CPD in a Textbook?

From teaching KS3 about concepts to challenging misconceptions

Brunetti pulled his mind away from these reflections. It was too easy to read history as you pleased, see what you chose to see in the actions of people and cultures long gone.

Donna Leon, Transient Desires, 2021

What were we modelling in five KS3 series, 1982-2022?

This article was prompted by my experiences of being interviewed about the nature and content of the textbooks I’ve written and edited. The interviews were enjoyable (who doesn’t enjoy talking about their own ideas?) but, in retrospect, also slightly uncomfortable. Thinking back, I found myself doubting my value as a source. Had I mentioned everything I should have? Just how reliable were my memories? Had I fallen into the trap identified by Commissario Brunetti – he may be a fictional character but he’s right, it is all too easy to interpret history as we please, especially when, as in this case, I was being interviewed about the history of my own thoughts and actions.

Amongst those reservations, one issue stood out – had I spent enough time explaining the contexts in which the books were written. During the interviews I’d realised that you can’t analyse or understand teaching resources created in a past era – even those from very recent decades – without understanding the educational and publishing contexts in which they were produced and being aware of the aims of the editors and writers.

Without those contexts, there’s a danger of ‘presentism’, of evaluating resources against the needs and preoccupations of the present day rather than the needs and preoccupations of teachers and writers at the time they were created. It’s temptingly easy to assume that what preoccupies teachers now also preoccupied teachers in the 1980s, 90s, 2000s or even the 2010s – especially as some of those past preoccupations really are history to teachers today (2023). Hardly anyone in classrooms today was teaching when GCSE was introduced in 1986 and those who remember the start of the National Curriculum in 1991 are on the verge of retirement.

My first aim in this article is therefore to explain the contexts of the five sets of KS3 resources I helped to create, as editor and writer, and which are shown in the chart below. In particular, I want to identify what each series was trying to model in terms of planning, teaching and learning – in effect, the core idea behind each series. These issues changed over time but all the series aimed to offer teachers solutions to planning, teaching and learning problems. Providing ‘CPD in a textbook’ is a shorter way of describing this aim.

Having identified what we were trying to model in each series I will explore whether we succeeded in delivering those aims. The only criterion I can use to discuss success is whether I feel that the books did deliver our aims. Ideally I’d also explore whether each series had a positive impact on planning, teaching and learning in schools but I can’t do this because I don’t know what impact the books had on individual teachers and departments. [I wonder if anyone has ever researched the impact of individual books and series?] The third possible criterion I could use is sales – did anyone buy the books? – but that’s a very crude and naive indicator of educational success. I know from my own books that some of those I thought the best sold far less well than more ordinary books and, besides this, sales don’t tell me anything about the CPD impact of the books either. So my single criterion has to be ‘did the books deliver what I hoped they’d deliver?’

All this sounds very serious but, in planning this article, I realised that I also wanted to capture the enjoyment of writing and editing so there’s another theme too – creativity and fun! This creativity was made possible by the freedom I was given to experiment, especially by John Murray/Hodder for the series I worked on for SHP. SHP’s ideals also heavily influenced the other resources, just as they’ve dominated my approach to learning and teaching since I was introduced to SHP in 1973. Ideals, however, don’t by themselves create successful ‘CPD in a textbook’. Books have to be created in a spirit of ‘pragmatic idealism’ – the ideal being the new and challenging approaches, the pragmatic being making the books interesting to teach from and practical to use.

Finally, as part of my conclusion, I want to explore what these older books continue to offer teachers today – what ideas and approaches they can still contribute to departmental CPD and discussions.

One thing I haven’t done is draw general conclusions about other KS3 books in general. I don’t know the contexts in which other books were written or their aims and, more importantly, I’ve long avoided looking at other people’s books because I’ve always had a stubborn belief in my own ideas and wanted to do things my own way.

I’m also fully aware that it’s impossible for me to be totally objective about my own books and ideas – but I’ll do my best to remember Commissario Brunetti’s warning and try not to present the history of these books just to make myself look good!

Download this article in full

This webpage presents only the introduction and concluding reflections.

A PDF of the full discussion, covering five major KS3 series, can be downloaded HERE …

Top of the page

Reflections:

Do these past publications still continue to
have value as CPD for teachers?

As these series all had a CPD purpose it seems important to ask if that value continues – so here are some of the planning, teaching and learning issues that these books highlight and can inform. They’re in no particular order but many are inter-linked.

