A response to Debra regarding traditional subjects
The following is my comment on Debra Kidd’s blog (Hey you. Poor person. We’re here to make you just like us.) I have avoided copying comments from one blog into a [...]
Knowledge and curriculum
A curriculum sets out what pupils ought to learn, and there is thus a fundamental connection between knowledge and curriculum. Most of my posts on this blog have focused on the nature of academic knowledge, why this is central to school curricula, and how this knowledge might be structured within a curriculum model.
Truth about and knowledge of the world: a fundamental right for children
Children, I would argue, have a right to know about the world in which they live. They have a right to be taught about the structures of reality at both cosmic and atomic [...]
Ofsted: the problem of the ignorant inspector
My argument in this post is that Ofsted inspectors who are not specialists in a subject are poorly placed to make judgements about whether progress is being made by pupils in [...]
Making History Stick Part 3: using the question effectively
In this sequence of blog posts I am taking some of the principles with which Brown, Roediger and McDaniel concluded their book Make It Stick and asking how these might apply [...]
Making History Stick Part 2: Switching the scale between overview and depth
Brown, Roediger and McDaniel clearly state that, even once some knowledge is mastered, it needs to be recalled periodically (every few weeks or months) under the ‘use it or [...]
Make History Stick Part 1: principles
This is a small adventure for me. My knowledge of cognitive psychology is weak, and I make no claims to having any expertise in the field: when it comes to disciplines, I am [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Lions led by donkeys?
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 [...]
Knowledge, skills and the ignored dichotomy
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 [...]
Clio et cetera 