The education twitter-sphere has been
all a-buzz today with stuff about helping (or failing) bright pupils.
I am not at all qualified to contribute directly to the debate; I can
only recount my own experiences, and anecdotal evidence is not very
valuable in such a case. Because of my work as an examiner I meet
history teachers from scores of other schools every summer, and I do
not think my approaches were in any way unusual. Yes, I taught at an
independent school, so it was selective in terms of ability to pay
fees. It was not very selective in terms of ability; plenty of our
pupils did well to get C passes at GCSE with a couple of Bs thrown
in.
However, I think I do have some
credentials when it comes to helping bright history pupils make good
use of their time in school. I do not know if there is a good way of
measuring this, and I have no idea whether my department did as well
or better than equivalent departments in Finland or in Shanghai. But
we did have a fair number of former pupils who went on to get first
class degrees at university. (Yes, that includes Oxford and
Cambridge, if any one cares) Some of them have even become history
teachers. Also I can affirm that helping the best pupils was
something about which I cared deeply and to which I gave a fair
amount of thought. My methods evolved and adapted over a longish
career, but here are a few things that seemed to work for many pupils
most of the time. They didn't work for a few pupils. One can always aspire to do better.
We laid great emphasis on free reading,
both quantity and quality. I could buy dozens of books in Edinburgh's
charity shops (a bit of luck with location, to be sure) for the price
of a couple of new volumes, and our departmental library ran to
hundreds. The excellent teacher who helped train me when I was on
teaching practice (at University College School, Hampstead) refused
to use text books at all with his sixth formers. They had to use
proper history books written for adults. I tried, up to a point, to
follow his advice, though I did find less able pupils needed the
text-book crutch. But in general the principle is sound. For senior
history pupils, text books specially written for school exams are a
gateway to mediocrity, however “good” they are. It is possible to
get very good marks indeed (super-As) at AS (England and Wales) and
at Higher (Scotland) using such books, but they do little or nothing
to encourage critical thinking, widen horizons, develop
sophistication and so on – let alone prepare pupils for university.
This emphasis on free reading started
with the juniors (and we had three years before exam-pressure kicked
in). One of the things of which I was quietly proud was the History
Reading Book Scheme. In theory every S1 and S2 pupil had a History
Reading Book. I issued lists based on the school library, and there
were general criteria for choosing a book not on the lists (“Ask me
if it is OK”). The book had to be brought to every lesson, and it
might be set for prep, read quietly for ten minutes at the start of a
lesson, or, by fast writers, once a piece of written work had been
finished. It saved hours of work setting up cover lessons when I was
away on examining duties too. Once in the year there would be a
mega-essay based on the reading book. I would set a specific title
based on the book of their choice. This scheme was applied to all
pupils, not just the brightest, but the brightest chose books beyond
their years and used the essay to produce very remarkable pieces of
work for twelve-year-olds.
As far as A2 work is concerned serious
reading of adult history was taken for granted. Not everyone achieved
the standards of the girl who read “Anna Karenina” in the summer
holidays before we started Russian history, or the boy who read “The
Kings Depart” over one weekend. But the encouragement and advice
was available to all. If possible at some point in the course we
found a fortnight to do a book review related to their A2 synoptic
paper. They would choose a book and I could steer the brightest
towards the more challenging works. During my very last year of
teaching the OCR introduced a piece of coursework, Historical
Investigations, that required the evaluation of several modern
historians. I happened to have a very good class that year, and they
rose to incredible heights. I regard this coursework, if properly
done, as the most intellectually challenging thing I saw in my
career.
At this point I am going to chuck in an
advert. One of the things about my teaching – a weakness, some
would think – was that I always liked to pitch everything just
above the expected level for all classes. (I may say I got on pretty
well with the Support for Learning Department and their charges. But
that is the subject for another blog. Suffice it to say that the less
able pupils don't like boring lessons either.)
(By the way I'm not at all happy with
these concepts “brightest” and “less able”. That's for
another blog too. Undeniably some pupils were more receptive, and
more successful, at the sorts of things we tried to do in history
courses.)
Back to the advert. When I retired my
head was bursting with revision lessons I had given to my AS and
Higher pupils and I wrote them down at high speed. They are not for
the faint-hearted and some might find them pitched too high. One
friend of mine who said he liked them is a Professor of Medical
Ethics – a bit beyond AS level. Another friend said he gave them to
the young teachers in his department. The point is that I tried, at
revision time, to stimulate and stretch, not merely recapitulate.
