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In my last two blogs, I explored some of the problems which have arisen from a limited engagement with historical interpretations and a general fear of talking about historical truth. In this final part of the series, I hope to offer some tried and tested classroom approaches which might help students build a better understanding of the provisional nature of historical claims, whilst not going down the rocky road of vague relativism.
Tackling the issue of oversimplification To prevent students from falling back to a lazy cynicism about historical interpretations, I like to use the following approach which I term the “IMA” approach to unpicking interpretations. This works best when students are asked to read extended extracts from historians, or even whole articles. It certainly would not work with tiny gobbets. In essence, the process involves:
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On Friday, the defence secretary. Michael Fallon said that NATO needed to do more to tackle the “false reality” being propagated by Russia. He argued that Russia’s production of “Fake News” was destabilising western democracy and undermining electoral processes. Claims like these are nothing new. For the last six months, the US has been awash with claims of “Fake News” being put out by both the Republicans and Democrats, and a simple search for the #FakeNews hashtag reveals some terrifying results. I find it striking that a country which was born of the declaration that some truths are self-evident, should find itself at the forefront of a post-truth version of politics. All of this is very disturbing, not least because if we are in a post-truth world, there is a very real question about whether knowledge is important any more (I would argue that it is more so than ever - more on this soon). Naturally there has been much soul searching and even more hand wringing about how we approach the issue of truth having been downgraded in our political discourse. In some cases, people are drawing historical parallels and suggesting that we learn the warnings of the 1930s; to be on guard against malicious propaganda; to disbelieve the information coming out of the (insert the group you disagree with here) camp; and so on.  History lessons and the post-truth discourse
Followers of the Schools History Project will know that one of the founding principles of the movement was to help students see the relevance of history to their lives, and give them some of the tools to help understand it (Schools History Project, n.d.). Over the last few months, I have seen numerous exhortations in the history teaching community for educators to warn pupils of the dangers of misinformation, and encourage them to be on guard against malign interpretations. Although well intentioned, I think this use of history misses the point of our discipline somewhat. In fact, I wonder if such an approach, namely using history to make pupils sceptical of information, has actually contributed to the post-truth problem.  Just a short blog to thank all of you who attended my session at TFSI yesterday. As promised I am uploading the session resources here for you to download. Please do have a browse around the rest of the site whilst you are here. There are lots of links to blogs on progress, progression, second-order concepts and substantive knowledge in the blog bar on the right. Alex Blog posts which may be of particular interest:
Or to give this it’s fuller title: “Shackled to a corpse by hands and feet, tied to a 50 tonne block made of GCSE specifications, in a sea of indifference, blinded by the sea-spray of accountability, with a guy sat in a boat asking why we are not swimming better: Why can’t we make progress in our understanding of progression?” To be honest, if you want the short version and have a bit of imagination, you can stop reading right there. I will warn you now, this is a long post. But then again, progression is a complex subject…or rather it is a subject which has been made complex. Please bear with me though, because I think this is fundamental! If you have not yet read my “primers” on progression, you may wish to do so now. If you are already familiar with the two aspects above then please feel free to read on... Context
Over the last week or so I have been marking PGCE trainees’ assessments on planning for progression in history. As I have done this, I have found myself returning to a common theme in my comments; namely that trainees first need to consider WHAT they want pupils to get better at before they start considering HOW they want to achieve this. Where trainees did focus on the substance of history, there was either too much generic focus on the development of historical “skills” and processes (and issue which I will deal with later), or too much time spent on discussing knowledge acquisition and aggregation with little sense of how this contributed to overall historical progression. Knowledge acquisition certainly is a type of progress, but I would argue is insufficient to count for all progression in history. In essence, trainees have found themselves wrestling with history’s twin goals of developing pupils’ knowledge as well as their second-order modes of thinking. Too often they fell down the gap in between. Interestingly, these confusions were much less evident in work produced by maths trainees. This may be because the maths curriculum specifies a series of substantive concepts for students to master. For example, in understanding algebra, students are asked to “simplify and manipulate algebraic expressions”, to “model situations or procedures by translating them into algebraic expressions”, or “use algebraic methods to solve linear equations in 1 variable” (DfE, 2013, p. 6). As such, maths teachers can help pupils progress to more powerful ideas about maths through a clear content focus. Maths does still have its unifying second-order concepts, “select and use appropriate calculation strategies to solve increasingly complex problems” for example (DfE, 2013, p. 4), but progression in these is can be tied to precise curriculum content. To be fair, this does also come unstuck, as pupils failed to use their second-order ability to apply maths in context in the “Hannah’s Sweets” controversy last year! A very real confusion In many ways, the confusion about progression is at the heart of history teaching more generally. Indeed, the recent book "New Directions in Assessing Historical Thinking" (Ercikan & Seixas, 2015) suggests that there are vastly different approaches to understanding historical progression both internationally and within countries and states. This is certainly true of history education in England. There are many reasons for this: This is a primer post which goes with my upcoming blog on progression in history. You can find the main post HERE. You can also find my other primer post, in which I attempted to do a demolition job on the idea of linear progression models HERE.
