Mr. Jerrit's History teaching blog

I don't honestly remember who inspired this format - but whoever you are on the EduTwitterverse, thanks! This was an attempt to have some quiz-style questions which covered most of the CIE IGCSE History course. Other GCSE courses do some similar topics, and some do different ones; I am sharing this here if you wish to make your own. I have used these questions as lesson starters or as a short test to consolidate a unit. This is partly inspired by the excellent work of Kate Jones and her work on "Retrieval Practice"; I'll write more about this in a future blog post, but in sum the idea is this: In order to get students to fully understand a topic its details have to be stored in long term memory, and be connected to existing knowledge. This is achieved by "calling to mind" the information previously taught and using this information in some way; new information is thus moved from the smaller working memory and stored in the long-term memory. Low-stakes qu...

Inspired a little by AQA's GCSE spec where it talks about Second Order Concepts of " continuity, change, cause, consequence, significance, similarity and difference" , and the Bayeux Tapestry Meme-Generator , I came up with these.  They are designed at least to get students thinking about how to use these concepts (having used other similar but less interesting things in the past). Hopefully they will also give students a starting point for their own work. There are probably things one could quibble about; whether the text is readable by SEN, and to what extent these are emphasising the traditional "top-down" understanding of hierarchy by saying that the king is more important than the people. I'll put the files in this Google Drive directory.  Here you'll find the images (which I'll try to print on A3) and the file I downloaded from the  Bayeux Tapestry Meme-Generator , which might allow you to make your own version (I've not had the chan...

Timeline of Inter-War Years and Dictatorships Inspired, as ever by the work of  @worcesterjonny,  and using one of his files as a template, I knocked this Timeline together to cover the Interwar years and the dictators of the 1920s and 1930s. I think it should be useful for display purposes if you can find a printer which can use A2 pages and also for analysis (give an A3 version to your students!). I hope to use it with my IB History students (Paper 3, Europe Topics 14 & 15), and it should be useful for a variety of GCSE courses too. The PDF can be found here The Editable Publisher file can be found here (if you want to do your own version)

I've tried various ways of encouraging students to read around the subject, sometimes with success - mostly talking to keen students about relevant texts is the best way, although a good display helps! With this in mind, I have put this poster together - inspired by the work of Twitter Educationalist Mark Anderson ( https://twitter.com/ICTEvangelist) . It is designed to look like a "periodic table" and is organised into broad themes which we cover in our various courses: As with a real periodic table I have tried to demonstrate a range of complexity; by putting the more straight-forward texts towards the top and the more complex and challenging towards the bottom. In case anyone wants to have their own version for editing (as not everyone covers the Tudors, the Dutch Revolt and Health & the People!) here is the editable PUB file (for MS Publisher 2013) . Here is the PDF file if you'd like that instead !