Teaching GCSE History: Crime and Punishment

>>ADDED MARCH 2011 SMART TASK: How and why did Victorian prisons change in the first half of Victoria's reign: a Webquest 

Outstanding lessons on this increasingly popular SHP option are now coming in thick and fast.  All have clear learning objectives and full resources. Not only are local sources put to good effect, there is also a wide range of imaginative approaches reflecting different learning styles. So if you want to test hypotheses about transportation, have a fun kinaesthetic lesson on highwaymen or an Ian Dawson-inspired overview then you’ll find plenty to stimulate your interest.  Poaching is the next main lesson to be added along with some new smart tasks.

Outstanding Lessons

• How effective was the Metropolitan police force and how would we find out?  Lesson starts with a slow reveal of the cartoon used in the short smart task below as a way of analysing one type of evidence.  Students then go on to predict what other forms of evidence a historian might use, before making judgements about the evidence provided by means of a line of usefulness.  The interesting product is something called a MInute Paper.
• Posting punishments in periods: an active approach to creating overviews in crime and punishment.
• Would you have liked to have been a highwayman? Why would you have stopped?
• Transportation enquiry. Students generate questions from statistics and then set about answering them

Smart Task

• ADDED MARCH 2011 How and why did Victorian prisons change in the first half of Victoria's reign: a Webquest leading to a brief filmed presentation  Short smart task to help students explore the changing nature of prisons between 1840 and 1880: includes ICT dimension using a webquest and Movie Maker.
• Poaching: Need or Greed? A 3 minute starter  Short starter activity with downloadable cards resource for those that need help to see both sides of the argument.
• The Metropolitan police force in 1830  Very quick introduction to a cartoon from 1830 using the slow reveal technique, each part of the cartoon being analysed in turn before considering the importance of the date and purpose.
• Why was the Metropolitan Police Force set up in 1829?  This activity forms the central spine of a lesson on the reasons for setting up the Metropolitan Police Force in 1829. Students work in pairs to come up with a satisfying explanation. Rather than use the textbook directly, they are given a set of 12 cards.
• Crime and Punishment starter; Smuggling  This simple smart task uses the rather unusual source of a famous Kipling poem to ascertain what students already know about smuggling and what they need to know.

Want to know what's coming next? Click here

I am sure you all know of the excellent websites out there to help you, but I would particularly recommend the Durham University Library, The British Library, and the National Archives . The Learning Curve section of the National Archives site is probably well-known to you all, but if you are new to teaching a Crime and Punishment course then you need to know that the resources here are really worth a visit. As you can see from the graphic in the image gallery to the right, by clicking on the link, the materials are organised around 3 themes (crime, prevention, and punishment) and four periods (pre-1450, 1450-1750, 1750-1900, and the 20th century). I particularly like the way that key questions have been used to give the choice of documents and related questions a real coherence. Dafydd Humphreys' website www.learnhistory.org.uk has some excellent resources and planning and will prove invaluable to those of you new to the course. Thanks, Dafydd.

The companion site to Dan Moorhouse's Medicine through Time is this new site on Crime and Punishment.  This site is being developed to provide links to the best teaching and revision materials available for the SHP study of Crime and Punishment through time. Initially this will consist of linking to materials elsewhere, with regular updates and additions. In time it is planned to develop pupil guides to the key elements of the course and interactive materials to support teaching and learning.

• Did the Industrial Revolution lead to more crime? An enquiry into not only the new crimes that appeared but also into the false conclusions that can be drawn from data, if not used intelligently.
• Were the Middle Ages really as violent and lawless as some people think? Fascinating lesson which deals not only with medieval crime but also with the problems to historians face regarding the dark figure of unreported crime. Good use of National Archive  Learning Curve material.
• How Bloody was the Bloody Code? Fascinating lesson using archival material from different collections to get behind the reality of the oft-quoted, over-simplified statistics.

If you would like to preview sample activities and resources from these lessons, then email us and we will forward some draft material prior to formal publication here.

£49.95 for 12 months unlimited access.

Return to top