Supporting High Achievement in History:

Conclusions of the NAGTY History Think Tank

28 / 29 November 2005
This document attempts to summarise the discussions that took place at NAGTY’s
History Think Tank in November 2005. It neither is a definitive report of that meeting nor
an exhaustive statement on the issues we addressed and it is very much intended as
work in progress. We will welcome the thoughts of colleagues nationally on the topics
that this document addresses and of the views that we have expressed on them:
additions, further suggestions and ideas for teaching approaches will be gratefully
received and integrated into subsequent editions of this text as appropriate.

Table of Contents

I. The History Think Tank: Contexts and Key Questions....................................................1

II. Characteristics of High Achievement in History.............................................................2
III. Supporting and Developing High Achievement in the History Classroom....................5
(a) High Achievement and Historical Thinking....................................................5
i. Evidence, enquiry and investigation........................................................................5
ii. Interpretations..........................................................................................................7
iii. Historical Significance.............................................................................................8
iv. Historical Causation..............................................................................................10
v. Change and Continuity..........................................................................................11
(b) High Achievement, Metacognition and Holistic Thinking.............................13
Reflecting on the Nature of History...........................................................................13
IV. High Achievement and Enrichment............................................................................14
Bringing Historians into School.................................................................................15
Building Virtual Academies........................................................................................15
VI. Next Steps..................................................................................................................16

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I. The History Think Tank: Contexts and Key Questions
In November 2005, the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth organised a
two-day event attended by 25 history practitioners with extensive experience and
expertise in English secondary history education, including classroom teachers, heads
of department and advanced skills teachers, academic historians and history teacher
educators. The group included an editor of Teaching History, numerous contributors to
the publication and members of the Historical Association and the Specialist Schools
and Academies Trust’s National Specialism Coordinator for Humanities. The event was
convened by Christine Counsell. Deborah Eyre and Angela Gould represented NAGTY.

The agenda for the meeting was set by a briefing paper prepared by Christine Counsell 1
and by preparatory reading that focused the group’s attention on two fundamental
questions that our discussions aimed to pose in relation to pupils across the secondary
age range, namely -

(i) What are and/or could be the characteristics of the highest achievement in
history?
(ii) How can secondary school history teachers nurture that achievement?

In our discussion we aimed to remain focused on the key issue underlying both
questions – high achievement in history – and to avoid becoming distracted or diverted
into questions relating to the definition and identification of gifted or very able pupils or
into curriculum or assessment matters.

History education research suggests that progression towards high achievement in

history is a complex matter and that children’s ideas develop and progress at differential
rates and in decoupled ways.2 In addition, and as every teacher knows, learners are
always and endlessly capable of surprising us, whatever “CAT score” or identity we
devise for them. Our discussion, therefore, was focused more on high achievement than
on high achievers and on the ways in which we could enable as broad a spectrum of
learners as possible to experience the cognitive challenge and excitement and the
opportunities for intellectual development and growth that rigorous historical thinking
offers.

We were also very mindful of the fact that curriculum review is in process and we hope
that our observations may inform this process. It seemed to us, however, that thinking
that focused on understanding and supporting high achievement in historical teaching
and learning might be of more use in this context than thinking bounded by system

1
A list of participants, the preparatory briefing paper and an initial statement of next steps can be found at
http://www.nagty.ac.uk/professional_academy/special_projects/think_tanks.aspx
2
Lee, P.J. and Shemilt, D. (2003) ‘A scaffold not a cage: progression and progression models in history’,
Teaching History, 113 and Ashby, R. Gordon, P. and Lee P.J. (2005), Understanding History: Recent
Research in History Education, Volume 4, International Review of History Education, London and New
York, Routledge Farmer

Supporting High Achievement in History Page 1 12/11/2018

specific questions of curriculum architecture and assessment: hence the focus of the
observations that follow below.

We were not able, in the two days of the Think Tank, to fully address all the issues that
arose in discussion or that were identified in Christine Counsell’s briefing paper. The
observations that follow reflect the bulk of our discussions and the focus that they took
on history as a discipline and on historical learning as a process of knowledge
construction. A working group, made up of members of the Think Tank, will meet in 2006
and subsequently to take our thinking on these matters forward but also to examine
further questions, identified in the Think Tank briefing paper, that go beyond this
disciplinary focus.

