Elizabeth Carr talking on planting perennials in the history garden: extending KS3 into GCSE.

A year 7 starter activity to start! And one on toilets…

Concerns about the new GCSE have encouraged Presdales history department to think about their KS3 and rethink what their students needed to know to provide the context for GCSE. Should they start teaching GCSE question types? Should they move to a three year KS4? Will students retain it? Will there be transferability in terms of ‘question skills’?

Firstly, they made careful choices about what content to include: putting it all into GCSE would lead to repetition and potential boredom. Better to plant ideas at KS3 that are revisited across the three years to interleave topics and reinforce memory and understanding of them.

The department decided on these for their focus:
Sense of time, place and period.
Big ideas – substantive concepts. Disciplinary knowledge.

A sense of time

Timeline tests, especially at enquiry transitions. Helps students to recall relevant key features for context. Timeline test at start of post is intended as a diagnostic to work out what students know when they arrive in year 7: students match the pictures to a list of time periods on the board and then organise chronologically. This comes up as a starter activity for recap, regularly.

Development study: when did toilets really change? This adds another layer to their understanding of sense of time. Elizabeth also talks about protest/rebellion over time.

Overviews. Offered at key transition points to help students.

Comparative timelines. Spain as compared to Britain: gives students the opportunity to highlight similarity/difference, eg did England have a dark age while Spain had a golden age?

Zoom out and see the bigger picture: compare knowledge of British Empire to knowledge of Britain. We have a go at this and discuss the idea of asking students to predict. Obviously this can go really badly, but seems to be a good diagnostic tool to be able to see what background knowledge students have retained.

A sense of place

I strongly agree with Elizabeth when she says that it is much easier to teach students when they know where places are. The location of Britain in relation to the rest of Europe is useful for the Norman conquest, but also for many other topics. Elizabeth shows a core knowledge sheet for her Cordoba unit that includes a small map to indicate Byzantium in relation to the rest of Europe.

Another example: the geography of the Reformation.

Nice bit of geography here: colouring the map to show points of conflict (wouldn’t this count as 50% of a geography GCSE?)

Similarly: mapping the locations of the major battles of the First World War.

Sense of period

Dual coding: using images that resonate is important because students need to remember the image in order to be prompted by it. Build knowledge at KS3 that will resonate visually at KS4: what a monastery looks like, Henry VIII’s face etc. If they see the same image that they have looked at lower down the school, perhaps they will remember more at GCSE.

Big ideas – substantive concepts

Mapping KS3 concepts that will be needed at KS4 prepares students better for their GCSE studies. This is a bit more than straightforward knowledge.

This helps with that perennial history teacher whinge: ‘I love teaching this but the kids find it really difficult’ – eg Cold War. Laying the foundation concepts in year 9 has helped students to grasp the GCSE content more quickly.

Disciplinary knowledge

Elizabeth talks through some ways that students ‘bump into’ some of the things they will be expected to do at GCSE throughout KS3, eg summarising interpretations and using knowledge to contextualise and critique, working with source material – ‘sources sitting inside their context’ (what a lovely turn of phrase). Elizabeth references her Cunning Plan, recently published in Teaching History, about teaching the Industrial Revolution.

Sorry this last picture is not the right way up!