Melville Miles, student history teacher, is in Term 3 of his PGCE year. Melville has taught a number of excellent lessons in which he enabled pupils to reach high levels of historical understanding. His diagnostic assessment of pupils' work is unusually sophisticated for a PGCE student. Melville's two placements have been in contrasting schools where he has taught pupils, aged 11 to 18, across the full ability range. However, Melville is frustrated because he feels that the practice that he has seen in both schools reduces causal understanding to something simplistic and unchallenging.
Gary Howells asks hard questions about typical teaching and assessment of historical causation at Key Stage 3. Popular activities that may be helpful in addressing particular learning areas, or in teaching pupils to use the terminology of causation, are not in themselves evidence of having acquired a ‘skill'. Howells invites us to ‘think big' about the purposes of teaching about causation and the possibility of helping more pupils not only to understand and explain but to think about the very processes of explanation.
The ESRC-funded Project Chata has collected evidence of children's ideas about the discipline of history and attempted to see if there is any progression in those ideas. Here, Peter Lee describes how Chata has tried to map children's ideas about historical accounts. History teachers (and tutors and managers of history teachers) who are trying to extend and explore the bases of their professional knowledge will find this clear and lively account an invaluable starting point for considering the role of the Chata project, its methods and findings.
Here is another breath of fresh air from the Thomas Tallis history department. In TH 103, Head of Department Tony Hier showed how he developed a rigorous framework for implementing government initiatives and improving departmental professional discourse at the same time. This time, from history teacher Vaughan Clark, we get a detailed, practical account of how he develops pupils' causal reasoning.
Dale's article argues the paradox that the more time spent in ‘depth' study, the more efficient, memorable and historically valid will be your subsequent ‘overviews'.