II. Characteristics of High Achievement in History

A number of abilities, attitudes and habits of mind characteristic of, or emerging from,
high achievement in history were identified in our discussions. High achievement in
history both results from and enables -

 An appreciation of the intrinsic value of historical learning and an enjoyment of

the process
 An unwillingness to be easily satisfied and a desire to be challenged by and to
pose real historical problems
 The ability to engage in open-ended historical research and enquiry and to enjoy
the process
 A developed awareness of the complexity of the past and of the process of
seeking to understand it
 The ability to cope with the unfamiliar (contexts, periods, cultures) and the ability
to use historical imagination to engage with and attempt to understand it
 A hunger for knowledge of the past and the ability to acquire and understand
large quantities of knowledge about the past
 The ability to see links between diverse elements and areas of historical
knowledge
 The ability to develop and internalise an ‘archive’ of historical knowledge and
concepts and the ability to use this to frame and develop questions
 An informed awareness of the importance of historical context, the desire and
ability to contextualise elements of the past and the ability to develop a sense of
period and to suggest, question and critically evaluate periodisations
 The ability to grasp and understand historical concepts, to develop them
rigorously and to apply them in a nuanced way when constructing historical
analyses, arguments and explanations
 A developed awareness of the nature of historical argument and of the ways in
which historical claims are put together and justified

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  The ability to critically deploy historical evidence to sustain, test and develop
historical arguments and to think critically about the ways in which others have
done this
 The ability to appreciate and to deal with logical complexity in historical writing
and documentary materials and to consider and to evaluate conflicting and
contradictory evidence and arguments
 The ability to make and to break historical generalisations – to see their value and
also their limits
 The ability to process and develop historical knowledge and to reorganise and
restructure it into new historical forms and new historical arguments
 A willingness to construct historical hypotheses, to test and develop historical
theories and descriptions and a willingness to take risks when doing so
 The ability to read historical materials actively and critically – to read documents
and accounts for purpose and to consider the aims of authors and documents
 The ability to grasp, to develop and to experiment with analytical historical
vocabularies and to enjoy communicating historical ideas and theories
 The ability to structure and to develop extended historical narrative and analysis
and the ability to construct, sustain and weave together chains of reasoning,
analysis, description and explanation
 A secure grasp of the nature of historical interpretation and the ability to
historicize representations and constructions of the past, in the light of a range of
considerations (such as their purpose, the questions being asked and answered,
provenance, audience, context)
 An understanding of presentism – of the inevitable human tendency to see the
past in terms of the present - and of the problems and opportunities that it
presents

It is history, in the disciplinary sense of a systematic process of analysis and enquiry,

that gives unity and coherence to the abilities, attitudes and habits of mind that we
identified and the process of acquiring understanding of the discipline both develops and
refines them.

As teachers we seek to encourage our pupils to think in these ways in order to develop
their understanding of the human past and also, and equally, to develop their
understanding of the complex and often contested processes of making knowledge
claims about the past. These are necessarily simultaneous tasks because you cannot be
said to “know your history” in the sense of knowing warranted stories about the past, if
you do not understand something of the nature of historical knowledge.

We know that a disciplinary approach to history can achieve outstanding results, in

terms of pupil achievement and motivation, from the earliest stages of primary
education.3 We also have numerous examples of approaches to teaching and learning
3
These matters are fully discussed in Cooper, H. (2004) The Teaching of History in Primary Schools:
Implementing the Revised National Curriculum David Fulton Publishers Ltd and were addressed in the
paper ‘History in Primary Schools’, given at the IHR conference History in British Education of the 14/15th

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across the full range of secondary history that show us what a rigorous disciplinary
approach looks like and that demonstrate how we can aspire to high achievement in
historical thinking for all our pupils. 4

The members of the Think Tank were in broad agreement that effective learning in
history, and high achievement in particular, depends upon clear and rigorous curricular
and pedagogic thinking about history as a discipline and that it depends upon pupils
achieving a developed grasp of the discipline of history: in other words, it depends upon
teaching and learning that foregrounds and scaffolds the development of the core
disciplinary (or “second order”) concepts.5

High achievement in history is also, of course, characterised by and developed through

the acquisition of extensive subject knowledge: you cannot develop as a historian
without knowledge of the past and developing historical literacy is about developing a
depth of knowledge, reference and example as well as about increasing conceptual and
disciplinary grasp.6 High achievement also involves an increasing ability to abstract and
compare and to think analogically. We advance pupil achievement therefore by setting
tasks, that explicitly make links between what the pupils have been taught over the
course of their studies and that ask pupils to generalise on the basis of comparisons and
contrasts and to debate the new and generalised understandings that they create
through such activities.

