Teacher Development, Volume 8, Numbers 2 & 3, 2004

Thinking Skills, Assessment for

Learning and Literacy Strategies
in Teaching History

PAULA MOUNTFORD[1]
University of York, United Kingdom
IAN PRICE
Huntington School, York, United Kingdom

ABSTRACT This article is about a small-scale research project which investigated

changing the authors classroom practice at General Certificate of Secondary Education
(GCSE) level and how that change impacts on both teachers and students. This project
emerged out of earlier classroom research funded and supported by the National Union
of Teachers and Newcastle University, where the authors looked at the use of thinking
skills activities in history classrooms. This article tells the story of how two teachers
embarked on a second research project, where they attempted to combine thinking skills,
assessment for learning and literacy strategies in teaching history and produce a revision
programme for 132 GCSE students. They also worked with three other members of their
department, thus linking the project to continuing professional development. The
authors aim to share what they learned as two teacher researchers working
collaboratively, what impact this work had on their students, as well as the departmental
learning that took place.

Huntington School is a large, 11-18 comprehensive school in the north of

England, and has 1512 pupils on roll. Our history department has seven
members of staff teaching 12 GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary
Education) groups in Years 10 and 11 and over 50 students at AS and A2
(advanced subsidiary and advanced) level. We have a long history of working
collaboratively, as Head of Department and Second in Department as well as
working together on the National Union of Teachers/Newcastle University
Thinking Skills project. Paula was also the schools Literacy Coordinator and
Co-Leader of the York Assessment for Learning Networked Learning
Community. Ian as Second in Department represented us on the Thinking
Skills working group and played a key role in the Teaching and Learning in the

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Foundation Subjects (TLF) work that the department was involved in. These
roles gave us access to a wide range of ideas and training opportunities
provided by the local education authority, as well as nationally available
courses. These ranged from Julia Strongs Literacy across the Curriculum,
Birmingham Advisory Support Service Thinking Skills Conference, a range of
courses provided by the Historical Association and a Kings College course on
assessment for learning.
This article tries to summarise how we were influenced by assessment
for learning, literacy and thinking skills and their impact on our professional
development as well as trying to assess their impact on the confidence,
motivation, skills and results of our pupils.
Over the past five years the take-up rate at GCSE history has increased
and moved away from a traditional core of higher-achieving pupils, to include
more pupils with target grades of D and below at GCSE. This led to
discussions relating to how we can improve access for these pupils to a highly
literate subject, where reading and writing as well as complex historical
analysis and interpretation of evidence are required. This encouraged us to
investigate our present approaches. We reviewed work being carried out at
Key Stage 4 (ages 14-16 years) and at Key Stage 3 (ages 11-14 years). We aimed
to try to understand more accurately what pupils find difficult and why and
move on to developing a curriculum that improves the skills and confidence of
all pupils, as well as continuing to stretch and develop the higher achievers.
This in turn led us to focus on thinking skills, assessment for learning and
literacy strategies in preparing GCSE students for their final examinations.
Essentially, the two of us allocated the time to work together, to plan,
design and reflect upon the activities and lessons we had created. We
researched, shared and developed the initial idea of a distinct revision
programme for GCSE. The next stage was to teach the activities to our
individual groups. We planned to video ourselves, observe each other and
discuss what we had thought of the lesson as well as use the learning logs to
add in pupil voice. From these discussions, which ranged from excited
exchanges to moans about how it did not work, we planned our departmental
session, where our aim was to share the activities, ideas and the findings from
our trial lessons with the rest of the GCSE teaching team. We aimed to initiate
discussion, train the rest of the team in a new technique and encourage them
to add to this body of knowledge, thus improving the activity and allowing
them to own it and adapt to their teaching styles. This process was replicated
for each of the areas we were developing.

A Brief Overview of Our Work

Literacy
The trick is to find the natural literacy in the subject. (Counsell, 2000,
p. 20)

