Subject knowledge and ITT
The relationship between subject knowledge and initial teacher training is currently up for consideration once again. In the spirit of sharing, Christine Counsell – who [...]
Articles by Michael Fordham
Why Hitler and Henry, and not Wallenstein and Anne?
For many years now, politicians, the media and plenty of teachers have complained about the narrow scope of GCSE and (to a lesser extent) A-Level exams in history. In [...]
Is education an academic discipline?
I got in trouble last week for suggesting that education was not an academic discipline, and I can see why. For many years, university education departments have been [...]
What does ‘secondary ready’ look like in history?
It is a good time to be thinking about transition. In a few weeks, a new cohort of pupils will arrive at secondary schools, ready to continue their history education. The [...]
Identifying knowledge deficits: mentor training for June 2014
Mentor training day is always a highlight of the calendar in the Cambridge partnership. Twice a year, history mentors from schools across the region gather in the Faculty of [...]
English: a Frankenstein subject?
In my last blog post I argued that the dominance of ‘English’ as a subject on the secondary school curriculum should be challenged. I want to elaborate in this post a [...]
A reading list for the new history curriculum
The summer holiday is coming into sight, and, no doubt, history teachers across the land are beginning to think about their reading lists. I thought I’d take this [...]
Ofsted and the history curriculum
I think that all children should be taught a broad history curriculum. I am happy to negotiate what this means, but I think the new National Curriculum gets the balance about [...]
What does a teacher need to know?
I filled out a reference recently for someone applying for a Head of History post. As anyone who has filled out references knows, you tend to get a list of criteria and then [...]
New Curriculum Part 3: planning for progression from KS3 to GCSE
I recently wrote about why it makes sense for schools to think about their history curriculum in terms of a ‘five-year plan’ in which what is learned in Key Stage 3 [...]
New Curriculum Part 2: just how big a change is the new GCSE History?
Answer: it’s a big change. You may want to look at the outline for the new GCSE History from the DfE here before reading this post. Some of it is quite complicated and [...]
New Curriculum Part 1: planning for the new five-year history curriculum
A typo, surely? Everyone knows that a GCSE course is taught in a period ranging from one to three years, depending on how intensively you teach it, and Key Stage 3 is taught [...]
Why should we research the subject and not just the child?
A great deal is written about research in education and the problems it faces. I rather think that we are passing something of a threshold at the moment in terms of the [...]
Are we training pupils to be historians?
This is a question that gets banded around in education quite a lot. It is quite common – and I have done it many times myself – to tell pupils that they are historians, [...]
History: a vehicle for moral enquiry?
What is history? For me, the discipline of history cannot be defined simply by its object of study – the past is, after all, studied in a wide variety of subjects including [...]
Beyond Levels Part Three: developing a mixed constitution
Assessment is always going to be an imperfect tool. Gaming the system will always be possible; students can cram for tests and then forget things that they really should [...]
Beyond Levels Part Two: summative and formative assessment
In my last post I commented briefly on why I thought task-specific mark schemes were more appropriate than ladder-like progression models for the assessment of pupil work. In [...]
Clio et cetera 