High Dive Teaching

Christine is speaking about knowledge. We don’t spend a lot of time talking about it which gives us bad PR as a profession. We should attend to it much more explicitly and not be frightened of it. The reaction from the middle of last century about the focus on high politics and memorisation, which turned children off and proved inaccessible, is now firmly in the past. SHP was about moving away to a broader range of content and engaging children with the raw materials of history: many good things, although perhaps some babies were thrown away with the bath water.

Therefore, Christine has been thinking about equipping children with enough knowledge to be able to do history really well, and what is enough to go out into the world as an educated historian.

We read an extract from Schama, underlining the words that have a meaning to use due to us having historical knowledge. Recognition and resonance are really bound up with knowledge, and as Hirsch says, a knowledge-rich experience allows for a better understanding of the words. So, when students struggle with a piece of reading, it’s not just a literacy problem – it’s a knowledge problem, too.

We look at some examples of student work and consider why one is better than the other. They are both very good and it is difficult to pin point exactly why one is better than the other. One provides better context, and shows good temporal agility – the ability to whizz around the topic and move back and forth through the timeline. Secure knowledge helps with this and also enables students to step back and be able to look at the whole picture which means they can work with concepts such as (in this case) “the public” and their place in the story. Someone comes up with a good football metaphor, that student A is like a Brazilian footballer in the recent World Cup match who has to concentrate hard on the skill of footballing and showing it off (or the knowledge in the history case) whereas student B is a German footballer who can pass and show their skill without thinking about it and so can instead look forward to where they are going instead of demonstrating the basics. This gets a round of applause….I hope I have characterised it correctly.

Christine makes the point that there is a certain amount of knowledge for each lesson, for the teacher to identify and consider, that cannot be outsourced: things that they need to learn and to know in order to access the rest of the lesson. This is why we need to think of a curriculum design culture, rather than an intervention culture. We need to establish an end point and ongoing content repertoire that helps us to measure what students have learned and ensure they finish key stage three with a clear picture that they can take forward. Patterns of resonance build up: as history teachers, when we see the word Renaissance, it resonates with a thousand stories, and this should be our aim with the students.

Christine talks about fingertip knowledge and residue knowledge. She admits to having a terrible memory for dates (this is comforting because I am also in that boat) and gives us an example of her own: when she taught late 19th century political history, she know all the dates and details of Gladstone and Disraeli, and although she has now forgotten the detail – the fingertip knowledge – but it has left a glorious residue in the sieve of the brain that gives her an enriched understanding of the 19th century and helps her to better understand the 20th century, going forward. What do we need to enable this? Saturation in glorious knowledge. She talks about Ians Dawson and Luff and their role plays and story telling, which give us an enormous amount of knowledge that is necessary in order to make judgements about, for example, Bannockburn’s significance. As teachers, we need to attend to the poverty of students’ brains.

We consider a 17th century enquiry of our choice and identify pieces of knowledge that might be necessary to be successful in studying this topic. Then we consider what knowledge they will need to bring with them: what prior learning will they be pulling on? Then we attempt to classify e types of knowledge: phenomena, people, events…? Categories of our choosing. We struggle with this, having a discussion about knowledge that transcends the time periods, eg treason and conspiracy, and knowledge that needs context, eg the relationship between Catholics and Protestants at the start of the 17th century. Someone else suggests bits and isms.

Christine suggests five:
1. Chronological frameworks
2. Substantive concepts
3. Particular stories
4. Particular personalities
5. Contextual knowledge of the period before

We look at some of Christine’s examples. She said that in her previous department, they decided that they wanted assessment to be driven by what the students needed to know. Thus, a no-revision, no-books timeline as a low-stakes, “fun” test – can you timeline everything we have learned so far this term? Secondly, a timeline done based on revision, with an analytic comment linked into change over time. Finally, a no-notice essay, based on prior learning. These things are also useful things when it comes to checking knowledge. Think about, though, what is useful to you and to them?