1. The central importance of enabling students to develop a strong sense of the overall process of studying history, not just of individual conceptual understandings. We got much better at this, building in the enquiry process as the context for learning how to handle individual concepts. To develop this broad understanding, students need the opportunity to study some topics in real depth. Our King John book, for example, provided that depth, enabling students to grapple with why interpretations differ – this was way ahead of its time in 2000.

2. KS3 courses need to be planned as a whole in order to help students see them as courses, not a sequence of often unrelated topics. This means planning backwards (not from the beginning with 1066!) from what you want students to take away in terms of substantive knowledge and of understanding of the process of studying history – the takeaways from Y7 and then Y8 that you’ll re-use build up to your overall KS3 takeaways. Students’ confidence as learners is much enhanced when they realise they are revisiting and re-using knowledge and understandings they developed earlier. That was how we planned the Y7, 8 and 9 books c2007. At the end of each unit students need to be asked ‘what have you learned from this? What do you think is important to take away and remember?’ (examples in the online medieval chapters).

3. KS3 has to include carefully constructed ‘big stories’, swiftly-covered-themes in order to create space for real depth. Themes are not second-best but a valid approach to history in their own right, offering students the opportunity to identify long-term patterns and discontinuities. We provided good attempts in the This is History! books, the Y7,8 and 9 books and in my most recent online medieval material.

4. Space has to be found to identify students’ preconceptions and misconceptions about topics and to explain to students why this is important. I only started doing this in the most recent medieval material but I believe it can have a significant impact on learning and on students’ understanding of how to learn effectively.

5.There is no reason why students should spend KS3 tackling GCSE-style questions. What are needed at KS3 are substantial outcomes, pieces of work such as those produced by following the Grand Prix track extended writing model in King John or rewriting Botchit and Leggit’s deeply misleading introduction to the medieval theme park in the Y7 book. These produce work that students can be proud of, that are motivating, creative and develop confidence.

6. Creativity is vital for teachers in planning and teaching – the fastest way to turn teachers away from teaching into other careers is to take away the opportunity for creativity, for problem-solving in the classroom i.e. continuing to learn and develop as teachers. If departments can work together to identify learning problems and come up with planning and teaching solutions to try out then morale can grow.

7. Linked to creativity is challenging how ‘it’s always been done this way before’! In the Y7 book I wanted to explore why the sources for the events of 1066 tell such different stories but decided to turn the whole task round – instead of starting, as usual, by identifying the content of the sources I gave students information about the chroniclers (i.e. the provenance of the sources) and asked them to predict what these writers said. This placed the emphasis on provenance which otherwise can be very much an after-thought. Then, armed with their predictions, students are eager to find out what was in the sources themselves and understand the reasons for the differences a whole lot better. Similarly I knew that yet another activity on the sources for the murder of Becket was not giving me anything that could be re-used later but asking ‘why was Henry II whipped?’ was introducing ideas about the limits of the power of the crown that swiftly reappeared with King John and later events.

8. And finally, do students understand why studying history is valuable to them, i.e. how their knowledge of the past and their understanding of how history is studied can help them understand and interpret their own world? Looking back, this is my greatest regret at all levels – do departments focus enough time on this or, as in our books, does this get squeezed out of courses because it’s not a strong enough aim?

A Final Accounting

I set out to identify the contexts which explain the nature of these series – both their historical content and, particularly, their teaching and learning approaches. Overall, with the exception of the SHP 11-13 series in the mid-1980s, I think we made good first efforts at achieving our aims but I never had that “punch the air in triumph” feeling when a series was completed – I was always aware of the things that hadn’t quite worked. Why this short-fall?

I’ve identified what feel like three ‘surface’ factors. The least significant is the role of government in the form of the National Curriculum. Although it was there in the background from 1991 it only played a major part in shaping one of my series, the OUP series when the first NC was introduced and, even then, I focussed on going beyond the NC to develop understanding of the enquiry process. Of greater importance was the role of my publishers. This was frequently positive, encouraging new ideas and experimentation and producing excellent design, illustrations of all kinds and editorial support, although commercial competition did on occasion require scheduling that was too short to produce the quality of material I was seeking.

An even greater influence on the nature of the books were the people who planned, edited and wrote them, aiming to offer students the best materials we could and provide teachers with ‘CPD in a textbook’. To my frustration, I also played a part in the limitations of these series – that important human factor of simply running out of mental energy because editing and writing a series is a lengthy and onerous task, juggling so many facets and people.

Looking back over these decades however I can identify another factor – the growing ambition in history education for us to do more and more in what was often less time and fewer pages. This ‘quart into a pint pot’ issue has grown more and more problematic with each decade since the 1970s and had a major impact on our ability to fulfil our aims for these series.

