Applying techniques from The Writing Revolution to support answering GCSE History exam questions
NOTE: For my two previous blogs on The Writing Revolution, look here and here.
It’s been great to see so many blogs and tweets from History teachers interested in The Writing Revolution. They’ve certainly helped move my thinking on from where I started on this back in the summer. As we approach the end of this half-term, and start to move towards mock exam season, I thought it might be a useful opportunity to share how some of the approaches from this book might be useful in supporting students around some of the exam questions.
Four caveats first:
- Students need to know stuff first — the ideas suggested here won’t work unless students have some sort of knowledge of the content (TWR can help with that too).
- I teach Edexcel’s course, so my examples may be slanted towards that, but there should be some obvious crossovers with AQA and OCR specifications as well.
- I’m not proclaiming these will transform results or anything — they are merely ideas that you might wish to throw into your repertoire to help vary up lessons if you’re needing that bit of inspiration — especially if you’re slogging through revision lessons which can be a bit of a slog.
- I’m just starting out with a lot of this stuff myself — some of my ideas are by no means fully formed or trialled out properly with students as yet.
I don’t think any of the ideas are hugely revolutionary, but sometimes it’s helpful to be reminded of some older ideas that we’ve forgotten to help us think our way out of a teaching cul-de-sac.
With that said, let’s get to it:
Question type: ‘Describe’ questions (e.g. ‘Describe two features of the nature of the wounds suffered by injured soldiers on the Western Front’ — 4 marks).
Technique: Developing questions (pp.36–39)
The 4-mark describe question is clearly one of the easiest on the entire exam. Yet it is often surprising how much some students struggle to get a way into this. Or they find the language tricky. For example, in the question above, they struggle with what a ‘feature’ is. They might also find it hard to articulate their pre-existing knowledge into an answer.
This is where developing questions can help. In the case above, you might ask them to formulate questions using the ‘5 Ws’ about ‘the nature of wounds suffered by injured soldiers on the Western Front’. Some of the Ws might be more helpful than others depending on the topic. Some examples:
- What caused wounds on the Western Front?
- Where on the body were wounds often found?
- Why did wounds sometimes lead to death?
If students can then start to answer these questions, they should have a way into the answer.
Question type: ‘Explain why…’ questions (e.g. ‘Explain why the Nazis were able to consolidate their power in Germany between 1933 and 1934 — 12 marks.’
Technique: The Single-Paragraph Outline (pp.83–109)
Greg Thornton very recently did an awesome blog about this. You should definitely go and read that. I’ll just say that I think this technique has huge potential to help students maintain focus on the question — often a problem for this type of question as students can lose their way, particularly those who are less secure writers.
The SPO offers a framework for paragraphs that is simpler and yet, I think, much more effective than concepts like PEEL, as they can be applied to a variety of different types of paragraph. It is essentially a planning template [see below].
Students start with a ‘Topic Sentence (TS)’, then in the numbered slots add in key supporting details in note form, and then finish with a ‘Concluding Sentence (CS)’ that should reiterate the main idea of a topic sentence but in a different form. For example, with regards to the 12-mark question above about the Nazi consolidation of power:
T.S. — The Nazis used violence in order to consolidate their dictatorship.
- Arrested Communists, sent them to Concentration Camps
- Street violence and intimidation of SA during March 1933 election.
- Night of the Long Knives — purged SA.
C.S. — It is clear that violence was an essential component of the Nazi consolidation of power by 1934 because without it, many of Hitler’s potential opponents would have remained in a position to cause them problems.
You then can give the students the opportunity to turn that into a clear paragraph — one of the three that they’d need for success on the 12 mark question. It’s probably also worth introducing students to the transitions on p.123–4 of the book in order to help link all those ideas together fluently.
Question type: Extended questions that require a judgement —( e.g. ‘Edward the Confessor was a weak and ineffective king between c.1060–1066.’ How far do you agree? — 16 marks)
Technique: The GST/TSG method for introductions and conclusions (pp.168–175).
This is not for the whole question (I have yet to properly dig into the MPO or Multiple Paragraph Outline) but just for the often tricky introduction and conclusion, which I find lots of students really struggle with and frankly would rather avoid entirely.
The premise of the GST method can be summarised in the diagram below:
Take an example introduction to the question above on Edward the Confessor.
Edward the Confessor was one of the longest-serving monarchs in the history of Anglo-Saxon England. Although he was later made a saint thanks to his religious devotion, he has often been remembered as a weak king due to his limitations as a battlefield commander. This was particularly true in his later years, as shall be contended below.
The first sentence is a general statement about the essay topic that leads nicely into the response. The second sentence is more specific and starts to establish focus on the question. The third sentence outlines the argument, or thesis, to be adopted in the response. This might be old hat to us, but I often find I suffer from the ‘curse of the expert’ when it comes to introductions and conclusions, and this method gives me a way in to explaining it to the average GCSE History student.
For conclusions, the reverse model is adopted (T-S-G). So, for the Edward question it might look as follows:
It is clear then, that Edward was undoubtedly a weak king in the years 1060–1066. In particular, he was far too dependent on the Godwin family who essentially ran the country during this period. As a result, it is no surprise that Edward is not remembered as an example of the archetypal medieval monarch.
Here, the thesis statement leads off (but in a re-worded form from the intro). A specific statement then follows that highlights a key criteria for the judgement. Finally, a more general statement about Edward’s monarchy rounds off the judgement. The conclusion, like the introduction, is short and punchy, but clearly supports the development of a clear judgement.
[Apologies to any Anglo-Saxon experts who wish to pick apart those assertions by the way!]
Question type: Source and interpretations questions (e.g. How useful are Sources A and B for an enquiry into…or What is the main difference in the views presented by Interpretations 1 and 2 about…)
Technique: The Summary Sentence (pp.142–3)
One of the big problems students have in encapsulating the overall view presented in a source or interpretation about the enquiry focus. Often they get bogged down into line-by-line analysis of the source that loses sight of the big picture.
Putting together a summary sentence might be a good way of helping students to get around this problem.
Let’s take the following source:
Producing a summary sentence requires students to answer certain questions about some text and then turn that into a single sentence. In the case of this source, this might look as follows:
Who/what: Albert Speer, senior Nazi
(Did/will do) what: started supporting the Nazis
When: during the early 1930s
Where: Germany
Why: because he admired/respected Hitler
How: He attended one of A.H.’s speeches
That would then turn into the following:
Source C shows that Albert Speer, who later became a senior Nazi, started supporting the Nazis during the early 1930s because he admired Hitler personally after attending one his speeches.
Admittedly, a little bit of extra teaching or re-working might be needed to get them to introduce the ‘Source C’ element of the above sentence, but hopefully it gives you an idea. I think this could be really useful for the part (b) interpretations question on the Germany paper where they need to identify the key difference between two views about the same issue.
Those prompt questions are put together in the form of a template in the book that can then be reproduced whenever you like for this task. (One of the other things I love about this book are the use of consistent templates that you can re-use over and over.)
There’s one or two other ideas I’ve got as well but I’ll leave it there for now as this post is already quite long enough. If you’ve just started out on your journey with TWR, do share ideas via twitter — I’m always keen to see what people are up to with it so do @ me @HistoryKss.
