Planning for Residual Knowledge

Last week my colleague Rob sent over an interesting document that got us both thinking. It was a plan of possible ‘takeaway’ knowledge about Medieval England that Ian Dawson had put together in Exploring and Teaching Medieval History. I put the document out on twitter and asked if similar things had been created for other

Alignment across History and English: surely a good thing?

A few years ago my colleague in English Richard Gleig mentioned the benefits of cross-curricular alignment. We spoke about it then, but did very little to see any kind of plan come to fruition. In actuality, his curriculum was in a far stronger state than my own, and the idea of alignment felt like a

What might a ‘Writing Curriculum’ look like in Secondary History?

Last week I posted about the use of sentence-level instruction in my History classroom. I was touched to receive some very kind feedback from people I have long-admired. It was all the more pleasing to see that others have begun experimenting in the same vein, weaving structures together in a bid to break away from

The Hochman method – sentence level instruction in the History classroom

Why teach writing at a sentence level? There are countless blog posts celebrating the transformative quality of Judith Hochman’s Writing Revolution. Jo Facer, for one, lauded the genuinely revolutionary quality of Hochman’s method (a comprehensive “rethink on how we teach writing”), while Kristian Shanks simply said the book was “one of the most important things”

Robust Vocabulary Instruction – A Model for Secondary History

Why is vocabulary instruction so important? I have long been amazed at the quality of words that leave our students mouths and pens when they are talking or writing about English literature. A year 7 at the end of Autumn 1 could tell you, for instance, that despite being the protagonist of the myth, Perseus