This page serves as an index for all the book reviews in the different subject sections of the site. Please click the link to see the review.

• Edward Baptist, The half has never been told. - Slavery in the USA
• Chris Eyre, Smoke Signals, 1998. (film review) - American West
  
• Orlando Figes, Revolutionary Russia, 1891-1991: A History, New York, Holt & Company, Henry, 2014
• Helen Gunter, Leaders and leadership in education. - Leadership in education
• Peter Kenez, Varieties of Fear.  Cold War and Communist Europe
• R.N. N. Morris, The Gentle Axe: A Novel, United States, Tantor Media, 2007. - Tsarist Russia - Fiction
• Robert Service, A history of 20th century Russia. - Tsarist and Soviet Russia.

• Edward Vallance, A Radical History of Britain: Visionaries, Rebels and Revolutionaries - The Men and Women Who Fought for Our Freedoms, London, Abacus, 2010. - British History - General
  
• Richard White, Remembering Ahanagran: A History of Stories, United States, Hill & Wang Pub, 1999. - Immigration in the USA & the Historical Method
  

Well that all sounds very meta!! Today's post is really a bit of a follow up to my post from the other day about how knowledge can help you structure a good A Level course. I had quite a long email discussion on the back of that post, in which it was suggested that some people might read "knowledge" as "events". Today I want therefore to outline what I mean when I am talking about using knowledge and how reading historians might help.

What do we Mean by Knowledge?
This is actually a very contentious issue, so I am going to rephrase it... "What do I mean by knowledge". This is my brief definition of what I am talking about:

• Knowledge of key concepts like "autocracy" and what they meant to people at the time. Knowledge of how these concepts changed and developed over time and why they mattered.
• Knowledge of context - the things that were going on in and around historical periods and the impact of these on the time.
• Knowledge of key people and events. This is really the surface level - events cannot be understood without their context or the underlying concepts.

My main focus when planning is to lay the foundations of the first two conceptions of knowledge so that the events make sense. This is based on an understanding of how to teach kids effectively, but also on having a really solid grasp of those concepts and that context myself. I will go into the issue of planning for progression within units in a later post.

So the real question is, how do I know what concepts and which aspects of the context to teach? This is where I come back to reading good historical overviews and depth studies. Any historian worth their salt will try to explain the important context and concepts to the reader as part of the unfolding narrative of events. As such it is the best place, in my opinion, for a history teacher to start. Robert Service for example begins his work on Russia with an exploration of the concept of autocracy and the concept of serfdom as well as an exploration of the context 1855-1881 before launching into the events of the reign of Alexander III. In essence it is this which allows the reader to make sense of events.

In terms of pupil understanding, the process is no different, however exam boards (and too often textbooks) make little allowance for how the context and concepts might be developed. Below I have tried to outline my own thinking on the concepts and context necessary for students to understand the Russia 1855-1964 course. This in effect was the invisible step which I did before beginning to plan the sequence of content to teach as outlined in my last blog. I hope by making this visible, it shows even more how the core concepts and context are the groundwork which inform how the content and events might be covered.