I love using maps in the history classroom. I often joke about geography being all about colouring in maps, but in reality, I’m jealous. It might just be me, but I need to locate myself in time. The chronology of most things is an obsession. It might be the date[…]
Richard McFahn provides 3 practical ideas to help history teachers create overview lessons.
Need some ideas to help support your students in their online learning? As we all know by now providing effective online learning is pretty tricky for a whole host of reasons. Some students just won’t engage. Others don’t have access to the hardware they need. Some don’t have a decent[…]
Here are 6 takeaways from Ofsted’s 2023 report into history teaching.
About This Webinar: In this free 45 minute webinar, Richard McFahn, provided 14 practical tips on how you can help students be successful with GCSE interpretations questions. Using published guidance from examiners and his own deep knowledge of this topic, Richard identified the common mistakes students make with interpretation questions.[…]
With the 9-1 GCSE there is more content to remember than there was with the older GCSE. Fact! We all need to develop short sharp ideas, or ‘tricks’ to make learning stick.
History teachers in England seem to agree that planning and teaching is best achieved through the Enquiry Question. And they are right to. A Rileyesque enquiry works (Riley 2000). Full stop! It is all very well to be looking for that killer enquiry question. But if you never show your[…]
Are you using retrieval practice, dual coding and interleaving? How do you know they actually work? The evidence base is actually a little shaky.
Some people say knowledge is power. Others say powerful knowledge is power. But that is another debate. But how is the history teacher being controlled? We know we are being controlled by Ofsted. SLTs react to what they think Ofsted are looking for. This is then forced upon teachers through teaching[…]
There is a strong case for English pupils studying more Wider world histories. I outlined in the previous blog post on this topic. The National Curriculum at Key Stage 3 gives schools ample scope for such a study. Nevertheless, diverse world history units, in general, are somewhat hard to find[…]
What strategies work best to boost learning? This is the million dollar question that teachers and students need to answer to so they can be successful at school/university/ in life. Here at HRC we believe that the knowledge required to do well in history – the substantive ‘stuff” and disciplinary[…]
With exams looming, these activities and techniques can help history teachers ensure their students are geared up and ready to perform under pressure.
Ever since I started teaching history I have been hugely conscious of the need to teach a broad and diverse history curriculum. My curriculum offer has always attempted to focus on unknown voices of people from these islands and beyond. I have taught about forgotten English people from our rich[…]
Assessment at Key Stage 3 has always been a challenge. And there always seems to have been a tension, a tug of war between doing what is right for the students, helping teachers assess the quality of their curriculum against doing what SLT require to please Ofsted and to report[…]
Ever since I started teaching, assessment at Key Stage 3 has proven to be a thorny issue. National Curriculum levels were introduced way back in 1995. And, they were contentious, to say the least. Their abolition in 2014 should have been celebrated. Yet, according to the brilliant annual HA survey,[…]
20 year’s worth of thinking has gone into planning and resourcing the HRC KS3 curriculum. The rationale behind this comes from scholarship, policy and best practice. The free schemes of work and curriculum map provide you with an ambitious and coherent curriculum plan. We believe that the National Curriculum for[…]
So, Ofsted published some research recently which underpins their new inspection framework. It’s reassuring that they agree with us about what makes good assessment. The research states, ‘Teachers can use assessment to help them plan lessons, adapt lessons to measured gaps in knowledge and skills, and if necessary re-teach where[…]
I think I might be out of fashion. Come to think of it, on a sartorial level I have never been in fashion. But that is a digression. You see I have always been an advocate of enquiry based history. I gardened in Michael Riley’s enquiry garden way back in[…]
Clearly many schools across the country have been sharing Rosenshine’s principles with their teachers during CPD sessions recently. Twitter is full of education guru’s retweeting how Rosenshine is the next best thing in education since sliced bread (or feedback, or metacognition). So what are these revolutionary principles for teaching? Well[…]
Recently, with the focus centring on the curriculum again, the term ‘powerful knowledge’ seems to have entered educational parlance. It appears in discussions on in the echo-chamber that is Edutwitter. The phrase ‘powerful knowledge’ seems to hold magical, untouchable qualities in general, and in particular when it comes to history teaching. It seems[…]
As you know Ofsted are changing their focus. They are proposing they look much more closely at the quality of the curriculum in schools. Over the last two years, they have conducted 3 research projects in schools. Knowing what their findings here are is really helpful. We live in a[…]
On March 6th between 4.15 and 6 pm, at the University of Sussex, I am going to running a free briefing/workshop on: What do the proposed changes to the Ofsted framework mean for the history department? This will: unpack the 3 research projects Ofsted undertook in the area of ‘curriculum’[…]
Thanks to the changes proposed by Ofsted to their framework and handbook, the history teacher should be thinking hard about curriculum planning. To be honest, the history department should always be thinking about curriculum planning as curriculum intent, implementation and evaluation as this is their core business. One essential aspect[…]
I have always been a big fan of collaborative planning. The best lessons or enquiries I have ever taught have been collaboratively planned. Many of them appear on this site. The best schemes of work and curriculum models I have been involved in creating have been the product of two[…]
L.P. Hartley famously stated that ‘the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.’ The more time I spend in history classrooms the more I agree. I would go further, I don’t just think the past is a foreign country, I also think that history to many students[…]
If you were to analyse the frequency of words used in the proposed Ofsted inspection handbook (first use for January 2020), what do you think the three most frequent words would be? ‘Teaching’? ‘Learning‘? Maybe ‘Pupils‘? You probably wouldn’t be surprised to find that ‘school’ is the most common which appears[…]
HistoryHomework.com’s approach has been taken directly from research into how students best learn and retain knowledge in the long term. Cognitive science tells us that the two best strategies to boost learning are practised/ repeat testing and distributed practice. You can find out more about them here. Historyhomework.com has been[…]
Clearly, curriculum planning and implementation are rightly going to be a hot agenda item for any school/subject leader over the coming few years. This has to be a good thing. It is just depressing that in our accountability mad system, we have to wait for the lever/threat of Ofsted inspections[…]
So, how do you go about planning a broad and balanced history curriculum? Or to put it another way, how do you create a coherent curriculum plan? Well this has been on our agenda for years now. We have blogged about it before. Curriculum planning is going to be of[…]
As I said in my previous post, there has been lots of interest in history curriculum planning again. This can only be a good thing. Recently, Ofsted has viewed many of the schools they inspect as exam factories where pupils are taught to pass the test at the cost of[…]
