What might have been? Improving chronological knowledge and understanding

There’s a huge amount to complain about in the draft NC but the trouble with simply listing the problems is that it can appear to be a defence of the status quo when what’s really needed is constructive discussion in order to improve on the current situation. It seems highly unlikely that Mr Gove will change tack and start taking part in constructive and rigorous discussion but that shouldn’t stop us advancing some ideas. So here are some first thoughts in one area only though the one at the heart of Mr Gove’s curriculum – chronological knowledge and understanding. This is the area he believes he alone has got right but this is where his ideas are most fundamentally flawed.

Firstly, let’s begin with the bullet points which provide absolutely no help to teachers in that there are no clues as to what an appropriate level of knowledge about each bullet might be. Seeking out my own junior school book from 1958-1961 (bought second-hand a few years ago – I didn’t walk off with it!) I discovered the great R.J. Unstead telling me that:

King John was a bad king who quarrelled with the barons and the clergy. The Pope said that he must be turned off the throne but John made his peace and continued to do as he pleased. In 1215 the barons forced him to put his seal to Magna Carta, a charter or list of their rights. His promise to rule well was soon broken.

13 pages later we’re told John died. Magna Carta does not reappear although its life after 1215 was far more important than its role in that year. Now here’s what I read aged about 9 about the Glorious Revolution:

James II was the next king. He did not rule wisely, and when he tried to make England a Catholic country, he became very unpopular. After only three years, he was driven into exile by the “Glorious Revolution” and his daughter Mary and her Dutch husband, William of Orange, became king and queen.

These extracts sum up the paradox of ‘simple coverage’. The text looks very simple (‘bad king’, ‘very unpopular’) and my first thought was “Is that all that Mr Gove wants children to know? It doesn’t seem very ‘rigorous’ to use his favourite word.” But look again at the number of tricky concepts that need explaining to young children – barons, clergy, pope, Catholic, Orange, revolution. What does James II ‘did not rule wisely’ really mean?

This kind of coverage is an alarming mix of the deeply superficial and really tough ideas that we know can be hard to explain at KS3. To take another example – it’s easy enough to demonstrate the idea behind the Heptarchy (7 lego men on a map or 7 children with crowns and tabards labelled ‘Wessex’ etc swapping precedence) but what value is it to them to take part in such story-telling aged 7 or 8? Which other parts of history can they relate it to? What part does the Heptarchy play in the story of the long-term development of a national monarchy? Will they remember this when, several years later, they encounter the development of the UK, union with Scotland, Irish independence and union? At that age what can it really mean to them?

Which leads me to another central question – where is the evidence that KS2 children will be able to remember the details of any of these individual events, let alone their significance, when they reach secondary school, let alone at university or later in life? We know that effective learning is a product of revisiting material (unless you’re one of those rare creatures who have the much-fabled photographic memory but even then do mentally-photographed paragraphs such as those above have any real value?) If you don’t revisit and re-use knowledge then most of it fades away from our minds. We all know that from personal experience. Even writing a book about a topic is no guarantee that details stick beyond a relatively short period. When I wrote an A level book on the Tudors in the early 1990s I ran workshops for students for the next three years but then stopped because I no longer had the necessary recall that comes from teaching a topic year in, year out. So if I couldn’t remember such details what chance do the majority of KS2 children have to retain for years ahead the details of all those events scheduled to be taught to them at KS2? Of course we are much better today at teaching in ways that make the material more memorable but even that very considerable advance won’t make this material memorable beyond a short time-span for the vast majority of pupils.

Thirdly, the massively yawning hole at the heart of this bullet point list is any suggestion or encouragement to make links across time (one of strengths of 2008 NC), to revisit periods, to create ‘big pictures’ across the past which is really the only way to help students understand the long-term significance of individual events. As I observed in my previous blog, this is the historical equivalent of teaching children the letters of the alphabet individually but never teaching them to read.

Enough criticism. What could and should have been discussed and proffered as part of a genuine attempt at discussion in a draft NC? What could be taught at KS2, KS3 and GCSE to enhance students’ chronological knowledge and understanding?

What follows are only starting points – there are many issues to be discussed, details developed and corrections to be made (especially as I have limited experience of KS2) but here’s a series of questions and hypotheses that would lead to stronger levels of chronological knowledge and understanding than Mr Gove’s NC will produce. This is necessarily very brief but might have offered a stronger way forward even if detail is lacking.

KS2 – children need to begin with their own experiences, start to learn the simple vocabularies of time, build up ideas about generations, centuries and other terminology. This takes much time and reinforcement. In addition their chronological sense would benefit from studying a wider range of periods spread right across time, several more than they do currently, mostly from British history but also representing other civilisations beyond the classical west. These period studies would have an emphasis on social history and the major aim would be to develop children’s sense of period – being able to identify similarities and differences between periods and to do lots of work on images and objects so their visual sense of chronology develops strongly. Such period studies need to be reinforced frequently, visually and kinaesthetically with timeline work – lots of hats, pictures etc so they always know where a period fits in time. All this means being introduced to periods from the whole sweep of history. Without that, starting to build a sense of chronology will fail. This does not preclude coverage of political events but these are, for the most part, better left to KS3.

