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Cunning Plan 167: teaching the industrial revolution
Teaching History article
‘Disastrous and terrible.’ For Arnold Toynbee, the historian who gave us the phrase ‘industrial revolution’, these three words sum up the period of dramatic technological change that took place in Britain across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We may not habitually use Toynbee’s description in the classroom, but it is...
Cunning Plan 167: teaching the industrial revolution
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Why are you wearing a watch? Complicating narratives of economic and social progress
Teaching History article
Frustrated by the traditional narrative of the industrial revolution as a steady march of progress, and disappointed by her students’ dull and deterministic statements about historical change, Hannah Sibona decided to complicate the tidy narrative of continual improvement.
Inspired by an article by E.P. Thompson, Sibona reflected that introducing her...
Why are you wearing a watch? Complicating narratives of economic and social progress
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A scaffold, not a cage: progression and progression models in history
Teaching History article
The need to understand ways of defining progression in history becomes ever more pressing in the face of a target-setting, assessment-driven regime which requires us to measure progress at every turn. We must defend our professional expertise in terms of measurable outcomes. Did we add value? Have our end of...
A scaffold, not a cage: progression and progression models in history
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Assessment after levels
Free Teaching History article
Ten years ago, two heads of department in contrasting schools presented a powerfully-argued case for resisting the use of level descriptions within their assessment regimes. Influenced both by research into the nature of children's historical thinking and by principles of assessment for learning, Sally Burnham and Geraint Brown argued that...
Assessment after levels
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Myths and Monty Python: using the witch-hunts to introduce students to significance
Article
In this article Kerry Apps introduces students to the significance of the witch-hunts in the modern era, at the time when they occurred, and in the middle of the eighteenth century. She presents her rationale for choosing the witch-hunts as a focus for the study of significance, and shows how her thinking about her teaching has evolved through her evaluation of her students’...
Myths and Monty Python: using the witch-hunts to introduce students to significance
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‘Weaving’ knowledge
Teaching History article
Diane Relf was concerned by what felt like an unbridgeable gulf between Year 7’s vocabulary and comprehension, and her aspirations both for their inclusion in history and their later academic success. As a subject leader without the benefit of any history-specific training at the start of her career, she embarked on...
‘Weaving’ knowledge
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No more mark schemes: manageable and meaningful assessment for Years 7–9
Teaching History article
In seeking to answer the question of how to make valid, reliable, and meaningful judgements about students’ work in history, Elizabeth Carr’s department abandoned criteria-based mark schemes and replaced them with a form of comparative judgement conducted in relation to a series of exemplars. In this article, Carr explains the...
No more mark schemes: manageable and meaningful assessment for Years 7–9
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Rescuing assessment from ‘knowledge-rich gone wrong’
Teaching History article
Christine Counsell sets out her concerns about the effects on history teaching of recent trends in secondary assessment practice. Situating her analysis within a long-term story of interplay between government policy, classroom practice and school leadership responses to inspection, Counsell sees new distortions emerging in the name of knowledge. She argues...
Rescuing assessment from ‘knowledge-rich gone wrong’
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Creating a progression model for teaching historical perspectives in Key Stage 3
Teaching History article
Jacob Olivey set out to design enquiries which would enable his pupils to reconstruct, using evidence, the perspectives of people in the past. In this article he shares in detail the planning and outcomes of two enquiries: one for Year 7 and one for Year 8. Olivey offers a example...
Creating a progression model for teaching historical perspectives in Key Stage 3
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Taking control of assessment
Teaching History article
Ian Luff recognised that in a post-levels world efforts to devise new assessment systems risked replicating old problems or creating new ones. Drawing on his many years’ experience of teaching and school leadership Luff argues that for assessment in history to be truly useful to teachers and pupils it needs...
Taking control of assessment
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Assessment and planning for progression at Key Stage 3
HA Guide and Links
The 2014 National Curriculum does not include an attainment target or any specified level against which you are expected to assess pupils' progress. The new attainment target says simply that:
‘By the end of each key stage, pupils are expected to know, apply and understand the matters, skills and processes...
Assessment and planning for progression at Key Stage 3
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Here ends the lesson: shaping lesson conclusions
Teaching History journal article
Reflecting on her efforts to improve her trainee’s lesson conclusions, Paula Worth decided to brush up her own. A journey of self-evaluation led her to revisit the Cambridge Conclusions Project. Through its lens, she judged her own lesson conclusions wanting. Worth examines the way in which the final episode of...