These five series of textbooks exemplify this problem. They were all attempts at providing problem-solving CPD but the number of problems we were trying to address mounted with each series, not least because we kept having more good ideas! When I started teaching – I did my PGCE in 1973-4 – textbooks contained information and explanation written by authors and some pictures. There were relatively few questions – as teachers we usually created them ourselves. There were few sources, little artwork, no discussion of second-order concepts, no enquiry questions or enquiry process, no contrasting depth and overview or attempts to make learning visible so that students can learn to learn more effectively. And then it began to change!

What’s apparent from my five series is that our ambitions kept mounting. In the 80s we wanted to develop students’ conceptual understandings and this continued to be an aim in each of the following series. In 1991, we added making the enquiry process (not just enquiry questions) explicit and that too remained ever-present. Then came how to build depth and thematic units and how to create greater coherence across KS3 by pursuing thematic stories. And if that wasn’t enough, there was the constant desire to make our aims explicit in our books so that students had a very clear idea of what the takeaways were (whether in terms of knowledge or conceptual understanding) and to relate these takeaways to what SHP in the 70s called ‘adolescent needs’, helping students understand how studying history can help them make sense of their world.

All these issues are visible in my medieval chapters alongside new preoccupations such as identifying and teaching to misconceptions at the same time as trying to create a better approach to teaching about the Middle Ages. That’s quite a list of issues for teachers and writers to tackle, indicative of how complex the teaching of history has become since the mid-1970s – something that may not be apparent unless you remember the nature of teaching and textbooks in the early 70s.

But that’s not all – there’s the central issue of content too because, alongside the work on teaching and learning, there has been the question of how to move the nature of the content studied forward. Given that SHP in the 1970s undertook a radical re-think of the topics studied by 14-16 year olds, the content studied at KS3 took a long time to move forward. The idea of studying the contexts of contemporary issues and topics that linked to students’ own lives – a core precept of the SHP exam course from the 70s – isn’t visible in our 1983 SHP History 11-13 series and the content of our NC core books in 1991 was very similar to the content I studied at school in the 1960s.

I can only write about my own series, not anyone else’s – and I know there were many worthwhile initiatives by teachers around the country and in some textbooks – but it wasn’t until the early 2000s with the This is History! series and more so in the SHP Y7, 8 and 9 books in 2008/9 that we managed to move forward. We used overviews to cover chunks of medieval and early modern history to create opportunities for greater depth on topics that linked more explicitly to issues in students’ lives. We also found ways of reducing the domination of the events of the World Wars so we could find more space for considered approaches to empire and imperialism, to migration and, though still to a limited extent, the histories of other parts of the world.

Why had it taken so long, given that the SHP Y7, 8 and 9 series appeared over 60 years after the end of World War Two? The National Curriculum played its part but I suspect the explanation goes deeper. Publishers tend to be conservative in wanting to cover topics most people teach and that meant not changing the traditional content too much, especially as many were used by non-specialist teachers comfortable with standard content. Publishers can also be conservative in choosing writers and editors – they want writers with a record of delivering reliable material on schedule, especially in periods when publishing competition is fierce, but that doesn’t create openings for new writers with expertise in new areas of content but who may not have the experience to deliver books on time.

My own role as editor is an example of this because I didn’t have the knowledge or experience to push those content frontiers in ways that other people could have done. My historical interests are in the Middle Ages and in history education what excited me was all those ‘big’ issues about the process of history, enquiry, depth and outline and understanding how students learn most effectively. I was a safe choice as writers and editor in content terms though radical in ideas about teaching and learning.

In addition, born in 1951, I can now see how lengthy was the shadow of both wars for many of my generation. I and my contemporaries grew up in a landscape of bomb sites, air-raid shelters and camouflaged buildings, still visible in the 1960s. Our families were exhausted and scarred by the experiences and psychological impact of both wars and the subliminal effects of those twin experiences were handed down to my generation. As a result, I suspect generational change is another factor explaining the slow change in the content in the books – it took until the early 2000s for a new generation of teachers, born in the 70s and 80s, to be able to think really afresh about the content studied in the history curriculum.

********

Having set all that out, it’s no wonder there were never enough pages and time to do everything I hoped for. It also explains why I never had time to focus on another ‘too big to solve’ issue – the visibility of the writer in the books. I’ve written about this in my essay on writing and editing A level books on this site but the issues bear repeating. There’s been a culture of authorial invisibility in textbooks at all levels – the writer is generally no more than a name on the cover and title page and almost always invisible in the style of writing too. I think this is deeply unhelpful if we want students to understand that the discipline of history is full of uncertainties and interpretations, and that those interpretations change. Students need to see that books are written by individuals because this is fundamental to students’ appreciation that a textbook isn’t ‘the word of truth’ but full of contestable statements and uncertainties, part of the ongoing conversation amongst historians about what can validly be said about each topic.