On top of that there has to be the opportunity to engage with new discoveries through archaeology, with the types of evidence from each period and the basic processes of the discipline of history including the ability to ask good historical questions.

GCSE – a leap ahead but what’s studied at GCSE inevitably has a back-wash at KS3. The most important point is that some part of a GCSE course should require students to revisit the broad sweep of history, as some currently do through a Development Study. This has the effect of reinforcing their sense of chronology – sequence and duration of periods, terminology etc. Such a Development Study within a GCSE course need not take up more than 25% or 30% of time, leaving the majority of time for a period study or period studies of the type Mr Gove seems likely to favour but the absence of that revisiting of the broad chronological overview means that the sense of overview hopefully developed at a younger age begins to erode and may disintegrate. I do wonder whether Mr Gove would have been so anti-SHP if the ‘Power and Democracy through time’ was studied rather than ‘Medicine through time’. Sadly he doesn’t seem to realise that ‘medicine’ covers every major development in western civilization from Greek philosophy to the impact of the welfare state and the technological revolution and makes a strong case for the beneficial impact of government intervention [though that may be where it goes wrong!]

KS3 – the hard bit. Approaching KS3 requires a strong dose of realism, of sitting down with a planning framework with the amount of teaching time available and looking deeply into what can be taught – and more importantly, learned – effectively in the available time.

The core issue here is what kinds of understandings we want students to have by the time they leave compulsory history at KS3. Mr Gove’s approach suggests that he wants students to have knowledge of people and events as a series of separate items, an educational version of ‘we’ll take each match as it comes, Brian.’ Beginning in 1700, with no encouragement to revisit earlier periods, there is little chance of relating developments and events post-1700 to events and patterns in the Middle Ages or early modern period. The alternative, more realistic and worthwhile, approach in my view is to aim to help students develop a sense of the ‘big pictures’ of the past e.g. a sense of the broad pattern of living standards or royal power across time. Yes, there is a danger of a Whiggish, ‘it’s bound to get better approach over time’ in this but not if we’re aware of it and can plan with that in mind. Another very important argument in favour of creating space for overviews (which must be seen whole in a single lesson to be effective) is that they help to make the individual events and people memorable by explaining their significance. Of course, such outlines would not be the sole element in a curriculum, in fact they would take a minority of time amidst depth studies, but they bind everything together into a coherent whole. And everything would still be in chronological order!!

What’s very much needed is for a much bigger effort to be made to work out how to teach the overviews effectively, enabling students to make links across time. It can provide a powerful alternative to the ‘bullet-point’ history of Mr Gove’s NC, enabling students to continue to study the really major events and people (from whatever chosen start date would be to the present) but knowing that the overviews stop these events simply being stand-alone stories.

At the same time we need to discuss whether it really matters if students leave history at 14 never having heard of the Wars of the Roses or other topics which Mr Gove believes must be learned as ‘cultural capital’ but wouldn’t come high enough up a list of really significant events to merit inclusion in a scheme of work from whenever-to-now in a future KS3. [If you don’t know me this isn’t anti-medieval bias – the 15thC was my research area at university, I taught it at degree level for many years and I still get much joy from studying it but faced with choices, it doesn’t make the cut in my view.] Is it really worth trying to teach every event to the kind of shallow coverage indicated above if the result is that students are unable to see the broad patterns of the past – and do not develop the much-wanted chronological understanding because the picture of the past is far too spread out from Y3 to Y9? If you want a good overview and to help students see the chronological sweep you have to do it quickly. Spreading it over seven or eight years is doomed to failure.

And there are many other areas that should have been debated with teachers about current approaches to KS3. For example, do we give enough time to modern history? Everybody studies 1066 and the Black Death – but do they get too much time at the expense of 19thC political reform or the development of the welfare state? I suspect that often the earlier periods (whatever some academics may think) do get too much time, leaving later material, which we are less used to teaching at this level, squeezed out. Which topics are really more significant for students to understand? And there’s the question of the balance of British and non-British history. One of the defining experiences of my life was working as a VSO teacher in Aswan, Egypt, my first prolonged encounter with another people – except they weren’t ‘another people’, they were just like people back in Liverpool, varied in their characters but overwhelmingly welcoming and generous. The histories of other peoples are very much worth studying to discover their achievements, their humanity, their triumphs. Focussing on British achievements alone will create a very warped view of human history.

That’s enough – a very hasty set of issues hurled together when I really ought to be editing an A level book. I’m not sure this has turned out as coherent as I would have liked and I don’t expect anyone in power to take any notice but I wanted to say this. I suppose the major difference is that teachers realise the fundamental importance of thinking about a curriculum from two directions at once – what you want children to learn and how they go about learning it. Mr Gove is one-dimensional – he seemingly knows nothing about how children learn and focusses solely on what is to be poured into their brains. This one-dimensional approach is doomed to failure.

