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,[…]
An inspirational ex-colleague of mine, Neil. Bates, wrote this blog a few years back. It is still as relevant now as ever. Enjoy: It’s period 4 on a Thursday and Year 11 are filing through my classroom door with a collective look of bemusement on their faces. Some are just[…]
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[…]
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[…]
Advice on how to stimulate and cater for students’ curiosity about history outside the classroom – with reading list download.
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[…]
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[…]
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. The latest Ofsted framework focuses[…]
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[…]
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[…]
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[…]
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[…]
We are all told how important feedback is. Written feedback especially. The research. The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) research states “feedback studies tend to show very high effects on learning”. We know feedback is important. SLTs love looking for this feedback as they can make it part of their accountability[…]
The progress of pupil premium students has been a hot topic over the last few years, even for the humble history teacher. Arms length control The government have spent millions on this vulnerable group of students and want to see bang for their buck. This pressure has been passed down[…]
Recently I arranged for Michael Riley to come and work with my initial teacher trainees and their mentors at Sussex University. What a privilege. After all, it was Michael alongside Jamie Byrom who inspired me to teach history the way that I have been for the last 18 years. A[…]
Why I had to move 1920s America to Year 9: So, we all had to adjust to the changes brought by the new GCSEs and in some ways, this was a good thing. I for one, have found that my teaching has been reinvigorated by getting to teach new units.[…]
Yesterday I saw a tweet about marking which definitely made me happy. It cited Ofsted’s school Inspection Update Issue 8 and was written by National Director of Education, Sean Harford. He referred to the Teacher Workload Review Group on Marking (March 2016) and the Education Endowment Foundation (April 2016) which both[…]
A Traveller’s guide to planning for success in the 9-1 GCSE: I have recently become fascinated by the history of the American West. There are so many great personalities and stories when you start to look. Visiting a number of these sites in the summer really made this history resonate[…]
Struggling to answer Edexcel’s new narrative account analysing question? Here’s how one teacher tried to make the abstract concrete in her students’ brains.
The 9-1 GCSE are content heavy. Fact. To ensure that teachers cover all of this content well, there is less time at the end of the two years to be able to re-visit and revise. So what do we do? How should we go about planning and teaching 2016 GCSE[…]