Linear progression models are riddled with problems. In this post, I want to focus on one response to the confusions created them: research-based progression models. Let me be clear from the outset, research-based models of progression were not designed as a replacement for National Curriculum levels, rather to address their myriad shortcomings and help teachers to really get to grips with what progression in history looks like. The best thing to do to understand research-based models of progression is to read Lee and Shemilt’s seminal article in Teaching History 113, “A scaffold not a cage”. Research based models differ from linear models because they take students’ work and understanding as a starting point to describe what improvement in history actually looks like. In the above article, Lee and Shemilt offer some descriptions of what pupils’ thinking about historical evidence looks like. They then divide this into “stages” of development. The upper four stages of their model are given here. This blog is a primer for my upcoming post on thinking about progression in history. You can find the main post HERE.
Linear progression models have dominated the way we talk about progression in history for many years now. Once upon a time, they were an odd perversion created by the mis-use of National Curriculum levels, but now they are absolutely everywhere, infiltrating everything from A Level to GCSE. Linear progression models attempt to create a series of steps which pupils must climb in order to improve at a subject. In maths for example, pupils might begin to understand the concept of angles and their relationships to straight lines by looking at how angles on a straight line add up to 360 degrees, then moving on to deal with angles on parallel lines, and so on. In maths this has the potential to work because there are clear steps for pupils to take to improve in their knowledge of angles and lines. In history the situation is quite different. Linear progression models, such as those used by many schools up until the abolition of the National Curriculum level descriptors, were generally based on the idea that students could improve through a focus on their second-order understanding, rather than knowledge; that is to say, the ways in which we understand history, for example through our understanding of significance, cause, or change. See the example below:  Richard White's "Remembering Ahanagran" is a book which I have been unable to put down. At times witty and amusing and at other times deeply moving, White tells the story of his mother's early life and emigration to the United States through her own memories, gathered over a lifetime.
"Lives are not stories. A day, a month, a year, or a lifetime has no plot. Our experiences are only the raw stuff of stories...We turn our lives into stories, and, in doing so, we...[give our] lives a coherence that the day-to-day lives of our actual experience lack." One one level, White helps us to get a glimpse into the intimate stories of his family and shows us the strangeness of the world they inhabited. We see the impact of British policy in Ireland, we feel the social stigma attached to mixed marriages, we appreciate how people were both driven by the own desires but also controlled by factors outside their control. I was particularly drawn in by the detailed focus on the construction and reconstruction of ordinary lives. White is by no means glorifying the life his mother led, however, he shows it to be of the same interest and importance as so many other "famous lives" which have of course received far more attention. He demonstrates this beautifully when talking about the house in which his mother spent her early years in the USA. "There are no histories of Chicago in which 6420 South Mozart Street...matters very much...But for Sara, Chicago always existed in relation to South Mozart Street. And all of America existed in relation to Chicago. South Mozart Street, where she started and ended her day, was the center of America." On a different level, the book is also a history of the United States in the early 20th century. The characters of the story, whilst very ordinary, are also touched by the major events of the time. During Prohibition illegal stills are kept in the basement. When the Great Depression arrives its toll on the immigrant Americans can be seen. The racial tensions in the South also receive mention as do the corrupt legal systems of Chicago which find themselves in thrall to the Irish gangs. Towards the end of the book, themes of anti-Semitism and racism tinge the story, whilst the War throws the lives of the characters into disarray. If nothing else, the book is well worth a read to see how these "great" events impacted on the lives of everyday people. It is a story about what it means to be American and how American identity has been shaped. Finally, and most importantly, "Remembering Ahanagran" is something of a historiography. The memories of White's mother are the raw materials of the book, however White has taken a very different approach to this. Much of the book sees him discussing and dealing with the gulf which exists between the memories of his mother and the evidence he can find historically. He begins by outlining the tensions between memory, story-telling and history. "I once though of my mother's stories as history...Then I became an historian, and after many years I have come to realize that only careless historians confuse memory and history. History is the enemy of memory. The two stalk each other across the fields of the past, claiming the same terrain." In every aspect, White compares his mother's memories and stories with the evidence he can find. In most cases there are huge tensions between the two version of the past and the book deals with how these might be reconciled. This is often a difficult process, and on more than one occasion it is clear that White's mother is not entirely happy with the direction the book is taking, she would rather keep the version of history she has created for herself. However White persists and the most fascinating aspect of the book is how White deals with these tensions and how he attempts to construct a history from the fragments. This is one of the most brilliant and eloquent explanations of the historical method I have read. It is like picking up White's thoughts and notes as much as it is a finished book. He also clearly struggles