On history teaching
A collection of mine and others' thoughts on how to teach secondary History well
When I started teaching, I taught very little History. I had one class of Year 8 Humanities, of which maybe half the year amounted to history units, with the rest the other Humanities strands. The rest of my class load was Spanish, which I was building fresh in Year 9 and then fresh in Year 10 and then in Year 11. It makes me shudder just to think about how much work I had to do and how ill-prepared I felt to do it.
So it’s only been a year or so that I would consider myself a proper History teacher, with responsibility for curriculum at one year level and scattered planning responsibilities across others.
Consequently, this blog post is largely going to be a collection of ideas from other, far more experienced, History teachers, accompanied by my own reflections, about what teaching History is and how to do it well. Each external piece of information is block-quoted and with an attribution and hyperlink in the preceding sentence.
Start with knowledge
I have always been a big believer in explicit teaching, although in my first teaching role I was all at sea about how to implement this on my own. Muddling along, it looked like eschewing technology when all of my colleagues were wholeheartedly embracing it which gained me a reputation for being boring and it meant putting students in rows when I would come back into the classroom and find they had been moved back into groups. I was that person in my year level meetings who said “Is a role play really the most efficient way to teach this? Think about how hard it will be to keep student behaviour on track and how long it will take to organise.” I suspect, at least with Humanities, none of the things I did really stuck. Being a wannabe explicit teacher was in some ways worse than just going along with all the inquiry learning, student-directed learning stuff because I knew I could be teaching so much better, but the job just felt so overwhelming I didn’t know where to start or what to do. I also had very little power to make decisions on my own save within the Spanish curriculum. For those of you who’ve never tried to develop a Languages curriculum from scratch as a non-native speaker, you are very lucky.
Now I am fortunate to teach at a school where I am not only encouraged but expected to teach explicitly and within a framework of shared planning and consistent delivery of lessons. But, as big a fan as I am of Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction - I had this summary laminated and pinned up above my desk at both schools I have taught at - that is not where to start.
To treat these principles as a checklist for lessons puts the cart before the horse. What should be driving History teaching is this: what do you want students to actually know about which parts of the past? Sometimes this can be difficult because there are simply so many potential things that you could teach, and with how vague the Australian and Victorian curricula are, teaching teams have to do a considerable amount of work on what to teach before figuring out how to teach it. The drivers of what is ultimately selected to be taught are varied and I don’t seek to advise on the specifics; I merely mean planning to teach History should begin with actual information about the past before any other framework for how to teach it is applied. See footnote #2 for a link to an exploration of how this functions at my school.
Nevertheless, I don’t do this sort of high-level planning in my role and in my school context. I am not in the business of deciding we should be teaching X battle over Y battle. So what could I do to become more effective?
Generic optimisation
I will term this section generic optimisation as, while it’s easier and more efficient the better the curriculum you are working with, you can still see some marginal gains even if what you’re working with isn’t all that great and you don’t have the authority to make more wide-ranging changes.
Area 1: How to explain new content better
Ben Newmark has given me some food for thought in a lengthy and excellent blog post - from the heading What, not how (bolding for emphasis mine):
…we need to think very carefully about what we are going to teach a class and how we are going to explain it. Strong subject knowledge makes this easier because it means a better understanding of the most significant and important areas of a topic, which can then be better emphasised in the delivery. I find making my own notes leads to better explanations, either through simple bullet points or mind-maps.
The process helps me identify potentially tricky spots, anticipate questions I am likely to be asked, and think up analogies and metaphors that build student understanding and retention of the material. For topics on which I know my own knowledge is still shaky, I script out what I’m going to say after reading up. I have a physical list of the areas in our curriculum on which I feel I am weak and try to work on these whenever time allows. The more I have learned about the subjects I teach the easier I have found it to explain them to my classes.
All this means my planning looks very different to how it did when I first trained. Whereas formerly, it was focused on the activities in the lessons, now most of my thinking goes on the substantive knowledge and how best to explain this directly instead of trying to find gimmicks on which to tangentially graft learning. I plan in the same way I do my lessons; I start with the objectives and then develop explicit explanation that directly addresses these.
