Mr. Jerrit's History teaching blog

I have other blog posts on the boil at the moment, but while I was thinking about it, I thought I would share a set of "Revision Grids" for the Edexcel IGCSE Germany Depth Study. I have given them out to Year 10 students as we have gone through the course - part of a lesson or homework has been to fill in part of them when we get to the end of a section. The intention is not for every fact to be included, but at least one (more is ideal) to help student to memorise the facts. I hoped it would help students to keep details in context. Many, if not all of these icons are used by me during teaching so the intention is that there is some recall of the learning that happened. I have also tried to highlight any causal links or thematic connections to help students see the link between factors, so that is also part of their learning too. Again - this has been a focus of my lessons and the students' classwork, so none of these ideas are new. I have been doing this sort of thing f...

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...