Hence I really would have liked our books to have contained pictures of writers and information about us and for us to be audible in the text, explicitly making judgments about topics and its interpretations and expressing uncertainties about what can be said. Presenting text in schoolbooks as the unchallengeable ‘word of authority’ runs counter to the reasons why we develop students’ understanding of the processes of studying the past. The best material I wrote was a GCSE book section on Medicine on the Western Front which I framed as my personal investigation of my grandfather’s medical history in 1917-18. Being visible in the text enabled me to set out the phases of my enquiry, the questions I hoped to answer, tentative conclusions on the way – and to explain when I changed my mind about my discoveries. My voice as an individual was vital to creating a sense of enquiry and hypothesis, the process of historical investigation brought to life in the text in a way I hadn’t managed in my KS3 books.

********

Concluding the conclusion – I may be guilty of falling into the ‘Brunetti trap’ (see page 1), by reading the history of these books as I choose but, despite all those caveats and problems, working on all those books was constantly stimulating and creative – and fun. I always bubbled with excitement when sitting down with a blank sheet of paper to sketch out the plan of a new book or series. Textbooks can and should be a form of CPD, offering teachers new approaches to planning, teaching and learning. None of the books I worked on ever quite lived up to my ideals when planning the series but then we’d set ourselves an increasingly gargantuan task with ever decreasing amounts of thinking and writing time. All of which makes me think that I, textbook writers and history teachers in general need to be kinder to ourselves and celebrate what is done well and less anxious about what hasn’t worked.

Top of the page

List of Publications Discussed: KS3

1. SHP History 11-13

Published by Holmes McDougall for SHP 1983-1987

Ian Dawson, Prehistoric Britain, 1983 (Evidence 1)
Joe Scott, Hadrian’s Wall, 1984 (Causation 1)
Jean Grant, The Neolithic Revolution, 1984 (Change 1)
Aileen Plummer, People and Pictures, 1984 (Empathy 1)
Terry Lewis, The Battle of Hastings, 1987 (Evidence 2)
David Jones, Muhammad and the Spread of Islam, 1988 (Causation 2)
Jim Clark, The Development of Printing, 1987 (Change 2)
Douglas Thorburn, The Children’s Crusade, 1985 (Empathy 2)

2. Oxford History Study Units

Published by OUP 1991-1993
National Curriculum Core topics

Ian Coulson, The Roman Empire, 1992
Ian Dawson and Paul Watson, Medieval Realms,1991
Charles Maltman and Ian Dawson, The Making of the United Kingdom, 1992
Jon Cresswell and Peter Laurence, Expansion, Trade and Industry, 1993
Neil DeMarco, The Era of the Second World War, 1993

Optional topics

Patricia and Ian Dawson, Castles and Cathedrals,1992
Ian Dawson, The Crusades, 1992
James Green, Native Peoples of the Americas, 1992
Nigel Smith, Black Peoples of the Americas, 1992
Neil DeMarco, Britain and the Great War, 1992
Carol Gleisner, Imperial China, 1993

3. This is History!

Published by John Murray/Hodder 2000-2004

Dave Martin and Beth Brooke, Write Your Own Roman Story, 2001
Ian Dawson, Lost in Time, 2001
Christopher Culpin and Ian Dawson, The Norman Conquest, 2002
Dale Banham and Ian Dawson, King John, 2000
Andy Harmsworth and Ian Dawson, King Cromwell?, 2002
Michael Riley, Jamie Byrom and Christopher Culpin The Impact of Empire, 2004
Jane Richardson and Ian Dawson, Dying for the Vote, 2002
Dale Banham and Christopher Culpin, The Trenches, 2002
Christopher Culpin, The Twentieth Century, 2004
Ann Moore and Christopher Culpin, The Holocaust, 2003
Ian Dawson, What is History? Y7, 2003
Ian Dawson, What is History? Y9, 2004

4. SHP Y7, 8 and 9 books

Published by John Murray/Hodder 2008-2009

Ian Dawson and Maggie Wilson, SHP Y7, 2008
Chris Culpin, Dale Banham, Sally Burnham, Bethan Edwards, SHP Y8, 2009
Dale Banham and Ian Luff, SHP Y9, 2009

5. Medieval Lives

Published online 2021-2