Should progression in history be modelled hierarchically?

I argued in my previous post that existing models of ‘getting better’ at history have tended (a) to look for generic features of historical practice and (b) to break these generic features down into hierarchical stages which describe ‘more sophisticated’ or ‘less sophisticated’ thinking within particular second-order conceptual domains (e.g. ‘evidence’ or ‘change’). In this post I want to tackle this problem head-on and suggest that our models of progression need to work on an accumulative rather than a hierarchical model.

The following table shows an attempt made in 1991 to break the idea of ‘causation’ down into ten stages by which to measure the progress of pupils between the ages of 5 and 16. This kind of approach has existed for many years in the UK with different iterations of the National Curriculum relying on the same approach to outline ‘levels’ of progression. Although these were finally scrapped in the 2014 National Curriculum, a number of organisations – such as Person and PiXL – have recreated very similar models for schools to use.

The 1991 National Curriculum Attainment Target for Causation
Level 1	Recognise everyday time conventions
Level 2	Demonstrate, by reference to stories of the past, an awareness that actions have consequences
Level 3	Demonstrate an awareness of human motivation illustrated by reference to events of the past
Level 4	Understand that historical events usually have more than one cause and consequence
Level 5	Understand that historical events have different types of causes and consequences
Level 6	When explaining historical issues, place some causes and consequences in a sensible order of importance
Level 7	When examining historical issues, can draw the distinction between causes, motives and reasons
Level 8	Produce a well-argued hierarchy of causes for complex historical issues
Level 9	Demonstrate an awareness of the problems inherent in the idea of causation
Level 10	Demonstrate a clear understanding of the complexities of the relationship between cause, consequence and change

There are two fundamental problems with this model (and with all similar hierarchical models based on second-order concepts). First, the statements contained within each stage are just too vague to be useful. Some models get around this by adding in qualifiers such as “beginning to” or “moving towards”, but all this achieves is taking something vague and making it vaguer still. Secondly, it is quite clear that there is no logical basis on which one moves from one level up to the next. I reckon I could teach most eleven-year-old an “awareness of the problems inherent in the idea of causation”; equally, one could argue that an “awareness of human motivation” is highly complex. On this particular model, thinking about consequences is easier than thinking about causes. On Day 2 of my PGCE we were given these statements as cut-outs and asked to put them in what we thought was the right order: unsurprisingly, a room of history graduates (some with MAs and PhDs) all came up with different orders for the statements.

Numerous attempts have been made by theorists and practising teachers to make this kind of hierarchical progression model work, but I have yet to see a single one that avoids the problems of vague genericism and an arbitrary order of hierarchy. I would argue that this is model to which we should no longer be attached: we need an alternative way of understanding progression in the subject. This probably means we need to set ourselves free from the chains of imposing a hierarchy onto the discipline, and instead to treat the learning of history as a growing web of things that have been learnt. Take the following diagrams as a model. A green circle represents something that has been learnt about how the discipline works: a particular causal model, a type of source used by historians, a historiographical point, and so on. A blue circle represents something that has been learnt about the past: the beliefs of a person, the actions of a government, the ideas held by a religious group, and so on.

When one begins learning history, one does not know very much. There are not many links, and the novice has a fairly superficial grasp of the subject.

But once more has been learnt and a student knows more about the past and about the discipline, then he or she is developing a more sophisticated understanding of the subject. As each students builds this more complex knowledge base, they are able to answer more complex questions, or turn what they already know to new questions in different contexts. Crucially, there are no hoops to jump through to ‘move up the levels’: what each individual student retains from each lesson might well vary. No one point in the web of their knowledge is necessary, but collectively what they know is sufficient for them to begin displaying some of the generic characteristics of historical competence that have been identified by philosophers of history and curriculum theorists.

The expert historian goes even further and has a highly complex knowledge base that incorporates all sorts of interesting links. Where this knowledge base is sufficiently complex, a critical mass is reached where novel and creative solutions to questions – including the formation of new questions – begin to emerge. It would be foolish to try to establish a threshold for this and it will vary from individual to individual, and indeed between specific specialisations.

This for me offers a more compelling vision of what it means to get better at history. As we learn more, we get better at history. The more we know, the more categories we can have, the more links we can form, and the more easily we can organise our ideas. This is not about learning a list of facts: it is rather about building up a complex array of knowledge of the past and the discipline. Although this model allows that ideas might be ‘hubs’ off which a number of other things hang, there is no hierarchy here that attempts to raise one thing above another.

This all points towards a very different model of progression: rather than rely on a series of conceptual levels derived from generic statements about disciplinary practice, we can simply say that the more one learns, the more progress one has made.  The problem here is that, in schools, we are often interested not just in the fact that a pupil has learnt more, but also in whether they have learnt what we intended them to learn. It is this, finally, which brings everything back to curriculum. In the third post in this series I intend to explore the implications of this, reaching the conclusion that the curriculum is the progression model.