Watch this short video, where Richard McFahn provides 3 simple ideas for overview lessons.
Before he does this, Richard gives you a brief rationale explaining why overview lessons are so important.
Watch the video here:
Why Overviews?
If you wanted more on why overview lessons are important, it is generally agreed that overviews provide a framework of knowledge which:
- Act as a provisional scaffold and accelerate learning of longer periods of history;
- They help students contextualise, organise, and analyse events, developments, and people over broad temporal and spatial scale;
- They include knowledge of second order concepts such as chronology and change;
- They are open and adaptable to new content that is taught in depth later on;
- They should be able to be taught quickly, and then more detail of the story is re-visited later on.
A short summary of the ideas
Idea one is a simple story telling and reading exercise that can be adapted for any unit.
Idea two shows you the importance of creating overview lessons at GCSE. The example here is a cracker.
Idea 3 shows an overview lesson that covers 500 years of history and involves matching pairs of pictures.
For more ideas on creating big picture overviews, read this blog which gives you loads more ideas.
