Historic academic rigor
mortis: students’ ‘switching’ off from GCSE history
Welcome back to @BeBoldHistory blogs! In this blog post committee member @knowledge_witch writes about the challenges of historical writing at GCSE.
Imagine the scenario. It’s the
third week of teaching your brand-new cohort of GCSE students. The first couple
of lessons there was a buzz, an electrified excitement of anticipation where
students were eager, keen, and excited to find out about what they are going to
be learning about at GCSE.
When I think back to the memories I
have of teaching their year 9 lessons, I remember there was a full cacophony of
powerful stories. The knowledge we taught them did the heavy lifting as they
visited old and new worlds, peoples, and places encapsulated under the premise
of a global journey through time.
In comparison GCSE History is
problematic. We teach modern world history, medicine through time, and
Elizabethan England. The trickiness inherently comes from the issue that
students already know the big reveal in these stories. In its most simplistic
form, the story for medicine is quickly diagnosed as ‘people got better,
medicine improved.’ In our modern world study of the interwar period, the
ending of this story is already hijacked from key stage two learning, with the
outbreak of World War Two in 1939. These units of work have already given away
their big plot reveal before teachers have taught the lesson: “Miss we have
already studied this in primary school.”
The lesson starts with our
well-rehearsed routines; students’ settling into answering retrieval practice
questions; however there is uneasiness in our teacher selves which has already
begun to permeate into our teaching. How much time do we have to get through
the GCSE content? When will I have time to explain exam questions? Equally,
when will students have time to practice them? When will I have time to teach
students how to revise? This anxiety is unintentionally passed on to your
students, they have begun to realise that there different ‘feel’ about their
lessons compared to key stage three. The situation is now incredibly serious,
it is high stakes, as they attend more lessons some begin to sink below the
overwhelming tidal wave of knowledge. The assumption that more content must
mean ‘better history’ for some of our students shuts them off from our subject.
While low stakes quizzing may have
afforded us the opportunity for students to recall knowledge from different
units they have studied, we are now faced with the conundrum of students’
holding a collection of knowledge about what they have been taught in the past
about the past! The impact is that when students sit their GCSE exam, they are
simply writing down lots of information, lots of key facts. Here comes the big
disclaimer – this blog is not a salvarsan 606 (a magic bullet – I realise that
this is a pretty niche reference) but some tried and tested strategies to help
students get better at history.
REBRAND
First, let us rebrand. Instead of
teachers living in the mindset that year 10 and 11 lessons are high stakes and
somehow different from key stage three, let us think differently here. We are
still teaching the subject which we love, the subject which brought us into the
classroom in the first place, we are still reading and incorporating
scholarship into our key stage four lessons. So then, instead of fixating on
the final product, the REAL GCSE EXAM, a small part of a student’s experience
of curriculum, let us return to what we love, history.
So what?
The USA did not join the league of
nations, so what? Yes, so what is this knowledge useful for? If you are
familiar with a unit of work which I love to call "men who make treaties
and men who break them", then this is a question I would be really asking
your students. So, your students have learnt this fact – let's get them to
think about why this small snippet of knowledge is worth remembering. So, what
is it useful for?
The USA didn’t join the League of
Nations – so what?
Option A: The League of Nations was
a complete failure because the USA didn’t join.
Option B: One of the world’s most
powerful countries failed to join the League.
Option C: The USA chose to
follow a policy of isolationism, which meant that they kept out of European
problems.
Here students are thinking hard
about the history, they’re thinking about these options and deciding which
option is best (is it A, B, or C – or is it all three?) Equally here, I would
encourage your students to be prepared to defend their ideas to reveal their
thinking (picture example).
GCSE = exam questions
Exam pressure alert! Instead of
overloading students with number of marks, faddy rubrics (sorry PEEL, PEE or
PEED) or mark schemes, let’s focus on getting students better at writing
history. Before students begin any writing, we must tackle the issue of
collections of knowledge. To help students make sense of the knowledge they
have been taught, we start by completing a knowledge sort. This is hardly
ground-breaking, but it allows all learners to sift through the vast amount of
historical content they have been taught. In this example, students can debate
with one another, and their teacher, about the answer. Does it fit into one
category or two? If they think the knowledge applies to one heading, what
verbal rationale can they give to support their ideas? Additionally, this
knowledge sort has given students the building blocks of their writing.
Right so we are on to the tricky
bit.
The tricky part- pen to paper
Writing. Writing is tricky, so let’s keep it simple. In this paragraph I am going to
explicitly tell students that I want them to make a claim, use evidence, and
explain the knowledge they are using. Why? We have all read the scholarship,
haven’t we? Historians make claims, so naturally isn’t
this just good writing? Forget about that GCSE exam, we want our students to be
proficient in writing about history! Returning to the scholarship is a great
way to show students historians' writing; where they have made a claim, where
they have used evidence and the explanations they have given (it’s a wonderful
way to show how evidence and explanations can be fluid in writing – one doesn’t
have to come before the other!)
As with all cases of historic
academic rigor mortis it takes time and practice. My experience is that it
takes time for these practices to become embedded, and the standard of writing
will take time to improve. Like any change, these practices should not be
reserved for the current fire that your fighting, the improvement of key stage
four teaching. In hindsight, year 7 is where this practice should be grounded.
@knowledge_witch is Head of Humanities at Ernulf Academy, part of Astrea Academy trust.
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