High achievement, in history as in many other areas, is also characterised by and

developed through complex engagement with language. Historical study, by its very
nature, promotes this since the past speaks differently to the present and studying the
past is about understanding different conceptual and linguistic worlds. Historical thinking
is also an excellent vehicle for promoting and developing pupils’ ability to reason and to

February 2005 (http://www.history.ac.uk/education/conference/cooper.html).

4
The pages of Teaching History abound with road-tested teaching approaches that are ambitious in both
in terms of achievement and in their disciplinary focus; examples include Michael Riley’s work on
curriculum planning, Gary Howell’s work on interpretations and Claire Riley’s work on “layers of inference”
in source interpretation (Riley, M. (2000) ‘Into the Key Stage 3 history garden: choosing and planting your
enquiry questions’, Teaching History, 99; Howells, G. (2006) ‘Interpretations and history teaching: why
Ronald Hutton’s Debates in Stuart History matters’, Teaching History, 121; Riley, C. (1999) ‘Evidential
understanding, period knowledge and the development of literacy: a practical approach to ‘layers of
inference’ for Key Stage 3’, Teaching History, 97).
5
These concepts include evidence and enquiry, interpretations, constructions and accounts, historical
significance, change and continuity and cause and effect. These concepts, and issues of progression in
pupil mastery of them, have been treated at length in a number of places and recently and highly
effectively in chapter two of Donovan, S., et al, eds. (2004) How Students Learn, History In The
Classroom, Washington: The National Academies Press. This publication is available online at
http://newton.nap.edu/books/0309089484/html/ and develops highly practical teaching approaches
grounded in extensive research findings.
6
Denis Shemilt and Peter Lee have addressed the question of frameworks of historical knowledge and
their importance to historically literate thinking in The Caliph’s Coin (in Stearns, P.N. et al, eds., 2000,
Knowing, Teaching and Learning History: National and International Perspectives New York: New York
University Press) and in Historical Literacy: Theory and Research
(http://www.centres.ex.ac.uk/historyresource/journal9/papers/leerev.doc) respectively.

Supporting High Achievement in History Page 4 12/11/2018

reflect on the process of doing so. 7 If we aim to raise pupil achievement we should aim
to develop and refine their grasp of analytical terminology, their grasp of concepts and
their grasp of logic. Language and historical thinking develop together and achievement
is best enhanced by teaching that explicitly seeks to advance both.

III. Supporting and Developing High Achievement in the

History Classroom

(a) High Achievement and Historical Thinking

How can we best support and develop pupils’ understanding of the discipline of history?
Our observations in this section explore individual historical concepts, the kinds of
understanding that pupils need to develop to fully grasp them and teaching strategies
that are likely to support pupil’s conceptual development and high achievement. We also
consider the ways in which these concepts overlap and inter-relate.

i. Evidence, enquiry and investigation

We want our highest achieving historians to be:

 Aware of the concept of evidence – of the fact that sources only become
historical sources in the context of historical enquiry and questioning
 Comfortable with a variety of source materials and types and with different
ways of using them in pursuit of different types of enquiry
 Aware that sources can be used to present, develop and support different
enquiries, arguments and analyses
 Aware that the same source can be used differently for different purposes in
different enquiries
 Aware that the crucial component of an enquiry is the question posed and that
changing the question changes everything - the sources that become relevant
and the conclusions that the sources will support
 Aware of the choices that historians make - choices of enquiry and question,
choices of sources – and of the link between these choices and differences in
interpretation

7
Thora Wiltshire’s work on developing pupils’ grasp of layers of certainty and James Woodcock’s work on
causal reasoning and the language of doubt demonstrate what can be achieved by a clear focus on the
use of language (Wiltshire, T. (2000) ‘Telling and suggesting in the Conwy Valley’, Teaching History, 100
and Woodcock, J. (2005) ‘Does the linguistic release the conceptual? Helping Year 10 to improve their
causal reasoning’, Teaching History, 119).

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How can we nurture these insights and understandings? 8 Above all, we must encourage
a sense of playfulness and experimentation with sources – if we want our learners to
appreciate the variety of ways in which sources can be used and interrogated we need
to allow them space and licence to think with sources in a number of ways. We need to
encourage open-ended tasks in which learners can devise and develop enquiries from
materials. We also need to encourage open-ended tasks in which learners start with an
enquiry and make judgements about the kind of archive they will need construct to begin
to move it forward. We should also foreground the differing ways in which different
traditions and historians have posed questions and used materials and give learners the
opportunity to see the historians behind the texts and to model and understand the
decisions, judgements and the creative thinking that historical investigation depends
upon.