A mixed constitution is important for assessment. Timeline tests, and of enquiry substantive outcome activities, mini tasks to show fluency in substantive concepts, routine little checks (I think this would be the scaffolded marking I do in lessons). She reminds us that levels were never intended to be used on individual pieces of work, or even at the end of a year. Using them like this makes it difficult to judge the knowledge in a piece of work, because if you only look at marks you can’t see the knowledge sitting underneath it. For example, when working through piano grades a students might get a pass, a distinction, a merit, another distinction, and then a pass on the the next four grades; so her marks graph will not show progress in terms of marks, but she WILL have a better knowledge of piano playing and have made huge progress in this area. That’s why the levels don’t really work, because it makes it very difficult for us to judge a student’s knowledge.

There is a bit of hope, though, in the form of an end of year exam, which can be quite knowledge focused but can be given a percentage, thus pleasing SLT. We look at some examples from Christine’s pizza assessment group.

Christine finishes with a quote from Daniel Koretz: “Teach to the domain, not the test”. This is a good excuse not to endlessly practice the types of questions on the test: the test just measures the domain, dipping into it, rather than being the point of the learning. Finally, knowledge matters at key stage three because it provides a breadth of understanding that is a vital platform on which to build GCSE knowledge.

Neil and Simon are explaining the Harkness idea of collaborative learning.

It involves a bit of the flipped learning idea, where students read and complete tasks before the lesson and then discuss it in class, tackling tasks set by the teacher. This encourages co-construction within the course of the lesson: students are passing ideas around and building them up in the classroom. The teacher acts as the facilitator and inquisitor – they are not there to deliver knowledge. One example of a teacher task would be to map the contributions made to the discussion, possibly identifying connections or discussions between each pair of students, and then feeding back to students on their contributions at the end of the lesson. The teacher might be directly involved in the debate, asking questions and adding their own ideas.

Why do it? It helps to create better historians, for a start. Chris Husbands, director of the IoE, in Great teaching and how to get it; Hattie; EEF Toolkit all provide educational research to back up the benefits of following the Harkness method, in terms of promoting things like collaborative learning, peer feedback, meta cognition etc. It solves perennial A-level problems: not enough reading, difficulty in constructing analysis and evaluation. It provides opportunities for different types of feedback, builds in modelling of good work and develops greater independence of thought and action. Finally, it increases student accountability.

We role play the method by reading a few extracts (not a proper example of a Harkness lesson, we are told, but necessary to model the method in a short time slot). Reading should be purposeful: read and annotate with a question in mind. Then we have a discussion in which we all take on different roles, while one member of the group maps the connections between the participants and notes down what sort of contributions they are making. This is helpful for identifying which students perhaps haven’t done the reading/work or who, perhaps, is not feeling especially confident about participating in the discussion. Suggestions about this include doing it by passing a ball of string around and apparently now there is an app you can use to do the mapping.

Groups of 12ish work for this, but a class could be split into 2 groups, or two circles, with the outer circle being observers or navigators. Neil has used it lower down the school, splitting classes into groups of eight and having a student moderator within each group. When it comes to ensuring students prepared, they tied it to essays to give it a really clear point; practice and training helped too, because after a lesson or two students found they didn’t really like having nothing to say in the discussion.

In its purest form, students would use Harkness in every lesson, necessitating 3 or 4 hours of reading every night, which is not really realistic. At MGS, units were planned and the Harkness session was built in to each section of the SoW, so that the reading was more likely to happen and had a clear point to it at the end. It allowed for the summing up of each section in a meaningful way and for consolidation prior to writing a practice response.

St Philips Exeter, where this method originated, runs a week’s course on this every year, which provides intense CPD (week in America to study a pedagogical idea – remind me to request that from the inset budget next year). MGS sent a member of staff there this year, who gathered information about the impact that the method had. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence, plus some suggestion based on scores on essays that using this method helps students to achieve better grades. It does help them to formulate an argument,; as my current method of balloon debates does.

There are variations on the Harkness theme. Chairmen lessons; policy advisers; thesis statements – come with an argument and be prepared to defend it; student takeover; standard essay prep. Using ICT can help a lot too – Padlet, Edmodo, Twitter etc.

