Pair work? Yes!

Tough topic: the crisis in the Catholic Church in the 14th-16th centuries. On the one hand, it is a topic negleted by the government and reduced to the Protestant Reformation. On the other hand, the school I work for is Catholic so the Head is interested in teaching this topic.

What I planned was to allow students to actually acknowledge the situation of the Catholic Church and then examine the solutions. This led me to put together a text sparkled with questions to check comprehension.

Not an easy topic.

I do no know how, but it suddenly hit me: just before students began to read and answer I told them to get together in pairs and each pair to line up with their desks in two lines: Line 1 and Line 2.

Then, every now and then I said "swap". Each boy from the "inner" line would move. In this way everyone worked with almost everyone.

Questions that may arise:

1) What happens if different students work at different pace? This is not a minor question. Differentiation in the classroom is important. However, this activity is not meant to do it at different pace but to include those that are a little slower into the general class work. Most of the boys that were slower could catch up because they had the opportunity to work with people that could help them and were eager to do so. In general, less able students could work and achieve their aims because they consulted with more able students or had their guidance.

2) A typical problem of pair work is that one may do all the job while the other student plays. In this case, half of the class was moving around so at some point everyone had to be working. Moreover, on that day one boy was absent so there was one moment when one of the swapping boys was left alone. In this case, he had the chance to round up what ever he was writing before having to move.

3) Moving around the classroom is disruptive. It is not. I made this activity in a classroom of 13 years old boys. Boys (and teens in general) need to move around the classroom. This activity was great because they could stay focused on the task while actually moving. (On further reading on this type of activities click here).

In the end, it was quite an enjoyable task, students had a sense of accomplishment and we could do the plenary with everyone raising their hand.

Creativity and history

History is a very abstract field: you are required, as a historian, to rebuild what has happened in the past and at the same time you are perfectly aware of the fact that you are going to fail, that you might get close to the éventment itself but you will not recreate it. Based on this assumption, I believe that 12-14 year-olds find history difficult, as maths for example, because of this abstract feature (there are, of course, many other elements to take into account and surely history and maths do not require the same type of neurological activity). Moreover, if you take a look at history books for this stage, you will see how much they try to make history more tangible for kids.

A year ago I started introducing some activities in the classroom that required students to be creative about history. At the beginning I did it because I was tired of correcting essays and I observed that students were bored. At home, I came to the conclusion that for some learning aims I needn't make students write long pieces but I could target their creativity. Here are some of the activities that were successful in students showing what they have learned and helped me assessing their learning:


* Two newspapers that show changes and continuities in the 14th and 15th centuries. One newspaper was from the beginning of the 14th and the other of the late 15th. 


* A brochure to a Leonardo Da Vinci museum to show why he was a Renaissance man (based on Ben Walsh's Empires and Citizens).


* A speech to say before the Catholic Monarchs in order to convince them to finance an expedition to the Indies (America). 


Can you think of others?

Interpretation in Year 9 (2)

Sometimes history is seen as something fixed and static. What is past, is past. This year, I took the first unit in Year 9 seriously. Theoretically, we should readdress the issue of what is history and how we make it. I decided to spend three lessons dealing with historiography. Actually, this was the last step. First, I introduced students to multiperspectives in intepretations with another activity. In this lesson, I wanted to show them why historians can say different things of the same event.


As a starter, I asked them to sort the odd-one-out from the following rulers: Napoleon Bonaparte, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Louis XIV and Adolf Hitler. I asked each student who he/she thought should be ruled out and note it down. Then I asked each one for their reasons and also wrote them on the board. One Year group came up with seven categories, the other one with eleven. 

This means that they found at least eight different ways of ruling someone out. In general, it was the same person (CFK) but for distinctive reasons: she is a woman, she is alive, she lives in South America, etc.  


After that, we plunged into different historiographic lines of thought (with the basic example of the French Revolution). By the end of the lesson, many students could make the connection between the starter and the rest of the lesson. They stated that the reason for doing the first activity was to realize that depending on what we pay attention to, we will write history in different ways. It was magical. Spontanenous. Incredible. 

Interpretation in Year 9

To introduce the course, I always try to surprise my students. Also, I devote one or two lessons to history itself, so that students remember that we do more than listing facts (actually, this is the least that we do). To introduce Year 9 to interpretation, I came up with an activity that worked really well. 

The main topic this year is Argentina in the 19th century, but this is by no means dislocated from European history thus we start with a revision of the French Revolution and we plunge into Napoleon's rule. But, since I first want to deal with historical practice per se, I planned to mention some historiographic lines of thought (liberals, materialists, romantics, positivists). So, to connect Napoleon to historiography (i.e. different interpretations of history), I thought of the following activity, which I do not remember if I invented it myself or got it from someone else. Here it goes:

I called one of the students to my laptop and showed him/her this picture (due to copyright reasons, I will not publish it here). It shows Napoleon Bonaparte fleeing a battle. So the student would describe it and the rest would draw. It is really funny to see them try to describe what they see and the others trying to get what he/she says. In the end, I showed them the picture and, after they made some comments, I ask them if what they have drawn is the same or not. They usually answered "yes but no" which is great because you can dig with more questions: How come they are the same? Look at them! or Are not your drawings based on the same description? How come they are all different? and you can get to the concept of different ways to see/understand/interpret history. 

Lovely.