Do I have time to do this to the extent that I would like most of the time? Certainly not. But as much as I can, I seek out podcasts or documentaries1 that relate to a lesson or series or lessons I am going to be teaching and watching/listening to these with a copy of the lesson resource open, adding to the notes where I can and providing explanations of additional context that strengthen the overall story I am telling and that I want students to understand. I should also note that this is enabled by the fact that I am not up until the wee hours the night before trying to figure out what I am going to teach the kids after lunch the following day.
However, here’s another consideration - being a sage before you step on stage:
Even in the lower year groups strong subject knowledge is crucial to planning great explanations because it is only by knowing more than we will deliver that we can be sure what we are explaining is of the most importance. It might be helpful to think of this process as a funnel or a sieve; by starting with a greater amount we can be more sure what we choose to deliver is of high value. For my own subject, history, Gustave Flaubert, provides a helpful analogy in saying that the writing of history should be like “drinking an ocean and then pissing a cup”.
Planning for great explanations should be seen in the same way.
To teach well explicitly, constantly upgrading our subject specific knowledge must be seen as a professional duty, privilege and perk of our positions. We must accept we can never know enough. We must read widely in our fields, listen to podcasts, and attend museums and lectures. Schools should support this; personally I believe that at least, if not more, time should be devoted to improving subject knowledge as is given to generic pedagogy.
This is also why it is helpful to keep teaching the same subject multiple years or semesters in a row; you have the opportunity to devote more of your preparation time to deepening your subject knowledge. I have almost the same subject load in the 2023 school year as I had in 2022 (I asked my department head for this) and it has really helped.
Area 2: Teaching for retention
To build on the earlier sections of this post, you could have the best curriculum in the world that is backed up by some great preparation and delivery, but unless it’s designed to retain knowledge rather than merely encounter knowledge2 then it’s all a big waste of time. So how have I tried to make sure my students retain what I taught them?
Ben Newmark has written a couple of good blog posts on retrieval practice: using retrieval practice as a starter and, once that is a habit, how to do it most effectively.
For various practical reasons I don’t deliver retrieval quizzes orally but as a single A4 page that students pick up when they enter the room. I also can’t do them for every lesson as they take time to plan and provide sample answers for marking, so at the moment I am aiming for one every 4-5 lessons and only with Year 10 where there is an end-of-semester exam to prepare for.
These are the focus areas Ben lists in his second post:
Plan retrieval quizzes to test the most important elements
Plan retrieval practice to link to the content of the lesson.
Test the disciplinary as well as the substantive.
Vary the style of retrieval practice.
Use retrieval practise tasks as prompts for further explanation.
I would rate myself a solid middling on most of these, except 5 and maybe 1 where I think I am doing better than middling. It’s too early for me to say whether it has made a difference to results but it provides me with opportunities to consistently re-articulate what level of detail is necessary for success and correct misconceptions as I go. I also try to collect the quizzes for scanning before returning to the students so they can keep it as a guide for their homework and for revision activities before end-of-semester exams.
Area 3: Modelling
This is a tough one. It’s hard to know when to stop modelling and when to expect students to just plan and write their own short answers and/or essays once they are familiar with the key arguments on a topic and have bedded down the key knowledge and evidence in support.
This is a lovely discussion (again, thanks Ben Newmark!) of how to teach an essay to Year 7 on Why did William win the Battle of Hastings?
My Y7 classes begin to build up to the essay two lessons before they write it. In the first lesson we read through the story of the Battle of Hastings together – me reading, pupils tracking. I plan questions around reasons William won without making it explicit this is what I’m doing. For example, after a passage on feigned flight I might ask “how did this help William win?”, and then spend some time extending the classes answers into fully developed sentences that would fit well in an essay. If a pupil voices something that isn’t developed, for example, “William had cavalry,” I’ll push them or another child in the class to turn it into a full sentence explanation into how cavalry helped William win the Battle. I’m especially quick to correct narrative answers, as unless this is dealt with early the seed can flower into the sorts of stories the children are more used to writing.
At the end of the lesson we’ll usually do a short quiz based on making sure they know events of the battle – this might also be a timeline that needs to be put in the right order or perhaps a cloze text exercise.
Read the whole thing. I like the way that he doesn’t expect students to assess or evaluate the most important factor(s) at Year 7 but focus on identifying and explaining with evidence to support and with a gradual release of responsibility as to the specifics on writing.
Questioning genericism - am I teaching History as History?
