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,[…]
Free use of HistoryHomework During the present crisis, we would like to offer you COMPLETELY FREE use of www.historyhomework.com for the next three months.YOU WILL NOT BE INVOICED OR TIED IN. We are a site created by teachers, for teachers and simply want to help. To sign up simply email[…]
Fingers crossed!? This is what one successful head of history hopes SLT will do in the New Year: Cancel your PiXL subscription and stop spending money on exam board spec courses. Put the £s of savings into department budgets. Give time for teachers to digest the spec materials and other[…]
Yesterday we had an INSET day focusing on curriculum planning. We enjoyed the second collaborative day whereby the local primary schools attended the secondary school for joint CPD. The afternoons are fantastic! Fantastic CPD Secondary and primary classroom teachers attending sessions together, delivered by colleagues. My NQT and PGCE trainee[…]
Ever since teachers got a whiff that Ofsted was no longer just interested in ‘outcomes’ but was now focusing on the ‘Quality of Education’ and the three ‘I’s, there seems to have been a debate about what curriculum intent actually is. In the summer, before the start of this new[…]
I am really excited to announce the first Grassroots History Conference on Saturday 18/1/20 at the University of Sussex. Why the need for a conference? I have worked in the South of England with loads and loads of history teachers over the years. There is some brilliant practice here. However,[…]
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[…]
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[…]
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[…]
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[…]
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[…]
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[…]
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[…]
Praise be! In the last few months, there has been lots of interest in curriculum planning again. 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 a high-quality education. There is much talk of[…]
So there seems to be some blather recently around the question: how do we decide what to teach in a curriculum? Ofsted This has inevitably be fuelled by talk of Ofsted changing its inspection framework over the coming months to focusing more on the quality of the curriculum and less[…]
I often meet teachers who have this (to me) weird compulsion to get a job, do three years, move on to a new school, three years, move…and repeat. In the interests of full disclosure, I am not one of these people. I got a job in the mid-90s and[…]
With exams looming, these activities and techniques can help history teachers ensure their students are geared up and ready to perform under pressure.
HistoryHomework.com has been designed to help you raise standards in your GCSE classes, dramatically cut your workload and provide you with crucial information about your individual students’ progress. Much thought and planning have gone into creating an assessment for learning tool that works for the GCSE history teacher. Unlike some[…]
www.historyhomework.com is live and ready for you to access. You can use it to help your students revise all of the content and many of the skills required for the most popular Edexcel 9-1 GCSE courses. AQA will be launching in September. To find out which topics are covered[…]
I am often late to the party. Fact. Sometimes I don’t even turn up. The curse of the socially awkward and the residue of an inferiority complex perhaps? I know I am very late to one particularly party but why change the habits of a life time? The party I[…]
Encouraging pupils to read is hugely important. Getting students reading historical fiction is a great idea as Marc blogged about a wee while back. It will help them develop their sense of period and will allow them to build their knowledge of key events in history. More importantly, though, if[…]
Bookmarks. By the end of your GCSE course it is helpful that your students know exactly what is required of them when it comes to answering different question types. As you may know, teaching students just to pass the test is not why we entered the teaching profession. We want[…]
There has been some debate recently about whether or not we should use textbooks to teach history in secondary school. And, if we should use such books, which one should be the ‘core’ text, the one that might provide the backbone of a school’s KS3 history course. Let me start[…]
The debate whimpers on. Knowledge and direct instruction against progress teaching ideas. This debate has been going on since the arguments over the birth of GCSE and before. Historical knowledge is crucially important – lets not forget it. But so is the ability to use this knowledge well. We have[…]
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