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

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