Here's the link to them:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_0_15?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=a%20grade%20history%20lectures&sprefix=A+grade+history%2Caps%2C512
They cost about £1.00 which means you can get three for the price of a
pint, so I don't feel I am exploiting the panic of nervous exam
candidates.
Now here is another thing we did that
helped stretch all our pupils – especially the ablest. As soon as I
took over the department I got permission from my Head to do away
with sets, marks, grades and orders in junior classes. I am delighted
to say that every single member of the department I worked with –
ten or a dozen teachers over 25 years - found that this worked. In the bad old days
of marks a child with a better mark than his peers heeded no further
advice; and as for the much praised competition to come top – well,
it was like the Premier League. Most pupils knew they couldn't come
top so did not bother to try. As for the bottom end, they lived in a world of perpetual low self esteem. But when all work was marked with
a meaningful comment (ideally praise + constructive advice) the
weakest pupils always received encouragement and the best work, the
subject of this blog, was always followed with some suggestions for
“next steps”.
Over a long career I tried all sorts of
extra-curricular history. Youth Hostel weekends looking at stately
homes and castles bring back happy memories. One year all our
successful Oxbridge candidates were in my “History on Film”
after-school activity. And so on. I may say that none of this was
exceptional in our school and nor, as I know from chatting to scores
of fellow professionals, is it unusual at all. It is what teachers
do, and it stretches and challenges. Everything can be done well or
badly, of course, even school trips. What preparation is there, what
follow up? What level of conversations take place on the trip itself?
Personally I never tried to promote them by offering fun-time apart
from the history. The history was the fun (though a lot of extra
stuff did happen; I still treasure my Monopoly victory in Falkland
YH. And the game of hide-and-seek in Norham Castle.)
I called A-level text-books a gateway
to mediocrity. I fancy the same might be true of league tables, as
the urgent need to get marks gets in the way of excellence. I am not
sure about this, because I was very fortunate to work under a series
of fine Heads who put the needs of individual pupils above the
pressures of statistics.
What about the two GCSE years? Well,
here we allowed our best pupils to aim as high as they could reach by
using the GCSE devised by the Schools History Project. The two
examined papers were a Study in Depth and a Study in Breadth. For the
“depth” we did Germany 1918-1945 (which I do think all European
pupils should do once at some point). This was fairly old-fashioned
knowledge and understanding. For the “breadth” we did “Crime
and Punishment from the Romans to the Present Day”. This was not
just juries, sheriffs, police, witch-trials, transportation and so on
but involved a great deal of social, cultural and political history.
There was, I repeat, no limit to the conceptual levels an able pupil
could reach in discussion and in the written answers. The challenges
of evaluating sources and of making connections across the centuries
were far more intellectually demanding than any memorisation of
narrative.
But the glory of the course was the
coursework. I had to set up two pieces, moderated by the exam board.
One had to be using a range of primary sources including field work
to write an essay. What I set up (given the location of our school)
was “Was the Edinburgh New Town really as good as it is commonly
described?” (and a few glowing descriptions were provided.) The
pupils did five tours, made notes and drawings, studied contemporary
documents and modern historians. Most of the finished essays were
beautifully word-processed and illustrated – but the marks were all
for the words on the page. One successful applicant for Classics at
Oxford later put in his UCAS form: “I became interested in the
civilisations of Greece and Rome while doing my GCSE coursework on
the New Town of Edinburgh.”
The other piece of coursework involved
showing how the past affected the present. We set up a course that
ended with the following essay: “Show how the causes of the Chechen
War are rooted deep in Russian history”. The need to use web-sites
(many of which, on that particular topic were crazily biased), to
grapple with wholly unfamiliar geography, to encounter new concepts
and new themes: the challenge was vast – though we provided
materials to prevent it becoming overwhelming. Candidates encountered
Peter the Great, Solzhenitsyn, Stalin, Tolstoy and Yeltsin. The
SHP/OCR rules imposed no word limits and, even though we made it
clear mere summary narrative would gain little credit, the best
candidates often produced over a thousand words of well-informed and
thoughtful analysis.
It is probably true that some history
departments, when faced with new examination arrangements, think “How
can we get the most marks for our pupils?”. But the right response
is “How can we use these new arrangements to improve the education
we offer?” Which brings me to my final suggestion as a way of
stretching the brightest. When new appointments of staff are being
made, always go for candidates who care deeply about history, who
think history really matters and appreciate that all history lessons
can be interesting, challenging and worthwhile. History ought to be a
life-enhancing subject in schools.
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