Teaching and learning history: using skills progression
History teachers pay lip service to learning historical skills. In reality we are either vague about it or what we mean is examination technique, how to write short essays and answer source questions to trigger the mark scheme. Ive always told classes that I have two missions in life. First and most important to make them excellent historians. Second, easier and less important, to get them top grades.
The problem arises because examinations are muddled about what theyre trying to assess. Questions that are supposed to test skill with historical sources in fact depend largely either on memory or on textual analysis. Essays that are supposed to test understanding of cause in fact test the basics of essay structure.
How do you structure good teaching and learning to turn students into historians? You do it by breaking down the skills they need for history and teaching them progressively. Starting on day one, when they arrive in the school at 11 or 13. Its actually quite simple. First they need to understand inference, reading on the surface and beneath, no brain and brain. Second they need to be able to sequence, get things in the right order and understand why it matters. If they can infer and sequence you can teach cause. You can teach long/possible, short/probable and trigger. Later you can teach categories of cause. Then you can combine the two. By now you are beyond whats necessary for GCSE and even A level. I teach all this (and much more) by the time theyre 14.
Once and only once they understand inference, sequence and cause they can examine sources. They read beneath the surface and ask why a source came to be written. It fits into the bigger pattern. Theres much more to be said here for example about why we should not be using primary and secondary any more. But thats for another time.
Now what the history teacher does is to take each of these skills inference, sequence, cause and source and revisits it each year in KS3. Each year you move on, building on what was done before. You find ways to teach topics at the beginning of the school year that concentrate on inference. Of course you will use sources all along, but you will only concentrate exclusively on learning how to use them in topics you study during the spring term. I find I use the summer term to teach other skills, such as using a whole archive of sources, or local history. And of course revision.
Progress the discrete skills through KS3 and you have thinking, articulate historians more than ready to sail through GCSE and A level. Now you can explore examinations syllabuses in depth. You can also teach examination technique without confusing it with being historians. Result.