with his own memories of his mother and father as these are challenged by the evidence. I think my favourite aspect of the book has been, what White would term, its anti-memoir quality. There is no attempt here to construct simple stories with simple meanings. Every aspect of Sara Walsh's life story is scrutinised. In many cases the result is complex and the result seems strange. But as White notes: "Any good history begins in strangeness. The past should not be comfortable. The past should not be a familiar echo of the present...The past should be so strange you wonder how you and the people you know and love could come from such as time..." Ultimately the book feels like a discussion, a conversation about the past and how and why we construct it. It is a brilliant way to get thinking about the historical method and a highly recommended read to really get you thinking about what it means to be an historian and what the role of history should be. It also asks us to consider the meaning of historical significance, taking seemingly innocuous events and showing the enormous shadows they cast over the lives of the people in the book. White also demands that we think about the nature of time itself. He shows how some stories occur in ordinary time, whilst others, such as those of the heroes of The Troubles, take place in a "monumental time", where lives and deaths can span centuries instead of decades. Of course, ultimately the question of historical truth is raised. The conclusion on this is far from clear cut. The themes of the book are universal, they ask us to consider the merits and dangers of memory, and the shortcomings of History as a discipline. This book has not always been a simple read, but it has been absolutely riveting. I am not sure I have done it justice here but I cannot recommend it highly enough. I will finish with one last quote (from a book I could quote every second page of). "Memory is a living thing vulnerable to a dead past until memory itself dies with its creator... History is a dead thing brought to new life. It is fragments of the past, dead and gone, resurrected by historians...It threatens our versions of ourselves." Well as it turns out, we do talk about History Club...quite a lot actually...my wife suggests possibly too much, though I think not enough! Anyway, today's blog is a follow-up to Toby French's excellent post about the myths of good history teaching. If you have not read it, can I suggest you head over and have a look now. In the blog, French notes how he tries to get a trainee to look beyond the "strategies for engagement" taught to them at university and think more pragmatically about how they might deliver effective history lessons. I thought this would be quite relevant as many trainees begin to think about moving into their new jobs for September.
Reading the blog got me to thinking about my own work with trainees. To be fair they are quite a mixed bunch. Some come in with really clear notions about what learning means and how it might be achieved, some less so. However all come with one unifying feature, a lack of experience. I completely understand French's frustration when he talks about having been told that group work, co-operative learning and teacher facilitation were the ultimate answers to pupil learning. Many of the trainees I have worked with in the past seem to work on a lesson by lesson basis, not really looking at the larger picture. They tend to focus on activity over content and assume that "engaging" means "fun", and that all teacher talk is a bad thing. They look at assessment as a way of showing progress, rather than as a useful teaching tool. These are the rules of History Club for many trainee teachers. What trainees don't yet know, is that these are the rules of Trainee History Club... Now I completely understand why universities have to equip their students with all of these beliefs. A single year is really not enough to become a good teacher. Hell ten years is barely adequate in my view! Universities therefore need to imbue their charges with a wide range of approaches to teaching, to allow them to deal with an even wider range of schools and students. Universities need to provide their NQTs with the milk needed to survive their infancy in teaching. This means quick ways to getting classes engaged and simple solutions to delivering content after only a few weeks of training. We all need to start somewhere, and the best universities couple this with excellent pedagogical training as well (the problem of poor training will if anything become worse as universities are cut off from the training programmes, as Rich Kennet has written about before.) The real issue with this form of training comes when such teachers are not weaned off this diet and into more complex understandings of their professional role. The best students should be moving beyond the "activity" approach to teaching within their first few months, others may take a bit longer, but all need to make this move. 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:
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.  This is just a very short post. I am uploading (bottom of the post) an updated version of my thoughts on assessing historical thinking. This is more of an update to previous posts than anything radically new, and I am painfully aware that I need to incorporate something of Kate Hammond's latest research on substantive knowledge. However, it does expand upon some of the ideas I have put forward in the "Setting us free?" article in this month's Teaching History. As such I thought it was worth putting on. All comments appreciated. For context read "Setting us free?" HERE. To be frank - read the whole issue - especially Hammond! Mr F 
So I have been reading "Make it Stick" by Baron, Roediger and McDaniel over the last few days, and I have to say that it has been quite enlightening. The book sets out to explore the neuroscience behind how we learn, setting out the processes involved in learning in an accessible way and making reference to a number of studies. The book does not claim to have complete knowledge of the subject and notes where more research is needed, however I feel it has offered some very useful guidance on how I could move my students on. Most importantly the book deals with a number of myths which are peddled in education especially and debunks these once and for all (VAK I am looking at you).
