How can I ‘secure success’ in my mixed-attaining GCSE History classes?

Since taking on the job of Head of History in 2018, we’ve done a good job in my department in improving the attainment of higher attaining pupils. However, as we’ve ramped up the academic demand, I think we’ve found that some of our lower-attaining have been left behind a little bit. So, as I’ve alluded to before, my central challenge is to maintain that higher challenge, while bringing more of the students who are likely to find that difficult, with me.

As I’ve been racking my brains about this issue, the question of motivation has kept rearing its’ ugly head. When I’ve looked at who was succeeding, and who wasn’t, there seemed to be a significant correlation between what I identified as the motivation levels for learning History (and succeeding academically in general) and strong performance. This seemed logical because to do well in History, you have to be motivated both to try and master the huge volume of content, and then write about this at length across three different exams. If you are lacking in motivation about one or both of these things, then the whole deck of cards can come tumbling down pretty quickly and a student who my bosses are saying should be getting a 4 or a 5, ends up getting a 2, a 1, or even worse they just rock up to the exam and put their head on the desk for the whole thing.

So this is where I’ve found Peps Mccrea’s latest work, Motivated Teaching, quite helpful. In it, he describes the five levers that we have available to us to improve student motivation. These are, in order:

1. Secure Success

2. Run Routines

3. Nudge Norms

4. Build Belonging

5. Boost Buy-In

The whole book is really interesting and I strongly recommend it, particularly if the problems I describe above are familiar ones to you (also, because of Peps’ economical prose style, you can whizz through it in a couple of hours if you’re concentrating). But I want to focus on the first of those levers, ‘Secure Success’, in this post, and to think about what this might look like in the context of my mixed-attaining, very large, History classes.

The premise, in a nutshell, is this. Success tends to lead to motivation, not the other way round. Therefore, we need to ensure students experience meaningful success pretty early and often — about an 80% success rate. But the word meaningful is doing some heavy lifting there. The success has to be genuine and the student needs to attribute it to themselves and not anyone else (or luck). There also has to be some degree of difficulty — hence an 80% and not a 100% success rate. We also need to put in place measures to mitigate against failure. Failure early on in the learning process is likely to deal a hammer blow to student motivation, unless we take some important action to frame that in the right way.

When I think about my own classes, I think that, with this in mind, I have perhaps made some mistakes. I tend to ramp up the challenge of History, kind of ‘big it up,’ perhaps too much, meaning not enough students are experiencing success early enough. Indeed, I think some students tragically feel defeated before they begin. I think I need to be clearer about what being successful in History looks like, which is hard because it’s not as obvious as in Maths, for example. What does being good at school history, besides ‘knowing lots’ and ‘writing more’ actually look like in a way that’s easily explainable to a child? As history teachers we can often be quite woolly as it is! I think that I need to build a stronger ‘Culture of Error’ and model success and failure a bit more clearly.

What am I trying to do about this, with the September 6th start date in mind? Well, a few things.

· First of all, I have invested in a visualiser to try to show students much more clearly exactly what I am looking for. My tentative plan is to have my own exercise book where I can show what I want in terms of layout, model answers and so forth. As well as this, I’ll be more easily able to give live feedback to the whole class on bits of work that have gone well, and, in a kind way, those that haven’t. This will be a huge change to my teaching approach if it works, furthering a process began last year as I moved away from powerpoint heavy lessons where lots of students were not processing or engaging with the full range of the material being presented. I’ve felt unsatisfied with my approach to modelling for some time, so hopefully this helps.

· I need to go back to the beginning on my retrieval practice. I’ve found that my starter quizzes at the start of the lesson can drag a bit, and the rates of completion vary wildly between different students (linked closely to motivation and attainment). I don’t think this aspect of my lessons is working as well as I would like. I need to make these a little shorter, and a little simpler. The fabulous RememberMore website is, I think, going to be a real driver of this for me with my GCSE groups. I’m also going to be using Google Forms quizzes for homeworks to help consolidate and retrieve the key points from lessons, as I aim to salvage some of the best bits of remote learning for the in-person classroom.

· I’m also going to try and be clearer to students through my lesson documents and remoulded powerpoints (see my previous blog) about what success looks like, in terms of knowledge development, for each lesson. What are the core things that everyone needs to get, to try and really establish focus for all in amongst all the Hinterland and tangents that a History lesson inevitably generates? In a sense it means coming back to ‘learning objectives’ and being much clearer about what these are — not just for individual lessons, but for topics as a whole.

· I also need to be better in terms of using praise, and being more generous in that regard. I think I probably got so entrenched in trying to promote high expectations and standards, that I lost sight a little bit of being more generous with kind words towards students and classes as a whole. This links to my point about being more visible from my previous blog, but as we return to a degree of normality in school, I need to get back to being a bit more effusive with students than I can be (without it becoming meaningless, of course).

I’m not saying these are the best ideas in the world, but it’s what I’m starting with, and we’ll see how we go. And of course, there are other factors at work, including literacy, SEMH issues and so on, which these don’t necessarily address directly.

But, I think that there is still a more fundamental question I am grappling with. If you are a student who struggles, who is told that their estimated grade is, at best, a 4 — how do you deal with that when you might be sat next to a kid who is a Grade 9 estimate, Oxbridge-potential student? That must be really challenging for your motivation, when success for you, would be abject disappointment for the person next to you? It must be hard to process internally, particularly as an emotionally developing teenager, that this student next to you makes effortless what to you seems, at times, nigh-on impossible? It’s all very well saying, ‘we’re aiming for Grade 9s for everyone’ but we all know in our heart of hearts that while we may aim for this, the likelihood of this is pretty much zero. An 80% success rate sounds like a tremendous goal, but what does that look like in any meaningful way for the Grade 9 estimate student, and the Grade 3 estimate student, in the same class at the same time, grappling with a single-tier of entry qualification?

These are the questions I have not yet found the answers to resolving.