As schools have just received their first set of 9-1 Ancient History GCSE grades, this would seem an apposite moment to offer some thoughts on handling of the material and the delivery of the syllabus.
Crom’s Tip No.1:
Know your stuff!
Whether at GCSE or A-Level, Ancient History is not a subject where the teacher can ‘keep a couple of pages ahead’. Especially in the Persian Period Study, which is likely to be the element least familiar to most teachers, it’s crucial to have a command of the sources and the facts.
Similarly, for both Depth Studies, the intertextuality of material demands that the teacher is very familiar with the sources. This is also an excellent opportunity to model best practice in terms of source handling to the students.
Crom’s Tip No.2:
Opinions are worthless!
Post-clickbait subtitle, let me immediately qualify that: an UNJUSTIFIED opinion is worthless. Increasingly I find that students are more than willing to express their ideas about the ancient world, but – and I’m demanding in this regard – without evidence for their opinion, said opinion is worthless. We are a subject that requires facts, dates, and quotations as justification.
So, whenever a pupil says “I think…” or “I believe…” respond with something like, “What’s your reasoning? or “What’s your evidence?”.
This can actually lead to a really great classroom dynamic as, when done consistently, other students take up the banner, either in demanding “Source!” from their peers, or by offering up evidence to support their classmates.
Ancient History is a subject that thrives on debate, so yours should not be the only voice in the room. Call it ‘Flipped Classroom’, call it ‘Independent Learning’, frankly you can give it whatever buzzword-term you want to, but students perform best when they get to deal with primary material for themselves, albeit with you as the expert guide.
We do a lot of reading aloud and debate work – with the above caveat– in order to develop student confidence and ability in using sources.
Which leads me on to…
Crom’s Tip No.3:
Manage the material!
Preparatory reading is also crucial in this subject, something with which I know some classes do struggle. I work this in a very simple way, by setting no written homework (aside from notes made while doing reading): no essays, no posters, none of it. With my first lesson with a class, we make a ‘Partnership Agreement’ to this effect. This reinforces the need for preparatory work or revision to be done outside of lessons, but all testing and extended writing is done in the classroom, under timed conditions.
If you are consistent in applying this, students wholly embrace it.
I also produce Topic Sheets to take pupils through the key factual narrative, which they use alongside the Prescribed Sources in their preparatory reading. These, combined with their own personal notes on the sources, which we keep in an Excel ‘Source Tracker’, allows them to create coherent revision notes as they go. This latter point is an important one, given the volume of material.
So, there you go, three ‘Top Tips’ to hopefully encourage you to dive deep into Ancient History’s waters.
Please post your thoughts below!
Hi Rob,
I like the idea of an online source annotation tracker. Is this something that your pupils collaborate on, or do they each have their own (like the individual “class notebooks” available in something like Teams) that you track? I’ve found when I’ve done collaborative docs (for instance in Class Civ at A level we usually do this for pooling critical quotations), one person puts in the most effort and the rest just use that (as happens often with group tasks in any context!).