Finding high-quality advice on teaching A2 and AS history is a difficult and time-consuming job. With so much post-16 work dominated by exam boards and textbooks, there is precious little available on methodology. Diana Laffin’s Better Lessons in A Level History first published by Hodder Education in 2009 is an honourable exception and needs to be required reading.
What this site offers is a collection of the best strategies used not by one teacher in one college but by the hundreds of A level teachers whose lessons have been visited during OFSTED inspection and LA advisory work. This is not just a pot pourri of bright ideas. I have carefully designed the final selection – because of course there are far more than the 30 included here – around a set of five principles. If they don’t reflect your teaching then this site might not be for you. There are 5 principles that underpin this section:
- a. Lessons being reserved for application not acquisition
- b. There is a high level of student to student interaction, less mediated through the teacher
- c. Students have to think about the criteria that make for good history
- d. Students make and sustain historical claims