With younger students, several seminar groups based on adapted reading and images. It can be difficult to manage as the teacher, but by providing roles, such as setting four questions and asking students to chair in turn for five minutes, students can carry out some really profitable discussion.

As I replan what I’m teaching year 12 next year, this has been very helpful.

Sally is talking about rigorous historical thinking in the mixed ability classroom.

We start by thinking about the challenges and the joys of mixed ability. Sally says she spent so much time doing different activities and differentiated sheets that she lost what she loved: whole class teaching. She then offers some strategies that have worked in her context that we might find adaptable to our situations.

Sally references Berger, saying that after she read Ethic of Excellence she started to question whether she really had the highest expectations of her students. She started by insisting that work was only handed in when it was the absolute best that the student could do. It was time consuming, and work came in in dribs and drabs, but slowly the quality of the work started to improve. Sally started to show the students an example: the epitome of success for the tasks she was setting, so that students are able to see what they are aiming for. For example when year 9s created political cartoons to show the outbreak of WW2, they looked at some political cartoons from the time to give them an idea of what it might look like. Peer critique can also help with that. Students present their work to each other, which can give the lower ability students some ideas for improving their own work: “Which piece of work did you really like? Why? What can you take from that to add to yours?” Sally also shows a picture of her school wow wall, which has examples of excellent work from across the whole school, as an example of a reward for producing excellent work whilst also modelling expectations and good practice.

We move onto hooks. Sally talks about a homework at the start of the British empire: ask students to get opinions from home, and then write them on post it notes to show how different they are. She sets up the students who might not have anybody at home who will have this discussion with them, by asking them to talk to their form tutors or the head teacher. When students realised how different the opinions are, they started to want to know why people felt so differently about this. There was also a helpful article from the local paper about someone who gave back their MBE because they were ashamed of the British Empire.

Another type of hook is outrage. We read an extract from Stannard’s Uniqueness as Denial: The Politics of Genocide Scholarship, which contains some unpalatable views on genocide of indigenous peoples, which she uses at the start of the American West course when looking at the Plains Indians. This is timely, as I’m changing the way I teach this unit next year and wanted to start with the Plains conflict. We talk about getting them to find the argument, or start with the words they don’t know, or break it down into different opinions. Sally uses it to show that it is a big, massive debate going on among academic historians, which hooks them in and makes them want to know more so that they can argue. Although they won’t get an exam question “was this genocide?” but they will have done the arguing and have the knowledge to answer what is, in fact, a much easier question.

Getting students to ask their own enquiry questions. Why is this good in a mixed ability classroom? We look at a simple map of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, indicating the Islamic empire in 644, and again by 750. Students are challenged to come up with a list of questions they would ask about the two maps. This was followed up by a series of images, from which students are invited to come up with even more questions. This gives them ownership of the learning, because the best question is taken forward to shape the rest of the enquiry. It also provides excellent training for history study later in their school life, as well as giving them some language that helps them to think.

I have noticed a few times over the past couple of weeks, since attending edfest, that some of my students know what they want to say – I can see it from their lit up faces and hands reaching up high – but they just lack the words to be able to say it out loud. They know they know, but they need some more language to be able to express their knowledge. Sally uses these Alphonse the Camel story to help students get their heads around causation vocab –

She uses a picture of an eruption, a snowy scene, a wiggly river and a flash flood to encourage students to think about words that can be used to describe change. This moves them forward in the language they are using to develop their analysis. Sally also talks about tentative langue – the hedging words that Richard mentioned this morning and Don mentioned yesterday.

She moves in to talk a bit about knowledge. She plays pass the hat, with a hat full of questions to test knowledge passed in huge same way as pass the parcel, accompanied by some relevant music. This encourages students to recap their knowledge to ensure they can answer the question if the hat stops on them.

Finally, extended writing. We consider positives and negatives of the writing frame; Sally suggests using card sorts to help students organise facts and topics into essay sections, or causes and consequences. This helps them to structure and plan before they start writing, but doesn’t restrict them to a paragraph plan.

Lots of ideas here!