High Dive Teaching

Lesley Ann McDermott (@LA_Mcdermott) and I ran a workshop this year on SOLO taxonomy. I’m sharing here our PowerPoint and the related resources which we shared at the session.

I sometimes worry that things won’t make a great deal of sense to people viewing the materials without attending the workshop, so please get in touch if there’s anything that needs explaining, or if there is a resource you’d like that isn’t here. This is the version of the PowerPoint that we used for the second session so it might look a little different – again, please get in touch if there’s anything missing.

Hopefully I will come back and do a write up of my thoughts on the session but these things have a habit of being put off so I won’t make a promise!

SHP SOLO Final 2013

Here is Pam Hook’s hexagon generator. My blank revision hexagons. Lesley Ann’s Prohibition hexagons and Highway Robbery hexagons. My American West Revision Hexagons.

Medicine Through Time Medical Megastars connections map. This is a Publisher file which WordPress doesn’t like, so I have uploaded it as a PDF – please get in touch if you would like an editable version.

My attempt at a History-focused SOLO unit planning sheet, along with my first attempt at using it. I have bronze/silver/gold success criteria on my lesson slides so the sheet is coloured accordingly. I should probably replace the word “Groups” with “Lessons” on pages 2 and 3 because this seemed to be confusing for some; I didn’t want to use Lessons to begin with because sometimes there is more than a lesson’s worth of stuff in each row.

(More resources to follow)

I had a great time working with Lesley Ann on this, even though we live at opposite ends of the country, and I like that we both approached the workshop with something different in mind. Thanks for the positive feedback from everybody over the weekend. It is really good to know that some of this stuff is going into classrooms this week, because my favourite workshops are always the ones that I can use right away! – the #quickwins as I like to call them.

Steve Mastin, how do I avoid teaching to the test?

Steve says that when he started teaching he went to a meeting about GCSE specs and it seemed to be one moan after another about how boring it was, and how students are almost being hoodwinked into taking it. The mark scheme. The syllabus. The miserable grope for one more mark. He and his fellow PGCE graduates started to be concerned that they had been hoodwinked and not teaching GCSE properly. And as it turned out, most teachers taught this way. Why?

Culture.
Pressure from SLT.
Loss of confidence among students when it doesn’t look as they expect.
The requirement to report working at grades.
Ofsted – or perceptions of Ofsted.

Steve says he’s not anti-mark scheme, but they’re designed for us. The culture has shifted and now it’s not just endemic among teachers, but among pupils as well, who want to see the mark scheme and the success criteria. The mark scheme is useful, but for us, to inform our teaching.

We teach them very well at key stage three – perhaps even more critical thinking than is required at GCSE, and the best of that, if we’re really confident that it is rigorous and worthwhile, should be promoted at key stage four as well.

He suggests five principals.

1. Enquiry questions
This works very well at key stage three and there is a lot of research and advice about it. So why not at key stage four? Steve shares some enquiry questions he has taught for Modern World over the past few years and we discuss the benefits of them. The questions go generally way beyond what they would ask in the exam – who was satisfied by the Treaty of Versailles, for example, would become was Clemenceau satisfied by the Treaty of Versailles. When students ask how many paragraphs they need to write for this example, ask them what they would need to include, and whether they would put each person in the same paragraph.
The questions are engaging, and promote discussion and debate, which will challenge pupils in a more engaging way that learning the mark scheme.

2. Second order concepts and processes.
Change and continuity; causation; evidence; historical interpretations; diversity; significance. The first three are very explicit in the NC. The last three tend to drop off at key stage four.

3. KS3 success leads to KS4 success
Steve shares an example of a big success/failure graph, which they create on the ceiling, and explain that it helps students to think at a deeper level about whether the factors can be judged against each other fairly and what criteria should be used to judge success. This isn’t something they need to do in the exam, but it helps them to think more critically and deeply about the topic. He also shows a graph to consider how effective opposition to the Nazis was – active/passive crosses effective/ineffective.
The key with both these is to ask students to do MORE than the exam requires, so the exam will then seem easy by comparison, I extrapolate.

Role play – whole class is really good, though it takes a whole to set up. Students get a character that they are not allowed to share, and then over a series of lessons the characters are revealed – when would these people have started voting Nazi? NOT empathy.
He asks how it could be adapted for our depth studies?
I think in American West, you could look at when particular characters started to turn against the Indian population through the 19th century, though perhaps it works over a shorter space of time.