I was pointed in the direction of the book by Christine Counsell and Michael Fordham. Michael in particular has posted three excellent blogs on the specific application of the book to issues of planning in history. (Blog 1, Blog 2, Blog 3). However, I wanted to focus more specifically on helping students to grasp some of the key points from the book. As such, I attach a PowerPoint which could be looked at in one, two or three sessions. I would suggest it will work best with KS4 or 5 and, in the spirit of creating a sense of urgency, should be linked to the idea that mastering memory is key to exam success.
OK, so I am not even going to make the pretense of being brief here! The attached document (below) outlines my current thinking about how we might make assessment work in a whole school context. As suggested by the title, this has been something of an epic struggle and I am pretty sure I haven't got it right, however I hope that it might at least spark some discussion.
I would like to make mention again however of the excellent work being done by Michael Fordham at http://clioetcetera.wordpress.com/ on this issue which has been crucial in forming many of my ideas. As ever, all thoughts and comments are appreciated!  Just a short post to say that I have updated a range of content to do with progression models for the new KS3. I have made a lot of amendments thanks to some very productive discussions with people online and in departments around the country. I have attached my DRAFT rationale for History, which outlines some of my current thinking - any feedback would be greatly appreciated. I have also updated the old posts with the new materials. Some of the key changes include:
All thoughts and comments appreciated.
 The AndAllThat.co.uk teacher blog is moving from WordPress onto the main website. From now on you will find non-topic related content here.
You can still access the archives from the WordPress site by visiting http://andallthatweb.wordpress.com . I will endeavour to transfer the content over the next few months. Mr F  “As part of our reforms to the national curriculum , the current system of ‘levels’ used to report children’s attainment and progress will be removed. It will not be replaced.” (DfE, 2013) This blog aims to be a follow-up to the Northern History Forum meeting from November 2013. You will find links on the blog to all aspects of planning for progress and progression in the new KS3. I hope we are able to spark some healthy professional dialogue about the concepts we want to use to assess History; how we make progression models meaningful; and how we can create a mastery model of History education. All comments are much appreciated and help us to begin the process of moving History forwards. I hope we can be in the vanguard of educational reform as a subject as we move into 2014. As ever, I am indebted to the huge amount of work which has already been done on these themes over the last 20 years, by a range of incredibly talented people. I have provided a full bibliography for all the models in the introductory file below. I would however like to mention the amazing articles from Peter Lee and Denis Shemilt in Teaching History, as well as Peter Seixas' and Tom Morton's "The Big Six" which first got me excited about the prospect of rethinking history assessment. For each of these concepts it would be good to have a discussion about how far you agree with the signposts set out and the aims of the concepts. Student friendly versions are available in the student resources section.
Exposition Surely I cannot be the only one whose heart leapt when I read this statement in the DfE’s recent statement on assessment without National Curriculum Levels. In two short paragraphs, the document went on to describe everything that was wrong with the current system of assessment in Key Stages 1 to 3. “We believe this system is complicated and difficult to understand, especially for parents. It also encourages teachers to focus on a pupil’s current level, rather than consider more broadly what the pupil can actually do. Prescribing a single detailed approach to assessment does not fit with the curriculum freedoms we are giving schools.” (DfE, 2013) I seldom sing the praises of the Secretary of State for Education, but this surely has to be one of the most sensible reforms we have seen for many years. In the wake of the demise of the levels system, it seems the ideal time to begin to thinking about what should come next. How should we think about progress and progression in History in a post-Levels world? It has long been accepted that the system of NC Levels is woefully inadequate when it comes to describing, assessing or planning for progression in History. Levels have become, in the worst cases, the end point of teaching itself. This has been accompanied by an increasing fetishisation of NC Levels as a means of establishing accountability in schools. Worryingly, the idea of NC Levels seems to have become so ingrained that many are unsure how we assess now these ‘ladders’ have been removed. I would suggest however that this is a moment where we need to seize the opportunity to build meaningful models of progression with both hands.
