With the 9-1 GCSE there is more content to remember. Fact! We all need to develop short sharp ideas, or ‘tricks’ to make learning stick.
Why?
With the 9-1 GCSE course history teachers have to consider how much time to spend on each unit across two (or three) years. There is more content than before so this will take longer.
A previous blog goes into detail on how to plan your GCSE course for maximum impact. You would be wise to attend our day course on this to help with planning and sticky ideas.
Having spent lots of time thinking about this, I believe that there simply isn’t the time to finish the course with lots of time left to re-visit / revise in the spring term of Year 11.
This is because you have more content to cover and you should be teaching the course using an enquiry based approach.
By basing your original lessons on clear planning principles you are more likely to make the first phase of teaching memorable. If not your GCSE course could become a content led slog of ‘one damn thing after another.’
Revise as you go
An alternative approach is to revise as you go.
Previously we have looked at Ebinghaus’s forgetting curve. Not only should the original learning experience be memorable, but ‘over-learning’ should take place. Re-visiting of older content should happen regularly through-out your GCSE course too.
We suggested that you should find time at the beginning (first five to ten minutes) of a lesson to remind and revise older material learnt weeks / months / years ago. Doing this regularly could build stronger memories.
We have all used ‘settler’ activities and we before we get to that high impact enquiry start or ‘ISM’ (thanks Rob Phillips). What is being said here, is use these settler tasks much more purposefully to link to prior learning.
By regularly re-calling older knowledge in this way, it should stick more.
It must be stressed that the original content should have taught through enquiry using an engaging and memorable approach. If not you will just be delivering a content led course.
Five minute tricks to make learning stick
So what might these short recall activities actually look like?
Here are 5 approaches or tricks to help make the learning stick.
Helping the ‘constantly chronologically lost’
This great quote from Christine Counsell was originally coined when she advised us on how to teach the concept ‘change and continuity’.
A really simple way to help the chronologically lost in, say your crime and punishment course is to start a lesson, after the first few weeks of the course, with a timeline and some jumbled events that you have looked at.
Get your students to place the events on the timeline in the correct place.
If you keep repeating this at the start of lessons as you proceed through the unit and introduce more and more events that you have covered, the chronologically lost will be found.
Then re-visit this crime or medicine content / jumbled time line when you are teaching other units too.
I tried this approach at Key Stage 3 last year and it really worked to help my classes get the events of the early 20th century. These two images show you what I did.
The three chair challenge
Here you place three chairs at the front of the room and have 6-10 event statements pinned (blu-taked?) to the board behind the chairs each on A3 size paper.
The events you choose could be about the same unit when you start in year 10, say your crime course.
As you progress through the course, you could choose random events from across the different units you teach.
If you are wise enough to teach Crime, Whitechapel and Elizabethan England in year 10 then by the summer you could have 10-12 statements from across the course. For example:
- The Waltham Black Act
- The execution of Mary Queen of Scots
- The year of the Ripper investigations
- The abolition of trial by ordeal
- The introduction of the Metropolitan police-force
- The Spanish Armada
- John Howard’s book, ‘The State of Prisons in England and Wales’
- The Gunpowder Plot
- The Revolt of the Northern Earls
- Roanoke
Then ask for three volunteers / conscripts to sit on the chairs. Whilst they attempt to sort the events into chronological order on the board, the rest of the class have to write a quiz question and answer about each event.
The three volunteers can be replaced if they don’t get the events in the correct order. Once they have arranged the statements in the correct order, individuals from the class test the three victims using the questions they have just written. The three volunteers can also be replaced if they get a question wrong.
Stepping Stones
This is the more active alternative to the three chair challenge.
Have 6/8/10 events tacked onto the board. The class then has use their knowledge to write a question and answer about each event.
Take the statements from the board and place them on the floor like stepping stones. Ask for a volunteer to come and stand on the first ‘stone’.
Someone else from the class asks their question, if the answer given is correct the volunteer jumps to the second stone, and so on.
If they get the answer wrong the person who asked the question gets to replace them.
Camp fires
You may remember our aversion to the lolly stick approach to questioning a few years ago?
If you still have bundles of the blessed wooden sticks tucked away in desk draws, now is the time to get them out. With this activity you can metaphorically burn them!
Get your class to stand in a circle. Its better to stand in an open space.
Each person has three lolly sticks to throw on the ‘camp fire’ (the space in the middle of the circle). Choose a topic / time period to discuss e.g crime prevention in the Middle Ages. Volunteers / conscripts then o tell you a precise fact about the topic.
Every one they get right allows them to throw one of their sticks onto the camp fire. Keep changing the topic after a couple of minutes. This activity is really good at encouraging those quiet classes you hate to contribute to speak.
Queue up challenge.
Get your class to line up in two teams in a queue, each in front of a large piece of sugar / flip chart paper.
Make sure that each team is positioned away from the other to stop them copying. Give both teams one marker pen. The game begins when you tell them all the topic. For example, Nazi methods of control.
The first person walks (runs?) to the large piece of paper and writes a precise fact about the topic. They then walk back and, hand the pen to the next person and join the back of the queue. I encourage conferring as this helps create a team vibe and, we do learn from each other.
Give them a short period of time to complete the task (one minute?). At the end you mark each point they have made with either one or two marks – the better / more precise the fact the more marks it is worth. This encourages the recall of precise information.
