Michael Fordham

Beyond Levels Part One: knowledge-rich and task-specific mark schemes

17 February 2014 // 7 Comments

In my last post, I criticised the old National Curriculum levels or, more specifically, the 1991 Attainment Targets to which schools kept trying to revert. The ladder-like [...]

On letting ourselves be specialists

9 February 2014 // 1 Comment

Last Sunday I was back in teacher mode again. I was not a teacher of history, however, but a teacher of winter walking. On a university hillwalking club trip, I took a group [...]

Levels: where it all went wrong

8 February 2014 // 10 Comments

Levels are dead! Long live… well, what? I am quite a fan of the new 2014 National Curriculum for history. I very much wish that Michael Gove had been brave enough to do [...]

Lesson observations as a mentor

13 January 2014 // 1 Comment

So far I have not written much on this blog about mentoring. This is an oversight on my part, as mentoring trainee teachers was one of the most satisfying parts of my job. I [...]

Lions led by donkeys?

11 January 2014 // 2 Comments

The recent furore over how the First World War should be interpreted has, directly and indirectly, raised questions about how the period should be taught in schools. It is [...]

Disciplines and the aims of an education

22 December 2013 // 11 Comments

I am currently reading Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. The following brief passage summarises, in a nutshell, the role that academic disciplines have to play in [...]

Knowledge, skills and the ignored dichotomy

11 December 2013 // 5 Comments

I have been following the debate online in recent weeks on the knowledge-skills dichotomy, particularly the post written by David Didau. Generally speaking, I am in agreement [...]

“Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs”

30 November 2013 // 4 Comments

It has not escaped my notice that I have not yet had chance to return to my series of blogs on medium-term planning. Fear not! I intend to do so soon. I have decided, [...]

Why should pupils learn dates?

9 October 2013 // 9 Comments

I doubt I invented the supermarket checkout date game, but I do not mind if someone wants to say I did. If you buy something for less than twenty pounds, then see if you can [...]

What if?

26 September 2013 // 5 Comments

What if, in teacher training, we had the same amount of time and funding available as for the training of new doctors? Okay, I know that comparisons between medicine and [...]

Medium-Term Planning 3: ‘Introductions and Conclusions’, not ‘Starters and Plenaries’

8 September 2013 // 1 Comment

The way in which lessons begin and end is very important in medium-term planning, though sadly I think careful reflection on this was rather swamped in the rhetoric of the [...]

Medium-Term Planning Part 2: getting the question right

6 September 2013 // 1 Comment

A brief browse through the pages of Teaching History from the last decade will show that one of the things that troubles history teachers most is ‘what is the right [...]

Medium-Term Planning 1: thinking through the process

27 August 2013 // 5 Comments

This is going to be the first in a series of blog posts that looks at medium-term planning for history teachers. I write this with a number of aims in mind. With a new school [...]

On teaching the canon

20 August 2013 // 1 Comment

It is a sad fact that there is insufficient time to teach all that we might want to teach. Whether it is periods of history or works of English literature, there is always [...]

David Carr, teacher training and evidence-based practice

26 July 2013 // 0 Comments

My reading recently led me to a now rather old article by David Carr in the Oxford Review of Education. I have not read as much Carr as I ought to have done, though this is [...]

Scepticism not cynicism: what made my teacher training so good?

24 July 2013 // 6 Comments

Having poked my head into the world of blogs and Twitter over this last year the thing that has surprised me most is how negative many teachers are about their initial [...]

It’s time to make knowledge more complicated

15 July 2013 // 4 Comments

I read with some interest this week Andrew Old’s blog on the sloppy use of the word ‘skills’. His analysis is very much in the right direction: the term skills has [...]

Articles by Michael Fordham