent, depending on how confident we feel with the topic. We record it over Skype, usually doing a few at a time; I edit it in Audacity (free to download) and it’s hosted on Soundcloud (it was free until we reached 3 hours of content, by which time I was convinced that enough people were listening to it to warrant forking over the annual fee). I’ve also submitted the RSS feed everywhere I can think of, so it is searchable on Spotify, Podcast Addict, Podbean and iTunes. It has been fun working out all the technical stuff, although I am painfully aware of some of my vocal tics that I wouldn’t necessarily have noticed if I wasn’t listening back to every episode to edit. I keep telling myself that nobody likes the sound of their own voice. Who knows, maybe next year I will add a musical intro and exit.

If this sounds like it would be up your street, give us a listen!

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‘Historian of the Month’ display

Posted on June 6, 2020 by sallythorne

A few years ago, I collaborated with some other teachers rounded up via Twitter to produce display materials for a ‘Historian of the Month’ display. Between us, we put together profiles of eleven different historians that could be used as a school display. The format was simple but formulaic –

  • Slide 1 – a short biography
  • Slide 2 – some notable quotes
  • Slide 3 – ‘Find out more’ – recommendations for further reading; run downs of particular interests or controversies
  • Slide 4 – potentially a review of a specific book

If you’d like to access these original presentations, they are together on a Google Drive here.

Yesterday I had a great discussion with my colleague and friend Kate Smee, mainly around the Black Lives Matter movement and what we are doing as educators to tackle systemic racism. Kate reminded me about this display project when we were discussing Black History Month, as she is hoping to have a display of BAME historians and historians specifically focused on BAME history within the Humanities department next October. Representation is important.

So, this seems like a good time to reinvigorate the project, so that we can share the workload and spread the word as widely as possible. While the original project aimed to have a balance of genders, it is definitely not ethnically balanced and that’s something we can address in this next round. I’m going to do a call on Twitter but leave a comment if you’d like to offer a historian’s profile too and I will be in touch.

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A decade in the life

Posted on January 1, 2020 by sallythorne

There’s been a lot of navel-gazing across social media platforms, as we all weigh up the past decade and consider our achievements. The beginning of a new decade has slightly crept on me. I’m sure there must be some people somewhere pointing out that the new decade technically begins in 2021, as there were people who argued that the new millennium began in 2001, though I’m not one of them – I’m just a bit old. ‘Oh, a new decade? What, again? Meh.’

Similarly (perhaps I am in something of a flat mood) my response to the question ‘what’s different?’ was initially, to borrow a phrase from my nanna, ‘Everything’s much about the same, dear.’ I’m still teaching history full time. I still mark GCSE exams for the same board. I live in the same house, with the same husband, and though with a different configuration of pets, some might argue that two rabbits are equal to one cat. I almost drive the same car, since I purchased it in June of 2010. I’ve even got the same mattress – come at me, Dreams.

I realised, though, that this malaise-filled answer does not really do justice to my achievements, which I don’t love talking about but will do so, since it’s a new decade and everything (probably). There are a lot of things I’m really proud of that aren’t included here but I really don’t have masses of navel-gazing time today, so I’ve kept it to the top 5.

1. I was published. I wrote a revision guide, then a textbook, then a book about teaching. I wrote pieces for Teaching History and consulted on teaching materials for Hodder. Sometimes my writing was deemed good enough to be cannibalised for future editions. It is hard to convey how proud I am about this. My 7-year-old self, the wannabe authoress, could never have dreamed that teaching would lead me to this. I am looking forward to there being more writing in the future. My best writing tip is to not think you have to start at the beginning: start where you find the words.

2. I was invited to speak. I gave my first SHP workshop in 2011, following up a project I had developed after Google Teaching Academy (HOW is that 10 years ago…OK, I think I’m getting everyone else’s amazement vibe now). Since then, I have presented at SHP six more times and HA once, plus whole-day insets I’ve planned for Philip Allen Events and Keynote and various speaking engagements for the exam board. This is never not scary. I am always conscious of becoming someone’s bad inset story. But, it’s easier now, to the point where I was able to complete new examiner training for 200 slightly spiky examiners in 2018, most of whom could list 100 ways they’d rather spend a lovely day in May, and though I was too wound up to eat the lunch, my colleague did tell me they’d picked me for the very wide, very shallow room that was difficult to present in ‘because you’re the best’. I am still fairly certain she was trying to make me feel better, but I’ll take it. My best speaking tip is to smile and slow down.

3. I was promoted at the exam board. Twice. I started the decade as a team leader. I became an assistant principal in 2012. I’m a principal examiner now. It just gets more interesting, I promise. I know more about assessment than I could ever have dreamed I’d want to. I also know a lot more (defo not everything) about managing people from a distance and prioritising when juggling a huge workload. I keep thinking about a Masters in Educational Assessment. I keep thinking of cutting down my teaching hours to spend more time on this. I’ll probably still be thinking of this in 2030. My best examiner tip is, communicate well and forget about getting your own way. None of us do.

4. I ran 9 ski trips (and attended a 10th). I had already run three at the start of the decade, but then the LA decided I wasn’t qualified and I had to do an arduous course to continue, which I failed the first time around. This taught me a lot about myself and the process of learning. I love skiing and I always feel proud of myself when I’m watching my students showing off what they’ve learned on the slopes, because I had to work pretty hard to get to this point. I’m also quite proud of the fact that, when I moved schools, the very experienced ski trip lead felt I was a safe pair of hands in which to entrust her treasure when she retired. The coup of the decade, surely: how many school ski trips are run by history teachers? We should form a clique. My best ski trip tip is, be as positive as humanly possible, all the time. Be merry fricking sunshine. Smother complaining with joy. They will definitely need it by day 4.

5. I moved schools but didn’t move up. I really did think that, without putting some effort into reinventing myself as an SLT bod, I might stay put where I was forever. I had four interviews in the years prior to leaving – one for every job I applied for – and kept getting sent home at lunch. I obviously don’t interview well and it’s not clear why. I started to think I should stop eating lunch. When the move came, though, I was applying for the right reasons (wanting to leave as opposed to fear of redundancy, the prompter for the previous applications) and it really clicked, even though my interview day began appallingly. I love where I work: the students, the setting, the autonomy, the opportunities to grow, my colleagues. I think the move probably saved my teaching career. So my best school moving tip is, apply for the right job, for the right reasons. And probably don’t eat lunch, just in case.

 

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