In my previous two blogs I looked at the problems with teaching the assassination of JFK as a murder mystery, and with imagination type activities in learning about the Holocaust. Today I want to explore one of the most controversial lessons I have witnessed.

The “slave auction”
Reading the title of this, I hope most people would be baulking already. However, in the last five years, I have heard of this kind of lesson being used in multiple history departments and the image above is not invented but actually came from a grammar school in the South East. Just as with the Holocaust example I gave last time, this type of activity can end up being done in multiple topic areas, but effectively involves role-playing an extreme power imbalance.
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The reasons departments persist with “lessons” like this one are usually vaguely couched in terms of empathy, and the need to clarify complex concepts like chattel slavery. However, more often than not they are promoted for their “interactive”, or “engaging” elements. Indeed, one non-historian described seeing such a lesson to me once as being “a good, fun way to get across a difficult idea.”

My thanks to Sally Thorne @MrsThorne for reading this blog and contributing her expertise to refining the very rough-round-the-edges original. For more of Sally's thoughts on teaching excellent history, do read her book: "Becoming and Outstanding History Teacher"

Today I want to briefly cover the issue of differentiation. In part this is responding to an anonymous blog HERE which suggests that differentiation is a well-intentioned but morally bankrupt educational approach. 

​Now there are many things I actually agree and sympathise with in this blogpost, especially the problems of “personalised learning” which became so prevalent in the early 2000s, and the demands for teachers to make tasks easier for pupils to access etc. However, I think the blog itself is based in a major logical fallacy: “because differentiation has been done badly, all differentiation must be bad.” It is for this reason I simply cannot agree with the conclusions the author reaches.