Here ends the lesson: shaping lesson conclusions
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Building meaningful models of progression
Teaching History article
Setting us free? Building meaningful models of progression for a ‘post-levels' world
Alex Ford was thrilled by the prospect of freedom offered to history departments in England by the abolition of level descriptions within the National Curriculum.
After analysing the range of competing purposes that the level descriptions were previously...
Building meaningful models of progression
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Designing end-of-year exams: trials and tribulations
Teaching History article
Since the decline of the National Curriculum Level Descriptions, schools in England have been asked to design their own forms of assessment at Key Stage 3. This had led to a great deal of creativity, but also a number of challenges. In this article Matt Stanford reflects on his department’s...
Designing end-of-year exams: trials and tribulations
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Triumphs Show 167: Keeping the 1960s complicated
Teaching History feature: celebrating and sharing success
During her PGCE year, it became evident to Rachel Coleman just how much pupils struggled with the complicated nature of history. They were troubled in particular by the lack of definitive answers, by the range of perspectives that might be held at the time of a particular event or development...
Triumphs Show 167: Keeping the 1960s complicated
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Making rigour a departmental reality
Teaching History article
Faced with the introduction of a two-year key stage and a new whole-school assessment policy, Rachel Arscott and Tom Hinks decided to make a virtue out of necessity and reconsider their whole approach to planning, teaching and assessment at Key Stage 3. In this article they give an account of...
Making rigour a departmental reality
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Effective essay introductions
Teaching History article
Struck by the dullness of some of her students’ essay introductions, Paula Worth reflected on the fact that she had never focused specifically on introductions. After surveying existing work by history teachers on essay structure in general and introductions in particular, she turns to the work of historians. Drawing on...
Effective essay introductions
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Cunning Plan 162: Transferring knowledge from Key Stage 3 to 4
Teaching History feature
Planning to deliver the new GCSE specifications presents a challenge and an opportunity to any history department, whatever their previous specification. The sweep of history that students will now study at GCSE is much broader than ‘Modern World’ departments are used to; including a medieval or early modern depth study...
Cunning Plan 162: Transferring knowledge from Key Stage 3 to 4
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Adventures in assessment
Teaching History article
In Teaching History 157, Assessment Edition, a number of different teachers shared the ways in which their departments were approaching the assessment and reporting of students’ progress in a ‘post-levels’ world. This article adds to those examples, first by illustrating how teachers from different schools in the Bristol area are...
Adventures in assessment
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Developing independent learning with Year 7
Teaching History article
Jaya Carrier’s decision to focus on developing a more independent approach to learning in history at Key Stage 3 was prompted by concerns about her A-level students. In seeking to establish secure foundations for students’ own historical research, Carrier first examined the assumptions of her colleagues and her students. She...
Developing independent learning with Year 7
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Assessment Without Levels
FAQs and Do's and Don'ts
The removal of level descriptions has generated some head-scratching, questions and conflict - especially when the adoption of a new whole school model does not seem to fit with recognised good practice for assessment and progression in history. Our FAQs guide will help to answer many of those frequently asked...
Assessment Without Levels
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Teaching History Curriculum Supplement 2014
Changes to the secondary history curriculum
Although modifications to the content of the National Curriculum for history have not been as dramatic as once feared, the effective revocation of the previous attainment target is radical indeed. When these changes are considered alongside the fact that more than half of maintained secondary schools (all academies and free...
Teaching History Curriculum Supplement 2014
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Move Me On 154: Mixed Ability Groups
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem:Joe Priestley is having problems providing sufficient challenge for the higher attainers within his mixed ability groups
Joe Priestley has settled into his training placement very well and has impressed other members of the history department with his lively and engaging ideas.
In his early teaching he was...
Move Me On 154: Mixed Ability Groups
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Pipes's punctuation and making complex historical claims
Teaching History article
Long, unreadable sentences in her students' essays led Rachel Foster to improve her post-16 students' punctuation. Her journey resulted, however, in more than improved punctuation.
It led her to theorise what historians are really doing in their ‘signpost sentences'. She found herself showing students how an academic historian anticipates a chunk of argument in a single, well-turned, opening sentence. Foster created an intervention in which students...
Pipes's punctuation and making complex historical claims
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Do's and Dont's in developing assessment practice
Article
Principles and practices to take forwardIn light of our experience since drafting our original plea for ‘Assessment without levels' and in the spirit of the new freedoms offered by the abolition of levels, we offer the series of principles and warnings set out in Figure 3. We hope that they...
Do's and Dont's in developing assessment practice
