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Developing independent learning with Year 7
Teaching History article
Jaya Carrier’s decision to focus on developing a more independent approach to learning in history at Key Stage 3 was prompted by concerns about her A-level students. In seeking to establish secure foundations for students’ own historical research, Carrier first examined the assumptions of her colleagues and her students. She...
Developing independent learning with Year 7
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Pipes's punctuation and making complex historical claims
Teaching History article
Long, unreadable sentences in her students' essays led Rachel Foster to improve her post-16 students' punctuation. Her journey resulted, however, in more than improved punctuation.
It led her to theorise what historians are really doing in their ‘signpost sentences'. She found herself showing students how an academic historian anticipates a chunk of argument in a single, well-turned, opening sentence. Foster created an intervention in which students...
Pipes's punctuation and making complex historical claims
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Move Me On 156: Assessment for Learning
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem: Fred North treats ‘Assessment for Learning' as though it is a bolt-on extra unconnected to his learning objectives
Fred is an enthusiastic trainee who has generally made a good impression on students and colleagues over the course of his first term. He has been determined to establish a...
Move Me On 156: Assessment for Learning
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Move Me On 154: Mixed Ability Groups
Teaching History feature
This issue's problem:Joe Priestley is having problems providing sufficient challenge for the higher attainers within his mixed ability groups
Joe Priestley has settled into his training placement very well and has impressed other members of the history department with his lively and engaging ideas.
In his early teaching he was...
Move Me On 154: Mixed Ability Groups
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Using ‘Assessment for Learning' to help students assume responsibility
Teaching History article
Robin Conway's interest in student led enquiry derived from a concern to encourage his students to take much more responsibility for their own learning. Here he explains how his department gradually learned to entrust students with defining the enquiry questions and planning the kinds of teaching and learning activities to be...
Using ‘Assessment for Learning' to help students assume responsibility
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Assessment without Level Descriptions
Teaching History article
Two heads of department in contrasting schools explain why they do not use Level Descriptions at all, other than at the very end of Key Stage 3. Influenced by ‘assessment for learning' principles, Sally Burnham and Geraint Brown develop a case for using assessment to help pupils grow in understanding...
Assessment without Level Descriptions
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Cunning Plan 162: Transferring knowledge from Key Stage 3 to 4
Teaching History feature
Planning to deliver the new GCSE specifications presents a challenge and an opportunity to any history department, whatever their previous specification. The sweep of history that students will now study at GCSE is much broader than ‘Modern World’ departments are used to; including a medieval or early modern depth study...
Cunning Plan 162: Transferring knowledge from Key Stage 3 to 4
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Adventures in assessment
Teaching History article
In Teaching History 157, Assessment Edition, a number of different teachers shared the ways in which their departments were approaching the assessment and reporting of students’ progress in a ‘post-levels’ world. This article adds to those examples, first by illustrating how teachers from different schools in the Bristol area are...
Adventures in assessment
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Building meaningful models of progression
Teaching History article
Setting us free? Building meaningful models of progression for a ‘post-levels' world
Alex Ford was thrilled by the prospect of freedom offered to history departments in England by the abolition of level descriptions within the National Curriculum.
After analysing the range of competing purposes that the level descriptions were previously...
Building meaningful models of progression
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Assessment after levels
Free Teaching History article
Ten years ago, two heads of department in contrasting schools presented a powerfully-argued case for resisting the use of level descriptions within their assessment regimes. Influenced both by research into the nature of children's historical thinking and by principles of assessment for learning, Sally Burnham and Geraint Brown argued that...
Assessment after levels
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'Assessing Pupil Progress'
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
England's Qualification and Curriculum Development Authority (QCDA) has been working on a new way of trying to support teachers in handling interim assessment during Key Stage 3. It is called Assessing Pupil Progress (APP).
Jerome...
'Assessing Pupil Progress'
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Rigorous, meaningful and robust: practical ways forward for assessment
Teaching History article
How do we know how good our students are at history? For that matter, how precisely do we really know what ‘good' at history even means? Even harder, how does our assessment of our students' attainment fit in with the National Curriculum Levels for Key Stage 3? Simon Harrison has...
Rigorous, meaningful and robust: practical ways forward for assessment
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Assessment and planning for progression at Key Stage 3
HA Guide and Links
The 2014 National Curriculum does not include an attainment target or any specified level against which you are expected to assess pupils' progress. The new attainment target says simply that:
‘By the end of each key stage, pupils are expected to know, apply and understand the matters, skills and processes...
Assessment and planning for progression at Key Stage 3
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What is progress in history?
Teaching History article
Evelyn Vermeulen argues that in order for teachers to identify outcomes for the learning of history, they must think clearly about the different attributes of the discipline - its ideas, structures and processes - and the relationship between them. Here, she takes us on her own professional thinking journey. She...
What is progress in history?
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Year 7 pupils collaboratively design an historical game about a medieval peasant
Teaching History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Jacques Haenen and Hanneke Tuithof describe an activity that they developed for pupils as part of an initial teacher education course. Teams of Year 7 pupils were given a structure and guidelines within which they...
Year 7 pupils collaboratively design an historical game about a medieval peasant
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Ensuring progression continues into GCSE: let's not do for our pupils with our plan of attack
Teaching History article
Dale Banham continues a theme explored by many other teacher-authors in recent years, how to ensure that progression does not just stop in Year 9, leaving pupils stagnant in key areas of historical learning before getting picked up again in Year 12. He produces a more thorough rationale and commentary...
Ensuring progression continues into GCSE: let's not do for our pupils with our plan of attack
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A scaffold, not a cage: progression and progression models in history
Teaching History article
The need to understand ways of defining progression in history becomes ever more pressing in the face of a target-setting, assessment-driven regime which requires us to measure progress at every turn. We must defend our professional expertise in terms of measurable outcomes. Did we add value? Have our end of...
A scaffold, not a cage: progression and progression models in history
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Myths and Monty Python: using the witch-hunts to introduce students to significance
Article
In this article Kerry Apps introduces students to the significance of the witch-hunts in the modern era, at the time when they occurred, and in the middle of the eighteenth century. She presents her rationale for choosing the witch-hunts as a focus for the study of significance, and shows how her thinking about her teaching has evolved through her evaluation of her students’...
Myths and Monty Python: using the witch-hunts to introduce students to significance
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Progression & Assessment without Levels - Guide
Progression & Assessment
In the 2014 national curriculum for primary and secondary history one of the key differences is that, for the first time since 1991, there are no level descriptions against which you can assess pupils' progress. The new attainment target says simply that:
‘By the end of each key stage, pupils...
Progression & Assessment without Levels - Guide