Analogies with what pupils already know can be particularly fruitful in developing
understandings of evidence – as teachers have known ever since the first “dustbin”
game was invented. Much can also be done with the unfamiliar – with archaeological
evidence and past material culture. Work with materials of these kinds is likely to be
highly effective, not least in challenging many unhelpful preconceptions that pupils often
bring to their work on evidence – for example the idea that the only credible access to
the past is through reports or witness testimony; an idea that rapidly runs history to
ground if notions such as “bias” are introduced without care and forethought. 9
Archaeology can really help here because the dependence of evidence on questions
and modes of enquiry is particularly apparent in concrete and easily understood ways in
this discipline and also because archaeology is the study of the “relic” rather than the
report and, hence, a discipline in which facile points about bias can have little purchase.

These are all big ideas: much can be achieved also by tinkering and thinking small.
Superficially minor changes to the texts that we work on with pupils can alter the
dynamics of tasks and open up possibilities. Attribution and origin are rightly seen as
essential to source comprehension and to effective evidential thinking. Much may be
gained, however, if we are seeking to encourage creativity and innovative thinking about
details, by taking this contextualising information away. Tight focus on attribution and
labelling can often close down thinking about the finer grain of source material and
about internal evidence in sources. Removing labels / dates / origins from sources, or
partially revealing some and not others, can allow the learner to think innovatively about
the details of texts, about their origins, purposes and so on and also about the kinds of
enquiry that material might support or allow. Removing contextualising attributions can
also rule out “easy” responses to tasks that often depend upon reading the attributions
of sources as much as the sources themselves.

8
There is of course a substantial body of research into children’s thinking about these matters, a recent
and notable contribution to which is Ashby, R. (2005) ‘Students Approaches to Validating Historical Claims’
in Ashby, R., Gordon, P. and Lee, P.J. (2005) op cit note 2.
9
On bias, see Lang, S. (1993) ‘What is bias?’ Teaching History, 92 and on pupil preconceptions about
evidence and reports, see Lee, op cit. note 6.

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ii. Interpretations

We want our highest achieving pupils to be able to historicize history; to be aware that
attempts to write and rewrite history are always particular and located in time and space
and defined by the questions, purposes and resources of those who create them: to
know, as Croce put it, that “all history is contemporary history”. We want all our
historians to have some understanding of important historical controversies and of
historiography. We also want them to reflect on and explore the multitude of purposes
that are served by representations and constructions of the past in the present –
memorialisation in public history, narratives and myths of identity and so on. 10

Specifically, we want our pupils

 To recognise that interpretations are representations and constructions of the

past
 To recognise the relationships between interpretations and the questions, and
indeed types of question, that they seek to ask and answer
 To identify and analyse the defining elements of particular representations and
constructions
 To explain why particular interpretations and constructions take the form that
they do
 To be able to evaluate differing types of interpretations and constructions
against appropriate and relevant criteria
 To understand the multiple purposes that interpretive engagements with the
past enact and to consider these purposes when reflecting on the relative
values and uses of varying approaches to the past

How can we help our pupils achieve these understandings and value them? It is crucial,
if we are to make progress with our pupils here, to think very carefully about the kinds of
ideas that they are likely to bring to their studies of historical interpretation and to design
tasks that challenge ideas that need to be challenged and that help pupils to build more
powerful ideas.11 There are a number of approaches that should be avoided –
approaches that set up polarised judgements and that ask pupils to adjudicate between
them, for example, often reinforce preconceptions that we should be seeking to
challenge, including the idea that differences in interpretation are simply a matter of
political bias and partisan “distortion” and the idea that there might be some
uninterpreted and transparent mirror of the past “out there” somewhere (if we could only
find it).

10
A stimulating conspectus of recent debates on these topics is Seixas, P. (2004), Theorising Historical
Consciousness, Toronto: University of Toronto Press Inc.
11
A concise summary of what research suggests about children’s thinking on interpretations and accounts
is Lee, P.J. and Shemilt, D. (2004). ‘I just wish we could go back in the past and find out what really
happened: progression in understanding about historical accounts’, Teaching History, 117. A fine-grained
study that looks at high achieving children’s’ ideas about historical accounts and interpretations is Boix
Mansilla, V. (2005) ‘Between Reproducing and Organizing the Past: Students’ Beliefs about the Standards
of Acceptability of Historical Knowledge’ in Ashby, R., Gordon, P. and Lee, P.J. (2005) op cit. note 2.

