Timelines as Retrieval Practice in History

One of the strategies I’ve been using a lot more with classes is timelines. Back in the day, I was never a big fan of doing timelines usually because I always thought they looked a bit rubbish in student exercise books, with half of a double page left blank or lots of stuff scrunched up in one part of the page and loads of the rest left blank. I used to do them at the start of the topic, probably as part of some awful research task which maybe 5 students would do well, and the other 25 would be pretty hopeless at. The problem of course was that students didn’t really know anything about the period in question so it was all a bit of a jumble of random knowledge for them that didn’t really make any sense.

However, I’ve increasingly started to love a good timeline in my lessons once again. My main focus is to use them as a whole class activity to get students thinking about the key events in a time period and to identify the hinge points within a time period. This is almost invariably as some form of a revision or review activity. A mini-whiteboard often plays a role for students to get them to identify some of the key knowledge (even if they are insecure on the dates).

A couple of examples from recent teaching includes:

Review of Settlement of the American West

In my lesson today we were about to start looking at the Exodusters and the Oklahoma Land Rush, but before we did I wanted to review the story of settlement (or colonisation as it probably should be but in the specification it isn’t) of the West in the earlier time periods. I put the date ranges of Key Topics 1 and 2 (1835–62; 1862–76 — see picture above, right hand side) and asked students to give me some of the key knowledge. After a bit of hubbub and nonsense and not much in the way of constructive comment, I decided to ask them to get the Mini Whiteboards out and to get some ideas down for the first of those time periods. I started the feedback by asking which was the most significant development in that time period (which we agreed was probably the Gold Rush to California in 1849). I then took quick feedback on other key events, such as the Donner Party, Mormons and Oregon Trail from before 1849, and then things like the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, the early settlement of the Plains and the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush afterwards.

We didn’t use the MWBs for the second time period, just feeding back as a class on that. Here obviously the focus was on the key legislation of 1862 in terms of the Pacific Railroad Act and the Homestead Act to start with. We also had some discussion as to whether the cattle industry constituted an example of settlement and concluded we needed to be careful with this.

This probably took a little longer than I would have liked, all told, but felt it was a useful review of this theme before heading into new content — where again we needed to establish chronology by revisiting the end of the Civil War and briefly outlining the period of Reconstruction to explain why there was a bit of time lag between slavery ending and the Exodusters (formerly enslaved African-American migrants to Kansas) moving west.

Review of Germany 1918–1939

Year 11 have been preparing for their next round of PPE exams, so I did a review of the Germany content in timeline form before their exam on this. In this case, this was less impromptu, as I’d pre-prepared a timeline for students to use (see the picture above). I divided political, economic, social and cultural themes out so they could see the breadth of content in this topic. I also identified January 1933 (Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor) as a key dividing line on the template.

When I did this with my class, I elicited feedback theme by theme, and in the hour we were able to cover Political and Economic aspects. I wasn’t too happy with how I laid mine out that I was displaying under the visualiser as I went along, and found it useful to try to sub-divide the period into smaller labelled chunks (e.g. 1924–29 as the ‘Golden Years’, 1929–33 as the ‘Nazi Rise to Power’, 1933–34 as ‘Nazi Consolidation of Power’ and so on). I think trying to break the time period down into smaller chunks like this is quite useful so that students can see the trends of the time period a little more easily.

I then did the same exercise with the small hardy group who turned up for intervention this evening (none in my class lol) who hadn’t done this task. This time I asked them, ‘which events do you think we should ensure go on here in the 40 minute session we have now, given that we can’t talk about everything?’ The first event one student mentioned was Hindenburg’s death, which kind of surprised me. The justification was that this was what meant that Hitler’s path to creating a dictatorship was now completely unblocked. Fair point! Always interesting to hear student thinking on this to see how they’ve processed what they’ve learned.

Conclusions

· Obviously the proof of any impact will be in the pudding a little bit — I can’t sit here and guarantee this had some sort of transformative impact on students, and it probably needs lots of reinforcement and repetition over time. I do think it helps improve my explanation at least.

· The use of timelines as a bit of co-constructive retrieval activity is definitely something I will persist with.

· I definitely think that for breadth study units I teach it could be very useful (Medicine at GCSE, Lancastrians, Yorkists and Henry VII at A-level) in particular where you have to synthesise a broad range of information very quickly.

· I’d love a bit of software that could help me produce something ‘neater’ without having to faff around with doing straight lines on Powerpoint.

· Tools like Mini-Whiteboards and Visualisers are a way of helping to get a little bit more bang for my buck.