Smart Tasks

These are short tasks for history lessons designed to promote thinking skills. Although they might look like starters and plenaries, and indeed some are, most are designed to be used more flexibly at different stages of the lesson. They give you a ready-made activity which you can slot into your own teaching style. It may be an animated PowerPoint presentation, a puzzling image, a set of perplexing statistics or maybe a piece of text to analyse. What they all have in common is that they have worked and have both engaged pupils’ attention and have stimulated further learning. They do not attempt to provide a full lesson plan but they do have clear learning objectives and should fire your imagination to think of creative ways of using or developing them.