I recently recorded a podcast for the HA under the title ‘How effective was medieval medicine?’
It’s aimed at GCSE students and you can find it at:
www.history.org.uk/resources/secondary_resources_122.html
It covers healers, treatments, ideas about causes of disease, public health and surgery – all in about 12 minutes! My original draft was about twice as long – amazing how little can fit into 12 minutes!
Ian
Yes, free – honestly. The link below takes you to:
1. Special Needs materials for KS3 – originally published in the early 1990s. There’s a very large quantity of useful material here.
2. Teachers’ support material for titles in the This is History! Series – even if you don’t use these books these resources contain a lot of material that can be used on their own. Titles include: The Norman Conquest; King John; Lost in Time; King Cromwell?; Dying for the Vote; The Trenches; the Holocaust
3. Two ‘flash’ activities from Hodder’s Dynamic Learning resources – The Amritsar Massacre and The Cuban Missile Crisis.
4. Plus material for:
Medicine through time
American West
GCSE Modern World History
See it all at:
Ian
Fed up with reading historians and politicians pontificating about History teaching without having any respect for the evidence or even trying to look at the evidence in the first place?
For a refreshing change read Richard J Evans in the New Statesman
www.newstatesman.com/education/2012/01/british-history-schools
Ian
I wonder how many people have done History degrees or become history teachers because of historical novels? Quite a significant number I’d guess.
I know that the history lodged most securely in my brain when I went to university came from the pages of Ronald Welch and other authors of fiction and not from the pages of Elton and other A level reading. I think it’s all about caring about the characters and the period – fiction made me care about the people I read about and want to find out more. Elton, sadly, didn’t. So fiction’s a great way of stimulating curiosity and further investigative reading. … did that really happen? … has the author manoeuvred events? … how do we know what it was really like?
Using historical fiction in the classroom isn’t always easy so this online HA CPD course may help you work out how to use fiction more effectively and so stimulate interest and get children caring about the people of the past.
For more information see:
www.history.org.uk/news/news_1402
Ian
New on Ofsted’s website is some very helpful and interesting guidance on evaluating your history department written by Mike Maddison, Ofsted’s lead History HMI.
There are separate sets of evaluation questions and guidance for primary and secondary. It’s well worth looking at and using and it could form the basis for discussions between linked secondaries and primaries, where that’s possible.
See the guidance:
www.ofsted.gov.uk resources professional development materials history
Ian
At last! I’ve had this activity sitting in my in-box for too long but other things, like editing 97 A level books (OK, not quite) got in the way, so I’m delighted to finally get this activity onto the site.
It was devised by Ian Luff and used with great success with his year 7s. Ian then kindly allowed me to fiddle with it and develop a few of the decisions so it now could more properly be described as a Luff-Dawson co-production.
The idea is that students take a series of decisions, building up points to improve their family’s welfare – but will they hit the jackpot and win what they want from the young King Richard II or face defeat and misery if their journey to London all goes wrong?
See the activity: Decisions of a Kentish Villager in 1381
The activity exemplifies some of the issues I’ve discussed elsewhere on the site about possible aims for teaching about 1381 – yes, it a rattling good story but it’s easy to underestimate the intelligence and good intentions of many of the original protesters.
See the discussion: Teaching about 1381
Good luck – and do try to get home in time for the harvest.
Ian
One of my occasional discussions of ‘content’, in this case what we might aim to get out of teaching about 1381.
It’s a great story but what links it to other protests covered later in KS3? What impression do KS3 pupils gain of the middle ages and medieval people from their coverage of 1381? What does research tell us about 1381 that the monastic chroniclers didn’t tell us?
You can read this brief discussion here.
And coming soon – well, by the end of January – a decision-making activity on 1381 devised and developed by Ian Luff and myself – that links to this discussion. A diary entry will follow as soon as the activity is finalised and uploaded.
Ian
This is a very simple idea than can be used in a variety of ways to tackle many of the bug-bears of chronological understanding.
Use your students as centuries to create a timeline and then all kinds of things become possible – sorting out periods and overlaps between periods, explaining what the Middle Ages were in the middle of etc etc.
Pictures, props, hats, tabards will all help make this activity more memorable and therefore more effective though the basic kit you need is very simple – and you can use the activity in different ways at KS2, KS3, GCSE and even A level.
See the activities:
Ian
Father Christmas was very kind to me, bringing the catalogue for the current major exhibition on illuminated manuscripts at the British Library.
While I had reservations about how well the exhibition communicated with the public I’d still been bouncing up and down with excitement on seeing so many old friends in the flesh – or maybe that should be parchment. There’s so many stunningly beautiful and evocative manuscripts on display so it’s great to see the BL education department offering workshops on what can perhaps be best described as sense of period – what can we learn about the Middle Ages, its people and their preoccupations from these wonderful manuscripts? Workshops for both primary and secondary students are available until 13th March.
Workshops for Primary students will look at heraldry, symbolism and how the manuscripts were made. Secondary groups will focus on developing skills in looking at primary sources to gain new insights into faith, learning, the monarchy and international politics in medieval times.
For more information and to book:
Ian
An activity from Stephen Lodge who teaches in Portsmouth for use with GCSE Medicine through Time. Can your students find the cure for their ailments at the Asclepion?
You could try this as an introduction, then use your books as back-up to consolidate knowledge and the balance of natural and supernatural cures.