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An approach that is likely to be effective in encouraging the kinds of insights identified
above might take a number of representations and constructions of a historical figure
that clearly differ in purpose and in intention and pose comparative questions about
them. For example, in an enquiry focused on Gandhi, fruitful learning about
interpretations might result if biographical film, historical narrative and public
memorialisations were compared and contrasted. Another approach to the same
problem might take a chronicle of the life of Gandhi and an archive of images and
quotations and set a selection and presentation problem – asking what would be
included and how it would be presented in representations constructed for a range of
differing purposes. A further approach might be to keep the purpose of the interpretation
constant but to locate the moment of interpretation at varying points in time – to ask,
what might be said if we knew no more than what could have been known in 1920, in
1930, in 1950 and so on - and to compare the results. These are all approaches that
could be further developed by examining actual interpretations, that differ in origin and
purpose, and by comparing and contrasting them with pupil-constructed interpretations.

iii. Historical Significance

Learning about historical significance is a stimulating way into the heart of higher order
historical thinking, because, contrary to the implications of the way significance is often
discussed – in the journalese of signal “historic” events or days that “changed the world
for ever” - attributions of significance are inherently contentious and contested
judgements and not straightforward reports on the natural attributes of people or events.
Working on significance and working on interpretations are of course closely related.
Vary the questions, vary the criteria, vary the frame of reference, vary the context and
judgements of significance begin to crumble or to reconfigure. This is why thinking about
significance is such a powerful tool: to learn to do it well you have to learn to play with
ideas and to see what work they will do – to sift and shift them and to focus and refocus.
Thinking about significance is also, therefore, an inherently meta-cognitive and creative
activity. 12

We want our highest achieving pupils to be able -

 To recognise that statements about significance depend upon contestable

judgements about events, issues and personalities in the past
 To recognise that thinking about significance means thinking about the criteria
that have been used, tacitly or explicitly, when judgements of significance
have been made – criteria that smuggle in frames of reference, criteria of
novelty, of uniqueness, of influence (and contexts of influence), of impact, and
so on.13
12
Cercadillo, L. (2001) ‘Significance in History: Students’ Ideas in England and Spain’ in Dickinson, A.,
Gordon, P. and Lee, P.J., eds. (2001) Raising Standards in History Education, International Review of
History Education, Volume 3.
13
Counsell, C. (2004) ‘Looking through a Josephine-Butler-shaped window: focusing pupils’ thinking on
historical significance’, Teaching History 114

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  To critically reflect on criteria that have been used – to test and contest them
and to suggest and develop their own criteria for reflecting on the significance
of aspects of the history that they are studying

Recent history has been characterised by the toppling of idols – all over Eastern Europe
in the aftermath of the collapse of communism and in Iraq more recently – and by actual
or proposed namings and re-namings of streets, of squares, of buildings in Berlin, in
London and elsewhere. What better way into focused and fruitful discussion of
judgements of significance than this: the debate on their public inscription and
celebration?

Pupils could be asked to devise their own scheme for redesigning public monumental
architecture14 - to set out a new pantheon in Trafalgar Square, for example, filling empty
plinths and considering proposals to re-order or replace the figures that now stand. It
would be interesting to ask, in the light of the bicentennial, whether the square’s name
ought to remain and why. Such an activity can be multi-faceted – requiring research, the
presentation of evidence and so on – but its crucial element, the explicit identification
and debate upon criteria for ascribing significance in “the national story”, would need to
be the key focus. An analogous task could be constructed about currency – about the
relative merits of the figures included on and deleted from issues and reissues of £10
notes, £5 notes, and so on, over the last 20 years and about the different criteria of
significance that might underlie this process.

Effective work with significance can be encouraged in a number of additional ways also.
Comparative work on historical biography is likely to be fruitful and suggestive –
comparing and contrasting different biographies of the same person, looking for
common themes and approaches in the biographies of different people with “significant”
status in the same field, examining biographies of famous figures in history and
comparing and contrasting them with biographies of ordinary people. Comparative work
on national histories is also likely to be effective and instructive. Learners can examine
significant events in national history, reflecting on why the event is held to be significant,
or comparing competing histories with variant significance assessments and looking for
tacit and explicit criteria for the inclusion and exclusion of events and personalities.
Other possible questions that could be pursued include: “Why do people become
heroes?” and “Why do people stop being considered heroes?” There are plenty of ways
into issues like these, of course, in contemporary culture, with its addiction to lists, top
tens and hundreds of heroes, villains, best and worst moments and so on.

