Extended Writing in History
Christine Counsell, Senior Lecturer in Education, University of CambridgeChristine Counsell gave out an essay written by a pupil she taught in a year 7 class. She asked the group to read the essay and then discuss it in pairs. The questions to be discussed were:
During the discussion it was noted that the essay was tightly written; everything was relevant to the question; it was not a ‘telling of the story’, nor was it a chronological tract. The child knew that analytical writing required a thematic not a narrative or a chronological framework. To support her case, the child had marshalled evidential information (factual information originally drawn from sources contemporary with 1066); and she had made use of appropriate language. Like good historical writing, the child’s essay crossed several literary genres or text types, e.g. analytical, persuasive, discursive. Christine stressed the importance of pupils’ understanding the contextual knowledge of events before they attempted essay writing.
She said that pupils find it difficult to move their thoughts from the concrete to the abstract, that is from a mass of historical detail to a more general, abstract idea. However, this process can be explicitly taught. As a young teacher, Christine had chanted a mantra to her classes that: “In essay writing,, the first sentence of each paragraph should indicate the role of that paragraph within the overall argument”. This mantra was readily understood by only a minority of pupils. In order for all pupils to understand the process she developed the concept of ‘Big Points and Little Points’. The first sentence in a paragraph becomes the topic starter or the ‘Big Point’. The rest of the paragraph is made up of ‘Little Points’, the details which support the big point. The child who can see that the opening sentences of paragraphs are working on a different level of generality than the rest of the paragraph, is a child who is capable of academic analysis. Pupils can test the opening sentences of each paragraph in their essays by asking: ‘Does it answer the question?’:
Christine Counsell gave each group a set of causation cards about the Great Fire of London in 1666, and a large sheet of paper, or Zone of Relevance, on which to put the cards. The cards were produced when she was an advisory teacher in Gloucestershire in 1991, working with Kate Thompson, a former primary history co-ordinator. The question card — Why Did The Fire Get Out of Control and Destroy So Much of London? — was put in the upper left-hand corner of the sheet. The first task was to arrange the cards in order of importance, with the card most relevant to answering the question placed nearest to the question. Any cards over which there was disagreement could be placed on the edge of the paper. Cards that were not relevant to the question were placed outside the Zone of Relevance:
It is important that the teacher uses a pre-planned intervention strategy to keep the pupils on task and to ensure that their work and their thinking stays relevant to the question. The teacher should enable the pupils to ‘see the heart of the challege’. They should challenge high-flyers and quick finishers by questioning their choices and arrangements:
When the groups have placed the cards in line and have almost reached a consensus on the order of importance or relevance, the teacher intervenes by telling the class to ‘Test The Line’, an activity which really challenges the brightest pupils and which provides a confidence-building scaffold for those who need one. The groups will have to ‘defend their line’ against a whole class onslaught. In preparation for this, each person in the group, starting with the most important card, takes it in turn to explain why it is more important than the card which follows:
After discussion in groups, it was discovered that each group had placed the cards in a different order. Groups always place the cards in a different order, and this always gives much scope for whole class debate. As an example of how this debate could be managed, Christine Counsell asked each group in turn to explain the reasoning behind their choice of the most important factor. The class discussion becomes an invigorating mix of competition and collaboration:
Christine Counsell has observed that most children put the ‘irrelevant’ Pudding Lane card high up in the Zone of Relevance because they are prone to carrying a proxy question in their head (such as When did the Fire start ? or How did the Fire of London start?). It is essential to keep the pupils focused on the question under investigation — Why did the Fire get out of control and destroy so much of London?. The class dicussion will have made the pupils aware that they need more information to write a satisfactory essay, but they need to be prepared for the information gathering stage. Get the pupils to write down a ‘shopping list’ of four things they would like to find out about each of the causation cards:
A second activity using the same causation cards assists in framing the question conceptually. In the middle of the piece of paper, one person in each group draws a small box and, in it, writes ‘Great Fire’ (“Tell the children to write this quickly, so they don’t waste time drawing flames”). The cards are then re-arranged into short-term, middle-term and long-term causes, with short term causes placed nearest the ‘Great Fire’; long term causes furthest away and medium term causes in between. As before, each group’s pattern of cards were laid out in a different way. Again, the teacher can lead a fruitful debate where groups challenge each other’s reasoning and lines of argument.
The groups were then given the freedom to sort the cards into whatever groups they liked, but with the proviso that there were no more than five different groupings and no less than two. In addition, the pupils were told to devise a heading, of no more than five words, for each grouping. The aim was for the headings to be so ‘helpful’ that the other groups in the class could guess correctly what cards were listed under each heading.
The final task would be for the pupils to convert the headings into sentences, and for these sentences to become a topic starter for each paragraph of a piece of extended writing that answered the question: ‘Why did the fire get out of control and destroy so much of London?’. It was this same style of teaching history as an enquiry, with a sequence of lessons, that helped the child who wrote the essay on the Battle of Hastings to produce such a good piece of work. In her conclusion, Christine Counsell said that the most important point would be for the children to understand, when they were writing an essay, that there is an organisational problem to be solved Teachers must “make it easy for the children by showing them how difficult it is”. Pupils can be shown the difficulty by doing organisational activities, like card sorting, in which there are no right and no wrong answers. Many children find history difficult because they like questions with simple answers. There are no simple answers in historical enquiry. “History teaching is about cultivating readiness. It is training children for uncertainty.” The process of cardsorting in its various forms, prior to extended writing, can help pupils to get use to this uncertainty.
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