 A quite brilliant (if post-modern) take on the study of history in schools. I attach both the 1999 original and a 2010 re-vamp. As the arguments over the national curriculum rage on Sam Wineburg’s question over why we should study history at all comes back to mind. Year 13 this is well worth a read (especially as he makes references to Richard White) in terms of historiography and what historical understanding actually means. Wineburg takes the position that we can never fully understand the past, but that does not equate to meaning we should not study history. He goes on to argue that we must try and appreciate our limitations in ever understanding the past. Two bits stand out:
Wineburg asks us to consider that we will never appreciate historical context ie. Did the Egyptians see as we do but draw in a different or primitive manner or did the Egyptians simply see differently to us? Importantly can we learn anything from asking this question? Secondly Wineburg notes that the good historian engages with the past through humility, knowledge of ignorance and with heart. What lessons might there be here for school history? Can you see any of Wineburg’s concepts working in the history classroom? How might you have tackled re-writing that textbook? Do you agree with his conclusions on the place of history? And importantly, what relevance does this have in light of curriculum reforms? Or rather, does it matter if it has relevance or not? Comments welcome… Need a brain break now!! Mr F Unnatural and Essential – This article can be downloaded from the HA here: LINK Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts can be viewed with a JStor free account here: LINK Feeling generally frustrated by the resurrection of the skills vs knowledge debate which, as far as I am concerned, was buried decades ago. Surely we all accept that a balance is needed here and that subject concepts and interpersonal skills can be developed alongside engaging subject knowledge …where are all these teachers who still throw chalk at children for failing to recite the bible? Of course, these people raise good issues about community engagement, independence and resilience… but their contempt for the profession is profound. Never the less, there seems to be good money in telling teachers that they are forcing a Victorian education system on a group of disengaged, working class kids who need reengaging through group work and technology. I am also deeply offended that any challenge to the “innovative” approaches is said to be an elitist response… As I see it, there are a number of major issues with the approach outlined above.
Schools are increasingly expected to reduce inequality in society in the face of increasing economic divisions. We are told that we must engage a generation of students who have become disengaged from a Victorian education system. This language is being peddled by the Innovation Unit amongst others. There is a worrying trend to see technologies as a solution to “self education” We need to recognise that schools alone cannot close this socio-economic divide, it is a matter for the whole of society but needs direct action from government. However recognising this does not mean accepting the status quo and being happy…far from it, it demands more radical change. Reducing education to a purely “skills-based” curriculum in an attempt to prepare students for a global job market is completely misguided. It is a blunt tool to enact social change and to engage students in the wrong ways. Whilst state schools reduce their subject specialisms to give their students “transferable skills for the economy”, private, public and independent schools continue to offer their students a rich curriculum diet and access to the best jobs and universities. The economic divide remains. The only way in which the socio-economic divide can be overcome is through a society-wide reformation of the neo-liberal precepts on which our society is based. Using schools to do this is attempting to plaster over the ever widening cracks. Our priority should be in supporting those most in need and creating a society which is more equitable. Of course, this will be unpopular amongst the most powerful, and potentially very expensive. We must preserve the idea that education should be available for all children and adults to develop their human potential – it is not about trying to battle market forces. This is not the same as an elitist agenda. A key part of any schooling is democratic education. If we want to add value to students lives, let us first think carefully about what values we want to add. We must recognise that in many cases, taking away subject expertise from education under the guise of equality is a cynical cost cutting exercise. Taking away this expertise is cheating our poorest students out of the chance of engaging in immersive subject experiences. It limits any true passion in learning. To pretend that this is in their best interests is unforgivable. It is not subject irrelevance which leads to children becoming demotivated in their studies, it is the slow realisation that their life is most likely mapped out for them thanks to their upbringing. In many cases the barriers to education just become more extreme as children get older. Subjects only regain their relevance when these barriers are removed. When this is the case, students will be able to study subjects for their own sake and in doing so will engage in the humanising processes of education. This is the real challenge of the C21st.
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