14
Peter Seixas and Penny Clark perceptively explore student understandings of related issues in ‘Murals
as Monuments: Pupils' Ideas about Depictions of Civilization in British Columbia’, American Journal of
Education 110 (February 2004)
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/AJE/journal/issues/v110n2/110203/110203.text.html

Supporting High Achievement in History Page 9 12/11/2018

iv. Historical Causation15

We want our highest achieving historians to be

 Aware that talk about causes is a form of historical argument

 Aware that historians construct causal arguments in order to explain how and
why events and states of affairs in the past have come about
 Aware that causal arguments depend upon models of how the world works
and that these are subject to dispute and debate
 Aware of the close relationship between causal argument and questions of
interpretation
 Conceptually capable of both constructing causal arguments – with the
analytical distinctions and hierarchies that they entail – and analysing and
evaluating them in terms of their logic and in terms of the relationships
between the claims they make and the evidence that they adduce

How can we help our pupils achieve these understandings? This is clearly a complex
question since achieving these understandings depends upon a number of
competencies, including those already identified under the headings evidence and
interpretation, and competencies including the following -

 A grasp of complex vocabulary – the whole jargon of triggers, catalysts and so

on, on the one hand, and of modal language (might, could, and so on) on the
other
 A grasp of analytical distinctions and conceptual labels (including role, time,
content and importance classificatory concepts and terms)
 Developed and detailed knowledge of chronologies and patterns of events,
states of affairs and processes in the past

Experience suggests that analogy with existing pupil knowledge of the world, or the use
of hypothetical and content-light problems and situations, is a very effective way of
developing these vocabularies and competencies: in other words, conceptual basic
training is needed and it works best when the terrain is already familiar or easily
mapped. Knowledge transfer to unfamiliar historical contexts, once the conceptual and
linguistic knowledge has already begun to be developed, is largely a matter of building a
working situation model of past states of affairs, and so on, through effective teacher
modelling and exposition.

A number of strategies are likely to develop pupil thinking about causal reasoning
effectively, including the following -

15
The observations that follow draw heavily on two Teaching History articles – Chapman, A. (2003)
‘Camels, Diamonds and Counterfactuals: a model for teaching causal reasoning’, Teaching History 112
and Woodcock, op cit., note 7. A number of the distinctions made in these paragraphs (for example
between states of affairs and processes) draw upon Chapter 2 of How Students Learn: History in the
Classroom (op cit. note 5).

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  Asking pupils to construct models and diagrams that call for visualisations of
chains of causality and their inter-linkages and outcomes
 Giving pupils lists of causes (or better cause cards) and asking them to
provide and write up their associated actual and probable consequences
 Giving pupils a narrative to turn into an explanation of why one element in the
narrative took place by cutting, pasting and reorganising elements from the
narrative
 Asking pupils to take the role of key decision makers in past situations by
working with situation simulations and asking pupils to make decisions and
predictions about the probable effects of those decisions
 Varying the questions that we ask pupils to answer about the same issue in
the past (for example – taking the abolition of slavery – asking pupils about
the role of economic factors in abolition, and then about ideological or cultural
causes, and then asking them about the role of slave insurrections and so on)
 Asking pupils to engage in counterfactual analysis in order to test and firm up
their understandings of how the various elements of the situations that they
are studying inter-related (the scope for the “what if” is endless – “What if
there had been no grain shortages in 1789?”, “What if Gorbachev had died in
a plane crash in 1986?”, “What if Lee Harvey Oswald had missed?” and so
on)

Activities such as the above should certainly provide scope for pupils to develop their
grasp of causal reasoning and also provide them with ways of deepening and
developing their understanding of the substantive historical materials they are working
with. These activities should also simultaneously develop pupil understandings of
interpretation and evidence: varying questions, for example, is an opportunity for
exploring one origin of alternative interpretations and also demonstrates the
relationships between questions that are asked and the fields of evidence that then
become relevant. None of the above are sufficient, however: if we want our pupils to
become adept at causal analysis, as at other forms of analysis, we need to provide
opportunities for extended writing and to work on pupils’ grasp of the linguistic and
conceptual tools that analytical thinking depends upon.

v. Change and Continuity

Thinking about change and continuity, like so much that has already been considered,
makes the inter-linkage between aspects of historical thinking striking and obvious.
Diagnoses of degrees and speeds of change, for example, will be as variable as the
conceptual frameworks, questions and resultant evidence bases of the historians who
make them; so thinking about change is simultaneously thinking about historians,
interpretations, evidence and much else besides. In addition, there is little point in
thinking big about the mind-numbingly narrow: we want all our pupils, and in particular
our highest achieving pupils, to have the opportunity to reflect on large patterns of
change and development in the human past.

