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Preparing And Refreshing History Examination Courses
When I was training I worked with a feisty head of department on the point of retirement. She was full of witty advice. She once handed me a classroom text book and said, ‘this is the book they don’t see.’ It’s a simple and effective trick. You use their textbook but also another. If your department does not have another, go out and buy one. In an instant your students trust your expertise because you know details and stories they could not discover for themselves. It’s a fine principle and in time I have taken it much further. The key is to set good time aside in the school holidays when your family leave you alone to prepare. Get the classroom textbook you will use in class. You must also get as many others as you can. Sit at your computer and build a clear, well-structured set of notes on the entire subject, using all the information you can find. Enrich it with funny stories and illuminating details. Include selected statistics and examples your students can quote in exams. Above all, work out the key, underlying questions and the clearest and most powerfully explanatory ways of answering them. I find that a GCSE unit will fill thirty or forty pages of typed notes. Do it properly and you will be able to come back to your notes year after year, usually adding new material and keeping yourself questioning. Now your mind is as clear as it needs to be for good teaching and learning. The overwhelming advantage of preparing for the whole course at the beginning is that you always know where you are going. From the start you can establish the big explanatory ideas that will make teaching and learning the material much easier. For example, if at the beginning of a course about Russia and the Soviet Union you take time to teach the structure of the Russian mir and the way the peasants farmed in it, then Stolypin’s failures, Lenin’s struggle with War Communism, Bukharin’s New Economic Policy and Stalin’s collectivisation all make sense. If at the start of a course on mid-war Germany you explain the problem presented by the old governing elites of aristocracy, civil service, army and industry, then the struggles of Weimar, the Nazi’s seizure of power and their curiously ambivalent approach to legality all make sense. In the course of your research you’ll think of classroom resources you can use. Don’t, however, succumb to the temptation to prepare too many lessons in advance. Those teachers who come back in September and churn out all the classroom resources for the year may look impressive. In fact they have missed the point. You will need to respond to each class as it progresses. Get the first week or two ready but after that see how it goes. You break the back of the hard work by mastering the history. Exactly how you teach it depends on the individuals you meet and each year it’s subtly different. It is poor teaching if you find yourself either bored or only just ahead of the class. We all have to do it sometimes. Get your material sorted in advance. Organise on paper enough and more than enough information and analysis, and you can relax in the classroom. Now you can let discussions range and questions emerge. Now you can let students learn for themselves without being afraid they will find you out. You can let them be individual learners, ready to be stretched. All those hours at the start turn out to be a small investment for excellent lessons and better results. Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com Visit www.brillianthistory.co.uk for ready-prepared detailed course notes on popular GCSE units |
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