Cunning Plan for planning the GCSE thematic unit…thematically

I started teaching ‘crime and punishment through time’ thematically a few years ago. I was teaching it as a Schools History Project ‘study in development’. We had moved from ‘medicine through time’ in order to keep things fresh. After six times through the content, much as I loved it, crime, too, was becoming stale. I was afraid of falling into the trap of knowing the material so well that I took students’ understanding for granted. So, that year, I began to teach it by theme instead of chronologically...