Towards a strategy of conceptual progression at Key Stage 3

Several years back, Alistair Dickins and Tommy-James Alexander realised they wanted to incorporate explicit consideration of substantive concepts into their Key Stage 3 teaching, to enable students to make sense of and order information about the past and to offer students a usable language that would support their historical reasoning. In reality, however, teachers were struggling to unpack and explain the concepts and students seemed to leave lessons without remembering them. This article explains the three-strand approach that they adopted, built into their long-term planning across Key Stage 3. The article illustrates how the teachers’ thinking developed as they experimented with making substantive concepts explicit building blocks of their curriculum...