To end with one of my inevitable sporting analogies – Mr Gove is tackling the development of children’s chronological knowledge and understanding with all the subtlety and grace of a club third eleven 20-20 cricketer. Many teachers and history educators have been tackling these topics at Test Match level, not always with success but with an increasing understanding of what it takes to move forward and succeed at this level.

He really ought to give the good players a chance to show what they can do in thinking ahead and planning for a better curriculum – it might just be inspirational.

Ian

The draft National Curriculum History document is an insult to the children of this country. They deserve far, far better than this.

Mr Gove is very fond of claiming that it will provide a rigorous historical education but you cannot achieve such rigour without first undertaking a rigorous process of analysis and discussion in putting together the draft plans. However the process – or what little we know of it – has been anything but rigorous. One hallmark of a rigorous mind is to engage with the evidence. Another is to be brave and strong-minded enough to listen to a range of views which do not accord with your own and to reconsider your first ideas. Another is to allow sufficient time for effective implementation of changes, especially if they coincide with other too-hasty changes, as is happening with GCSE and A level. Instead Mr Gove has failed to engage with the evidence about the state of history teaching in England, failed to engage in discussion with those who spend their lives teaching children, failed to work to a timetable that will enable effective reform to take place. As a result, instead of the rigorous curriculum children deserve, we have a ‘gesture curriculum’ designed to win short-term political credit amongst those who are misled by his oft-repeated misrepresentations of what takes place in history classrooms.

In the draft National Curriculum Mr Gove has missed the opportunity to do what he claims to want – to provide children with a higher quality of historical education. If he would listen and discuss he would discover that the history teaching community is well-aware of issues that need attention. These include the improvement of primary history and the rethinking of GCSE, including the SHP specification which, thanks to an accumulation of minor changes over the years (especially the demise of coursework)is a pale shadow of the original SHP exam course of the 1970s and 1980s. What should attract him to listen is the concern amongst history teachers to tackle the issue of chronological knowledge and understanding, a problem which will not be solved but made worse by his list of bullet points. To develop that chronological knowledge and understanding children need to revisit periods studied at an earlier age, make strong links across time, work on the outline of the ‘big stories’ of topics such as monarchy, power and social conditions in order to make any sense of the significance of an individual event which, if this curriculum is ‘delivered’ in the way Mr Gove seems to favour will be little more than a series of out of context news bulletins. This approach to individual events is akin to teaching children the letters of the alphabet but never teaching them to put those letters together and so never teaching them to read.

However for a proper rigorous process of reform to be effective it would need to be undertaken at a slower pace and would place rigorous debate at its heart. It would also require the Secretary of State to listen and show some semblance of humility in recognizing that history teachers, across the last several decades, have worked extremely hard to improve the quality of history teaching. Not every change has been in the right direction and, as described above, there are still significant challenges  but history teachers do want improvement because they care about the children they teach and care just as much about the discipline of history.

And amidst the many oddities of Mr Gove’s view of history teaching is that the very approaches Mr Gove decries are in much demand abroad, even in places such as Singapore (which he frequently holds up as a model to us) which has regularly sought advice from English history teachers. Our conferences are regularly visited by history teachers from overseas, eager to discuss, borrow and learn. One such visitor from Poland emailed me this week to say ‘thank you’ for an exchange of ideas and, in passing, mentioned ‘the proposal of the curriculum in England which seems to be one big disaster.’ Just as strange to Mr Gove would be the recent flurry of emails I’ve received from independent schools telling me how effective a variety of activities have been which they’ve found on ThinkingHistory. If so many teachers from abroad and the teachers in some of our ‘best’ independent schools can listen to SHP, ThinkingHistory and the best of history teaching in the state sector – why can’t Mr Gove?

Finally, in my oft-mentioned favourite book, Alan Plater’s Oliver’s Travels I’ve noted two extracts which might have been written with Mr Gove in mind.

The first sees Oliver, an about-to-be-redundant college lecturer being called to see the new Vice-Chancellor whose name is Moody:

Moody was not what he expected. The Vice Chancellor of his imagination combined the finest elements of Albert Einstein, Duke Ellington, Bertrand Russell and Leo Tolstoy: the wisdom of all the ages, tempered with mischief. Moody possessed neither of these attributes. He was probably forty years old but looked like a sixteen year-old television executive. He wore visible stress symptoms, suit trousers, red braces and a blue striped shirt …

Just change Vice Chancellor for Secretary of State in the above.

And secondly a simple observation:

Most of the world’s ills, it seemed to Oliver, were caused by men who believed themselves important doing things they believed to be important: on a good day it always ended in tears, on a bad day in global destruction.

There, in a nutshell, is the problem with the Secretary of State.

Too much self-importance, far too little humility, a distinct lack of rigour.

The result will be an impoverishment of our children’s education when the opportunity exists to build on our existing experience to create something that should, and could, be so much better.

Ian Dawson