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We should expect our highest achieving pupils to be able to

 Recognise different types of change (modelled by the content they refer to, by
their speed and so on)
 Recognise that judgements of change and continuity are relative the
interpreter who makes them and that they depend upon and vary with
questions, concepts, focus and forms of evidence
 Recognise and challenge models of change in the past (from this that or the
other “revolution” on the one hand to this that or the other periodisation based
on judgements of continuity on the other)
 Evaluate the judgements of change and continuity that others have made and
make and defend their own models of change and continuity in the time
periods that they are studying

Successfully achieving insights and making evaluations such as the above depends
upon a number of prior achievements. On the one hand, pupils must appreciate how to
measure types and rates of change and continuity and why it is important and
informative to do so. Experience suggests that analogies with existing pupil experiences
and knowledge are key here as elsewhere. 16 On the other hand pupils must know
enough, or must find out enough, about the stretches of time that they are being asked
to analyse to be able to pose and answer questions in depth.

A range of possible enquiries that might help to nurture thinking of this kind suggest
themselves. Much might be done, for example, through a Key Stage 3 local study, to
develop a sense of the long term and to think about change and continuity on a broad
canvass. Two specific enquiries that were discussed during the Think Tank were -

When was the Reformation?

To pursue this enquiry effectively a high achieving pupil would need:

 A breadth and depth of knowledge about a broad period of time (including the
periods before and after the Reformation as conventionally defined)
 To be taught to look for themes of continuity and change (in other words to be
taught to think in the ways already identified above)
 To be taught to identify turning points (to think about impacts, significance,
causes and effects as well as change and continuity and also to consider
different types of change as identified above)
 To reflect on and link their thinking to their understandings of evidence and
interpretation and to engage with existing interpretations of the period (Duffy
vs. Dickens and so on)
 To have developed (or to be developing) a grasp of the writing skills and
vocabularies that they will need to synthesise all of the above into their own
interpretation
16
See the analogies with football contained in Cain, K. and Neal, C. (2004) ‘Opportunities, challenges and
questions: continual assessment in Year 9’, Teaching History, 115.

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 When did the 1960s happen?
Success in this enquiry would depend upon much the same teaching and learning as
the Reformation enquiry. This inquiry, however, develops a different and valuable set
of historical insights. The link between insights into questions of interpretation,
already discussed above, and this question will be particularly apparent. Subsidiary
issues that this inquiry might raise include the following –

 What do we mean by 1960s? How do we define the Sixties?

 How can historians talk about and chunk up time?
 What relative weight should be given to politics, culture, environment,
economics and so on when identifying and defining a “period”?

In other words, this is likely to be a particularly effective way of raising issues that
might other wise remain latent and unexamined. On first consideration the answer to
the question “When did the 1960s happen?” will seem obvious and the question will
seem pointless, however, on reflection both the answer and the broader question of
historical periodisation in general become much more complex and interesting.

(b) High Achievement, Metacognition and Holistic Thinking

The members of the Think Tank were very much of the view that our highest achieving
pupils should be challenged to think hard about their history and to think holistically.

If we really aim to stretch and to challenge our pupils and to raise the power of their
thinking we need to design learning experiences that ask them to think about the
thinking that they do in history so as to deepen and broaden their grasp of the material
that they study and of the tools that they use to study it. We should also encourage
pupils to break down the barriers between aspects of their work in history that are
suggested by the apparatus of KSUs, by questions that target individual assessment
objectives and by a rigid adherence to headings such as those we have used above.
High achievement in history is characterised by and developed through an awareness of
the ways in which causal reasoning interacts with the evidence, the ways in which
attributions of significance advance interpretations, and so on.

Reflecting on the Nature of History

It seems likely therefore that the development of high achievement in history will be
much enhanced if pupils are explicitly asked to reflect on history as a way of knowing
and on its forms, limits and potential. Questions of this nature arise naturally in the
course of teaching – for example, it is natural enough when reflecting on specific items
of evidence about the past to pause and reflect on what we can and cannot know about

Supporting High Achievement in History Page 13 12/11/2018

the past and on how our knowledge can be best advanced. 17 As has long been
recognised, pupils achieve best when they understand what they are being asked to do
and what it would be to do it well. Similarly, pupils achieve their best in a subject when
its key elements are explicitly identified, reflected on, combined and inter-related and
explicitly developed over a course of study.

Disciplinary rigour is by no means exhausted by a focus on second order knowledge,

however: historical knowledge is woven through with first order concepts (such as
“revolution”, “power” and so on) and is best progressed when pupils are explicitly asked
to develop their thinking about these ideas also.

We suggest, therefore, that curriculum planning in history should consider over-arching

and meta-historical issues and questions and build consideration of them into curriculum
delivery and assessment. We identified a number of questions that would raise issues of
this nature for pupils, including the following -

 Can we learn from the past?

