Significance and Interpretation
Significance and interpretation are two of
the hardest skills to teach in History – or at
least to teach in a historically rigorous, not
a morally superficial, fashion. Students tend
to slip into writing answers based on their own
judgements and backgrounds (interesting in
and of itself, but perhaps a discussion for
another time) rather than building an argument
based on historical evidence and an in-depth
understanding of the skills.
With interpretation becoming more of a focus in the UK GCSE, the writing on this has increased – recommended are Counsell, Riley, Pearson and Howells. Pulling together the work of these colleagues, the focus seems to be a) on ensuring that students understand the relationship between the historian and the evidence, b) focusing on ‘process, purpose and perspective’ and c) embedding skills of interpretation into your History curriculum. Process, purpose and perspective is particularly illuminating when focusing on how students generally access interpretations, and how we, as practitioners, can streamline this. Process focuses on the creation of the interpretation, for example, who made it? When did they make it? Purpose focuses on the intent, and perspective focuses on the views of the creator (although Howells makes the excellent point that we cannot always know this). Empowering students to use this language and to evaluate sources of information using these key words is a useful start to improve the delivery of interpretations.
Significance is often known as the most difficult of all the History skills, and I have in my time come across practitioners who actively chose not to teach it. This is understandable, given how easy it is to confuse significance with consequence or with why an event is significant. Significance as a skill is focused on the factors that have made people think that an event is significant – identifying what they are, and applying them to events that could be seen as ‘obviously’ significant and regularly taught, or less obviously significant and yet still taught. Counsell’s writing on this has been indispensable to our department, especially given that our coursework is focused solely on significance, and honourable mentions must also be given to Lomas and Phillips.
In our attempt to ensure that students can digest and utilise these skills, we drew up the ‘Golden Rules of History’. These are stuck to all books in the department, and regularly referred to in lessons. They are not exhaustive, and may not apply to all departments in our group, but they have been an excellent starting point for us, and I recommend that departments sit down to draw up their own, with a chance to review them regularly.
Alongside this, I cannot stress enough how eye-opening spending time reading about teaching History has been. There seems to be some level of guilt attached to doing this in work time (alongside spending time keeping up with developments in subject knowledge) and yet this is essential to stay up to date and knowledgeable as a practitioner. Taking time as a department to do this has helped us to critique our own curriculum, find possible improvements and reflect on our practice as teachers. Taking this time has helped us to become better teachers, who are far more focused on student outcomes, and is therefore perfectly in keeping with the theme of this issue of Connect-Ed.
You can talk to Charlotte about the ideas in the article by visiting the History community in NAU.
Charlotte Giles
Head of History & Year 11
The British School of Guangzhou