SHP Conference 2011

Getting Length into the Classroom

Rick Rogers

SHP Conference 2011

Kids

• If anybody fancies having a rant about what our kids can’t do, now is your time.

• Kids can do things.• Kids think things.• As teachers we need to know what they can do

and how they think.• Then we can this knowledge to help make them

better.• Some people call this education.

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A Picture of Some Kids

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How kids think about the past

• “Children cannot hold a big picture of the past in their heads.”

• So what can they do?• What follows is an illustration of a starting

point of a problem that I have been scratching at for years.

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A Task• An Essay question: What happened at the

Battle of Waterloo, June 18th 1815?• A Year 9 girl wrote an essay.• She placed the following at the battle of

Waterloo:– Napoleon Bonaparte– The Duke of Wellington– Oliver Cromwell– General George Custer – Julius Caesar

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A Process at Work?

• Historical material is stored in the memory.• To place Custer, Cromwell, Caesar, Wellington

and Napoleon in the same area, there must be a theme.

• Possible the theme of battles.• When faced with a battle question, the battle

information is recalled.

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That’s my Big Picture of the Past

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The Big Picture of the Past

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Shaping the Big Picture

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How People Understand the Past

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The ‘Mural’ Past versus the Continuum Past

• Question: What was life like in the Middle Ages?

• Answer:• It was really hard. Everybody had to grow

turnips and then go and work for the Lord. He rode around on his poor horse wearing a suit of armour. The Lord owned everything whilst all the poor people died of the Black Death.

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The ‘Mural’ Past versus the Continuum Past

• Question: What was life like in the Middle Ages?

• Answer:• When?• Where?• For whom?

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Classroom Task One: Darwin’s Beard

• The problem is:– We ascribe facets to known phenomena from the

past.– We can make judgements from these facets.– Facets change over time when we see the past as

a continuum.– When we see the past as a mural, they don’t.

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Histories

• Example: Charles Darwin

• Lived 1809 to 1882• Question: Did Charles

Darwin have a large grey beard?

• If ‘yes’ raise your right arm, if ‘no’ raise your left.

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Classroom Task Two: Anne FrankUse the timeline of Anne Frank, your own knowledge

and the hugely impressive encyclopaedic knowledge of your teacher to complete the Anne Frank grid.

– 1929 Born – 1933 Nazi party was elected to power in Germany. – Summer 1933 The Franks moved to the Netherlands.– 1940 German forces invaded the Netherlands. – June 12, 1942 Anne's 13th birthday. Received diary.– July 6, 1942 The Frank family moved into hiding place– August 4, 1944 The Franks were arrested– September 2, 1944 Sent to Auschwitz. – April 1945 Anne died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen. – June 25, 1947 The Diary of Anne Frank went on sale.

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Classroom Task Two: Anne Frank

• In order to complete the Anne Frank grid you had to try to put to one side some of the things that came towards the end.

• We need to ‘unknow’ some parts of history in order to better understand some of its moments.

• Putting these moments back into context helps us to understand the development of history.

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Classroom Task Two: Anne Frank

• If we did the same thing with Anne Frank’s father, Otto, we would get a different variation.

• Otto was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust.

• He lived a comfortable life until he died in 1980.• He worked hard to spread the story of Anne’s

life through her diary.

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Classroom Task Two: Anne Frank

• Anne versus Otto.• If you think Anne raise your right hand, if you

think Otto raise your left.• Who died in the Holocaust?• Who survived the Holocaust?• Who enjoyed the greater freedom in their lives?• Who suffered the most?• Who was the most tragic figure?

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The Most Evil?

• Who is the most evil, Adolf Hitler or Rick Rogers?

• The future life of Rick Rogers:– Will take up leadership of the Liberal Democrats– Will use demonic rhetoric to whip them into a

frenzy.– They will then perpetrate mass murder of all those

that they don’t regard as being nice.

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Games in Time.

• Let’s transplant the life of Rogers back 100 years.• The only information in the public domain is an

incident where the irate schoolteacher shouted at an innocent looking young boy.

• We then landed in Berlin in November 1944. We asked Traudl Junge the same question.

• In 1916 Belgium, we also asked the same question of the officer, commanding Hitler’s company.

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Classroom Task Three: Causation Maps

• A visual representation of change over time.• The aim is to show students that history is a

combination of processes over time.• It is a not a set of different pictures

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Uses of Causation Maps – Revision

• Annotate the map with events.• The Map on the downfall of Napoleon’s

empire is an aid for A level. • Towards the end of the course, the teacher

took the students through the process.• They made a record on the sheet for revision

purposes.

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Uses of Causation Maps – KS3 Familiarising through Matching

• The students have to work out through the changes in the shapes which strand pertains to which definition.

• This emphasises to the students the nature of the changes in terms of the substantive history.

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Uses of Causation Maps – Omission to stress significance

• The causation maps in this session were made by Rick Rogers.

• Rick Rogers is a teacher therefore the causation maps are correct.

• The way that it stresses the importance of the Popish Plot of 1678, er.........

• Oh, it’s not there!• The causation map is wrong!!!!!!

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Uses of Causation Maps – Omission to stress significance

• On the Gunpowder Plot map, let’s suppose any reflection of the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, the Spanish Armada or the restoration of Charles II is missed off.

• We then give the kids a list of these to use to label the map.

• They realise the map has omissions.• The students make the map ‘right’.• We then show them the next slide.

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Uses of Causation Maps – Omission to stress significance

• The reign of Lady Jane Grey.• The Battle of Namur• Singeing the king of Spain’s beard• The Earl of Essex’s rebellion• The dissolving of the Rump Parliament in 1653• John Churchill’s defection to William of Orange

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Uses of Causation Maps – Omission to stress significance

• The Pilgrimage of Grace• The rule of the Major Generals• Founding of the Bank of England• Reforms of the Poor Law• Death of Mary II• War with Spain and France in the 1620s• The battle of Solway Moss

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Inclusion and Omission

• What to include is a fundamental operation in the construction of history.

• As an example, take any weighty historical biography.

• Ask the students, so what did X have for breakfast on date Y?

• It’s not there.• The biography is not, therefore, useful.

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Classroom Task Four: Inevitability

• Things that have happened, had to happen.• Why?• Because they happened.• Did these things have to happen?• Yes because they did happen.• What if they had not happened?• But they did happen.

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Or put another way....

• Why did World War Two happen?• Because all these causes made it happen.• What did these factors cause?• They caused World War Two?• Did World War Two have to happen?• Yes because these causes were there.• So if these causes were not there, would World War

Two have happened?• But they were there, so it had to happen.

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If the past is inevitable....

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The Bradford City Fire

• Three causes (two conditions and one trigger):– Litter– Wooden stand– Lit cigarette

• Was this inevitable?• Why did it not happen earlier?• Why could it not have happened after it did?

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The Plenary Session

• So what have we learned from this workshop?• I hope you might consider:– The way that students think about the past– Mural versus continuum past– Activities that dig around in your students heads

and reveal what they think about the past.

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Workshop Documents

• Available at:– Rickinthenorth.wordpress.com