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[…]
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[…]
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[…]
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[…]
As stated in a previous blog, the teaching of historical interpretations is a crucial element of developing your student’s historical thinking. If you want to play the game where your teaching is solely about getting kids to ‘pass the test’, to do well in the 9-1 GCSEs then this is[…]
Are interventions worth it? How much time do you spend on ‘interventions’? How busy are you with year 11/12/13 weekly intervention, after school revision sessions, lunch time drop ins, emails home for those who haven’t and probably won’t ever attend, logging this attendance on SIMs… All of these things take[…]
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[…]
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[…]
A guide to conducting and oral history project from Giddy – a brilliant new resource which, explores teenage memories from the post-war era
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[…]
Revision / re-visiting information to make it stick is hugely important. Revising knowledge regularly will help your students remember better. Fact. To help with this process why not play Weimar Germany revision Jenga in your classroom? The resources are available here for you to download. If you want to find out how[…]
Over the last year I have been working hard creating resources for the new GCSEs. This has led me to look really carefully at many things: different topics, the details of the content, and the assessment approaches of the new GCSEs on offer. These exam questions can be predictable. Fact.[…]
After marking our mock exams a few years ago something struck me. Our students were often failing to get high marks on questions about source evaluation (this was the source paper for OCR Modern World). After closer analysis of examiners reports, mark-schemes and student responses, I realised that we needed some[…]
Here are 6 Strategies for using You Tube clips in the history classroom. YouTube is such a fantastic resource that when you take a step back it is almost impossible to comprehend. If you’d have told me 20 years ago that I could type a few words into a[…]