We look at a snakes and ladders version of the Cuban Missile Crisis. What are the high points and lows points? Write a justification on the snake or the ladder.
Design a League of Nations. This is given as an exercise before they know anything about it. Location? Aims? Membership? Leadership? Decisions? This makes them think about how the league was formed and flawed from the start, so better than what students are expected to do in the exam.
Interrogate statistics with no contextual knowledge (or at the end, with all the contextual knowledge). What questions do you need to ask? What stands out? We look at German election results between 1919 and 1933.
Use a picture as a lesson stimulus – not a starter, but just something on the board to look at when you get started.
Causation target – factor in the centre with relevant factors written in the rings, getting less relevant as they work out from the centre.
Myths. Provide pub quiz facts that are generalisations and reword, combine, go beyond, knock down..
Teach a lesson in character. Steve teaches Nazi lessons; he doesn’t tell the students he’s going to do this, but instead gets them to do these in a carousel so that they can understand what students were taught in the nazi regime, and extrapolate from this the aims of the system and what was important to the nazis (half the lessons are sport, for example).
Chalk on the carpet to show the post-war German divide. Allows for a visual representation of how people could and couldn’t move around.
Start or end a lesson with what three people have in common, or who is the odd one out, with no clear answer, to help them to develop their skill in describing.
Start a topic without telling them what it is about. Give them some cards about women’s actions, for example, when doing the suffragettes/ists, and ask them to identify the suffragette references in the Mary Poppins clip.

4. Interpretations
Look at real historians writing real history, rather than the gobbets we usually deal with. This is excellent advice because for me, one of the biggest leaps between key stages four and five is being able to identify the voices of different historians in the topics they are studying. Giving them a variety of opinions, summarised, allows them to access the debate – give them the original source too if you like, underlined for assistance. Makes me think of the Churchill speech about Gandhi I shared with my year 8 class this year.

5. Handling historical sources
Another thing they don’t need to do for the exam but will help them to answer the exam questions. Give them the sources and ask them questions – very natural questions, nothing lifted from the exam board. Interrogate the sources to consider what they say. The exam doesn’t encourage students to ask interesting questions, but we can do this.

A final tip!
History cafes.
Weekly Revision session from January onwards with a different focus. At parents evening you look at the mock and identify which sessions students should come to.

Peter Mandler on History, National Life and the Curriculum

Peter is a university lecturer at Cambridge. He admits he knows very little about history in schools, because he says there are too many people whose voices join the debate when they have no connection with it, perhaps because it seems to touch their sense of self more than other subjects. There is responsibility attached to this too, though, to make sure it will work under your grand design. You can’t just extrapolate from your own experience. He doesn’t feel very well qualified to talk about the national curriculum, something he explains in a lengthy, self-deprecating, interesting speech.

Before the NC, there was considerable autonomy in the history classroom, unless you we’re sitting a public exam – school certificate, o level – when you had to study what the exam board said. Entry to the professions was achieved by apprenticeship rather than exam qualification. Only a few careers required a university degree – most graduates became teachers – so the focus was not on the exams. “The position of a teacher in an English school is a happy one….history teaching should not be put into a strait jacket.”

The DfE promote the idea that before the NC, it couldn’t work because teachers refused to be told what to teach, but this ignores the history of government intervention in schools in the twentieth century. There was a resistance to central control due to the liberalism in education and elsewhere, which increased funding but not control. Arm’s length government was the name of the game in the early twentieth century, and it was fiercely defended. There were arguments about schools being forced to fly the British flag or celebrate Empire Day. This went for arts, universities, the print media…more power was confided to the state but freedom of individual expression was jealously defended.

This ethos continued to be applied in education for a long time after the war. There was a push for science and technology over arts and humanities, but the will to tell teachers what to teach was simply not there. In the end, the choice stayed with students, and they voted with their feet. Science and technology actually lost ground at A level in spite of the promotion. This led to more on the job training in those subjects, because there was no intention among the government to dictate to schools.

So why did we get a NC? Thatcher wasn’t that interested at the start of her premiership, but over the cours of the eighties that changed. Key people in the government started to argue that it was important for social mobility and poor education was holding Britain back. This led to the GCSE and an expansion of sixth form places to promote university attendance – which has risen from about 14% to nearly half of school leavers.

The first NC was remarkably uncontroversial. There was quite a widespread consensus that here should be a NC although there was an equal consensus that such an abrogation of liberalism required a focus on consensus building. (That’s a lot of consensus in one sentence and I haven’t spelled it correctly first time yet…)

The drafts produced quite a lot of academic debate and consensus was built up, so that what was ratified was very similar to what was proposed by the working groups. Celebrity academics were wheeled out and the media printed hyperbolic headlines but there were focus groups etc and the civil servants, of whom there were more, better resourced, mediated between the groups and the ministers.

This time, there is no independent body to consider all the sides which has impoverished public debate. Expert groups are ignored, as are the opinions of key academics. So we’ve ended up with what the minister has drafted, without assistance. It has inadequacies which indicate more about the problems of the process than what we’ll be teaching. We’ll worry about it when it’s published.

He’s not sure that the government wants a NC. So many academies! This is true 1950s style that the Secretary of State knows best, coupled with 1980s style that teachers and parents know best…on alternate weeks.