What I have described above are methods to shift the dial on the quality of History teaching. But there is a pitfall, too, of trying to over-genericise the teaching of what is a specific and unique discipline. The danger is that when students leave us, they don’t really understand what makes History as a discipline meaningful and don’t understand that knowing History is different from knowing stuff from other domains largely because History has more capacity to surprise us.
Recently on Twitter there was a little brouhaha on ‘action steps’ (which I have taken to essentially mean Rosenshine’s principles-type stuff) and their limited usefulness on their own to successful History teaching. It was provoked by this blog post.
I had never come across this blogger, Jonathan Grande, before and I will admit that some of the language makes me cringe and roll my eyes. But this did get me thinking (emphasis original):
The aims and purposes of teaching science and history differ wildly. Not just in content. It’s not simply that one subject aims for pupils to know and be able to do one set of things, and the other subject a different set.
The very nature of the curricular content and aims differ. It’s not just different information for pupils to process and store in long-term memory. It’s not simply that historical knowledge is different to scientific knowledge.
It’s more than that.
Historical knowing is different to scientific knowing.
Knowing about the past is different to knowing about the human body.
Knowing about the past means something different. Requires something different from the knower.
Because knowing about the past requires knowing what it takes to know about the past. And what it takes to know about the past is different to what it takes to know about the human body. We can’t – to take an obvious example – study the past through observation or experimentation. Historical knowledge is constructed in different ways. To know about the past and to know about the human body means to know something about these differences in how the knowledge is constructed. To understand something of the differences in the status of the knowledge.
Once you cut away the acadamese, there is a glimmer of a point here, or perhaps a warning sign - don’t get caught up in checklists!
And so generic action steps – however impressive the list, however well organised – are left impotent. They tell us nothing about how to teach different subjects. Nothing about how to develop disciplinary-specific ways of knowing. Nothing about how to get better as a history teacher.
You can’t action step your way to effective history teaching.
The differences in modelling, or resourcing, or explaining in history and science are so great – so fundamental – that starting from the same point, the same action step, is pointless. Unhelpful. Perhaps damaging.
This earlier blog post from the same writer made me go cold because, well, this is me:
When I began to adopt the ‘I Do, We Do, You Do’ model, I – unintentionally, without realising it – ended up changing the curricular object. It was no longer ‘causal reasoning’ I was teaching but ‘how to write a paragraph (about the past)’. Or ‘how to write a topic sentence’. Whilst those are both things I want and need my pupils to do successfully, I’m not sure they are, or should be, the curricular object themselves. At least, not as isolated, generic things. They only have meaning and purpose in context. As a way for a pupil to communicate their understanding of and argument about the past. As a way for a pupil to communicate their answer to a particular historical question. So pupils need to argue and think and craft their answer first. Then I can teach them how to communicate it in writing.
See Ben Newmark here on the dangers of generic writing frames such as PEE or PEEL which, again, I use all the time:
To free ourselves and our pupils from the chains of genericism we must first accept that good writing is contingent on what is being written about. They are not separable. The shape and structure of our argument should be influenced by the content we are concerned with to avoid creating unhelpful and misleading distortions. An argument about the extent of change and continuity after the Norman Invasion should be structured differently to an analysis of King John’s failings as a king.
I mean, yes. Obviously. But it also seems a bit beyond where I am at with my students. How can I teach Year 10 that there are different ways to write a historical argument that differ based on the kind of argument, when I sometimes still have students struggling with the concept of historical argument full stop and give me responses in the vein of “X occurred because of many different factors”? What I want to see is “While Y is an important reason that X occurred, ultimately Z is a more significant factor in X” and for that argument to be based on their own reasoning and not just regurgitating a thesis statement model I have taught them. Original arguments that indicate a student has really thought through and wrestled with the question is what gives me a thrill when marking and I still need to think about how I can teach this better.
Conclusions
So this is my summary on what is informing my teaching at the moment and what is informing my next steps both within my own classrooms and in terms of the conversations I have with my colleagues. No doubt as the term wears on I’ll be thinking about other things.
I have developed quite a tidy little list for teaching WW2 in Europe. My favourite documentary series is also entirely free on YouTube! I am also fortunate that my husband is a bit of a nerd himself and is OK with me spending an hour on this every now and then
Thanks. Check out my student- lrd lessons at historyideasandlessons.substack.com
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