 Is the truth out there?
 Can history tell us who we are?
 What is a period, what is an era, what is an epoch and what is an event?
 Why do things happen?
 Is significance only in the eye of the beholder?
 What is an empire?
 Who are the people?
 What is a revolution?
 What is kingship?
 Are power and money the same thing?

IV. High Achievement and Enrichment

So far, our observations have concentrated on activities and approaches that might be
developed in the history classroom and in the normal course of teaching. The reasons
are simple: we were emphatically of the view, firstly, that the ordinary history classroom
was where the drive to develop high achievement should be focused first and foremost
and, secondly, that we should aspire to high achievement for all our pupils.

The observations that follow shift the focus on to what are conventionally known as
“enrichment” activities, or activities that aim to provide challenge by introducing pupils to
new contexts and experiences.

There already are highly successful initiatives in place, not least NAGTY’s Summer
Schools, that aim to provide high achieving pupils with opportunities to enrich their
learning through interaction with equally high achieving pupils from different institutions
17
See Claire Riley’s ‘layers of inference’ model Riley, C (1999), op cit. note 4.

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and through interaction with subject specialists and professionals from university and
other contexts. Our discussions considered ways in which opportunities like these might
be further developed and extended.

Bringing Historians into School

Kate Hammond drew the attention of the Think Tank to successful work that she has
been engaged in to develop links between higher education institutions and schools.
The profession is familiar with the idea of bringing external speakers into schools. Kate
Hammond’s initiative involved taking this one step further by bringing PhD students into
school on a regular basis to talk about their research and its on-going development and
to assist history pupils with research. The suggestion that initiatives like these might be
extended and developed further was welcomed, particularly because, given the
research focus of doctoral work, initiatives like these explicitly draw attention to the
nature of history as an ongoing process of creative thinking and problem solving –
something that is lost in the standard “lecture” format that many links with higher
education professionals tend to take. Further suggestions, for links with other kinds of
history professional, were made and will be pursued further in our Working Group (see
below).

Building Virtual Academies

A number of members of the Think Tank have taken leading roles in the development of
e-conferencing and e-discussions in history, and members of the Think Tank had
published articles on this topic. 18 Initiatives of this nature are now becoming widespread
– for example through the University of Oxfords “HOTS”, 19 the Historical Association’s
online centenary debates and the “Arguing in History” project at the Open University 20 -
and their potential to progress and develop understanding is now widely accepted.

These emergent developments clearly have great potential – not least in easily and
cost-effectively bringing high achieving pupils together in contexts in which they can be
encouraged to compete with and to learn from each other. They also provide a further
and similarly cost-effective and straightforward opportunity for high achieving pupils to
engage with academics and others at the leading edge of historical studies.
Developments of this nature also have great potential because they are potentially
“narrow-cast” and provide a way of delivering challenging learning experiences directly
to the highest achieving pupils. Much might be achieved nationally through specific sites

18
Thompson, D and Cole, N. (2003) ‘Keeping the kids on message… one school’s attempt at helping sixth
form students to engage in historical debate using ICT’, Teaching History, 113.
19
http://hots.modhist.ox.ac.uk/
20
http://www.tes.co.uk/2220760 This project is particularly notable in that it simultaneously aims to
facilitate computer conferencing, by providing support and training for schools, and to research the impact
of computer conferencing on pupils’ argument skills in history.

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designed to target the needs of and stretch the thinking of high achieving historians.
Again, these are issues that our Working Group will seek to explore.

VI. Next Steps

This paper represents an initial position and a beginning. A History Working Group,
made up of members of the Think Tank, will begin to meet in 2006 to take our thinking
forward and to expand its scope.

Possible action points that will form an initial agenda for discussion when the Working
Group meets will include -

 Developing position papers for policy audiences identifying recommendations

relevant to the processes of curriculum review
 Developing resources to support teachers seeking to challenge and to stretch
their own practice and their pupils’ thinking including materials for a special
“Giftedness” edition of Teaching History (September 2006) and web materials
to support high achievement in history
 Developing new forms of enrichment, including ways of linking pupils in
different schools together and ways of linking pupils with researchers and
academics in universities through direct contacts but also through e-debates
and computer conferencing
 Developing history specific CPD opportunities for teachers

Arthur Chapman
For NAGTY, April 2006.

This is a working document. We would like to hear your feedback and intend to update
the guidance to ensure it keeps pace with developments. Please email your comments
on this guidance to us nagty-cpd@warwick.ac.uk

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