The draft is a politicians’ curriculum, thinking the main focus of the history NC is to tell the story of the political mechanisms of the world, eg the development of democracy (my current year 9 unit…). So there is plenty in there about acts, etc – politicians are the heroes and the fulcrum around which all other events dance.

At this point I went to Twitter to respond to an MFL teacher who said yesterday that he feels the history curriculum is reducing uptake in his subject by not teaching enough about our place in Europe, finally fired up enough by what Peter is saying about the bias imposed by various people to think of what I wanted to say. So I missed a bit. But I think this suggests the lecture had its intended impact.

We need to safeguard the integrity of the subject and an NC will do this, but it mustn’t be focused on what any one person or group of people think. It should not be taught for either national or international political ends. We haven’t managed that this time but perhaps we can learn from history next time.

@johnmayo first, sharing a couple of helpful websites about teaching Irish history – Century Ireland from RTE and the Down Survey of Ireland on the Trinity College website, which shows land distribution in Ireland to help show colonisation, etc

@davestacey talking about making a wiki with students, using Google Drive. Key msg for me here was “trust them, they’ll surprise you” – agree, agree, agree.

Lesley Ann @la_mcdermott talks about using Socrative in lessons for quick knowledge tests and getting feedback.

Steve Seger from Euroclio talks about Historiana and invites ideas from us about how to improve the website.

@Ericha1806 talks about disguising learning with fun this year, especially in home learning. Monarchs’ tea party: research a monarch, then in the last week they have to come to class in role and do something like speed dating. Also play doh answers – create a 5 mark question in play doh.

@danlyndon talks about a project on WW1 with the Imperial War Museum, inspired by one key artefact. They produced a narrative in a silent movie, which they story boarded first. This was really powerful.

Don Cumming @jackdisco suggests asking students for feedback on what made the lessons better and what activities they enjoy – he shares their advice on post its with us.

@nickdennis talks about the apparent skills vs knowledge dichotomy. He talks about a project with his library staff on researching the Black Death. He created a fake website about the Black Death and asked students to critique both the knowledge and the layout.

Evernote saved my marriage! (I missed this lady’s name, sorry) she has been able to hoard all the interesting stuff she comes across without creating piles of messy paper.

Rich Kennett @kenradical talks about choosing a history hero and having your picture taken with it. Add a bit of writing to justify your choice. He got all his year 8 to do it, which created a bit of a contest to get the weirdest person. These were displayed in the history department and other faculties have got involved. Has created a lot of passion and debate, as well as a great display.

Michael Maddison, HMI, on outstanding leadership in history.

Michael begins with some press headlines in the 6 months leading up to the publication of the new curriculum, and then invites us to identify the papers that have reported various headlines since. Michael is going to share Ofsted’s evidence, giving us a snapshot of the current picture. He fears that at primary, the picture has become less positive with less subject specialism and greater focus on creativity. It is episodic and leads to episodic knowledge. In secondary, there are huge successes. It is well taught by subject specialists and the NC has led to high quality teaching and learning. Attainment is high and entries are rising. History maintains a consistent GCSE entry for the past 20 years. Roughly a third of pupils take it.

There are concerns, though. More non-specialists and variable teaching time mean that standards are variable and progress is not fast enough. The person who indicates that his school gets 3 hours a week for history in year 7 is treated to envious sighs from the crowd. Students are restricted from accessing history post-ks3.

Regarding good leadership, Michael recommends a few books, including Ofsted’s Good Teaching, Effective Departments. He talks us through the supplementary history-specific guidance to go alongside the Ofsted level descriptors. Effective teachers have good subject knowledge. The learning is rooted in rigorous historical enquiry. Historical thinking, the ability to investigate, consider, reflect and review events, is well developed in great lessons. It’s also important to explain why they’re doing it. Lots of people singing from this hymn sheet this weekend. When Ofsted saw me, they did ask the students why they were doing their activity and they were able to answer. It is vital, he says, to have a clarity of rationale and thinking. Why, what, how, when? What do we want pupils to know, do and understand that they couldn’t before? Let the prior learning guide your planning.

What makes a good curriculum?

He cites the Hampshire History Steering Group and their work on getting children to appreciate causation at a much younger age. He also mentions Harris Academy and their 2 year KS3.

Use the data to assist when leading in department. he takes us through some slides, available later, showing statistics about achievement in history. On average, girls do 6 or 7% better than boys in history GCSE, for example.

He recommends the case studies available from Ofsted as models of good practice, and finishes by asking us to reflect on what we’ll do differently after today’s session. Replan ks3 – I don’t think I’ll have time to do two more.

He also says that all/most/some is a cop out and reduces challenge immediately. Hear, hear. As Jackie Beere said in a session I went to once – who wants to be some?