Mr. Jerrit's History teaching blog

I am currently marking 3 sets' worth of tests for Year 9, which my school did this week for all subjects and all year groups 7-12. While I have a big concern about the efficacy of this as a process (Year 7 English is just not the same as Year 12 A Level Chemistry and should not be treated in the same way, for example) it got me thinking further about the way I have been approaching source analysis across the curriculum and the year groups I teach. I set this as a source analysis question at the end of a unit on the Western Front, with a focus on Verdun, the Somme and tank development. We had spent time analysing sources in different ways (what they can tell us about the past, the views they have, comparison, usefulness, reliability etc) Although I appreciate the wording could be different,  I chose this source because I felt there was a lot of potential in it and details which students could unpack. There were some good answers from good students, but only a few managed to get the ...

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...