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We looked closely at how the department was employing literacy strategies to
improve history teaching and learning. Both Literacy across the Curriculum
and TLF had allowed us to focus on Key Stage 3; we wanted to develop this
work for Key Stage 4. Our aim was to build on the concept work naturally
covered through teaching the course, the reading of sources and, in particular,
the writing of extended answers for exams. We found that our chosen areas of
literacy, thinking skills and assessment for learning (AFL) linked and
overlapped in an interesting and efficient way. We had produced separate unit
packs to teach the course, for example The League of Nations, Vietnam,
USA. These were successful from both a teacher and pupil perspective. They
led us to produce a range of revision packs that dealt with separate historical
skills, for example reliability, causation and comparison of sources. These
packs helped us to focus on key literacy skills as well as AFL. The skill packs
contained questions, sources and mark schemes as well as a checklist on how
to approach, for example, causation-style questions. We focused on a
historical skill (reliability, utility, causation, cross-referencing, comprehension,
interpretation and description of key features) and guided our pupils through
the process of question de-construction, source annotation, then the levels
required by the mark scheme. We discussed ideas and activities to scaffold the
actual writing process. These included use of mini whiteboards, flip charts and
overhead transparencies, where pupils and teachers devised plans, clever
starters (opening lesson sequences) and suggested connectives and analytical
words or phrases. We also used a range of good-quality answers to both mark
and assess using AFL techniques such as peer assessment and comment-only
marking. Adding to this was the work we developed using the thinking skill
activity of Odd One Out (identifying the concept which is different in
construction or idea from the others in the sequence), which allowed us to
develop pupil confidence with concepts and vocabulary. The pupils would be
given three words and then select the odd one out and suggest a reason. For
America in the 1920s we had boom, prohibition and immigration. Any
word can be the odd one out and therefore the activity develops the reasoning
skills of the pupils.

Thinking Skills
We developed a number of thinking skills activities from the range of
materials that are available inspired by Leat (1998). We worked collaboratively
to plan and design the activities, trialling them in our own lessons, reflecting
on what worked and what was achieved as well as areas of weakness. Again
we took them to the rest of the team at a departmental meeting and usually
one of us would teach the activity, with the rest of the team taking the role of
learners. At different stages we would all discuss or comment upon how
something could work, what the difficulty was, how it could be improved.
The whiteboard was used to capture these thoughts and aid the rewriting of
teaching notes or materials.

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The Activities
Reading pictures. By cutting up and laminating pictures from old textbooks, we
produced a versatile resource that lent itself to both thinking skills and literacy
activities. We took these materials to a departmental meeting asking
colleagues to play with these cards and collectively designed trial lesson plans
and activities. We came up with the following ideas:
Sugar paper timelines.
A description game, where one person describes the pictures to the other
two in the group. The person who guesses first gains the card.
Concepts students had to group the pictures around concepts or events
and come up with as much detail as they could. Then add to this using the
Walsh textbooks (Walsh, 1996, 2002).
Cause and effect card sort.
5Ws and H thinking skill activity another thinking skills activity where
students are asked to design questions using the following question stems:
Who, What, Where, When, Why and How?
This type of activity resulted in history being discussed, groupwork taking
place with all its additional skills of speaking, and listening and collaborating
being developed.

Fortune lines. The fortune lines activities we produced were linked to the
following topics from our three exam papers:
Vietnam;
First World War;
Women;
USA;
Rise of the Nazis.
Our activities start with a situation card, key questions and character cards.
Students are put into groups of three. Three character cards are given out. An
icebreaker activity when first introducing fortune lines is to ask students to
give their characters names and to introduce themselves to the other
characters. Initially, students felt embarrassed but the icebreaker activity
tended to ease this.
We then moved on to a discussion of the three or four questions, which
require pupils to pass comment on key events. Thus, in character they begin to
view key events from three different perspectives: tenant farmer, car
manufacturer and 24-year-old dancer, and then discuss the following
questions: Who are you? What are your views on prohibition? What are your
views on the 1920s? What are your views on the Wall Street Crash? What are
your views on the New Deal?
The next stage of this activity is to design a graph axis onto A3 paper.
Each character must respond to each of the events using one of the three
emotions on the x-axis. The groups are encouraged to help each other, to

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discuss how each of the characters feels or thinks about the events, thus
developing their understanding of historical events from different perspectives.
Feedback is taken from the different characters, across different groups; this
also helps to develop a chronological overview.
The last activity moves away from the characters and involves a number
of quotations related to the issues or events linked to the topic. The aim is for
pupils to conclude who said the quote, why and to identify the event that the
quote applies to. The plenary or debriefing consists of the teacher asking
questions about the key learning that has taken place then moves on to
asking why this activity was selected by the teacher, what thinking has taken
place during the lesson.

Symbol writing. Symbol writing was another activity employed to help students
develop their understanding of events, grasp of chronology and ability to
learn information. Symbol writing was again built upon from Key Stage 3
work and was used at different times throughout the two years of the GCSE
course.
Events were summarised, the teacher reads out the story and pupils
note down the story in symbol form onto sheets of A3 paper. The purpose is
to use as few words as possible, translating the words or story into symbols
and images. The next stage of this activity is for the students to work in
learning pairs; each reads their symbol writing back to their partners. The
teacher circulates and listens in; one or two students are asked to volunteer to
read their piece. The teacher asks questions about what was difficult, what was
easy, takes feedback on the techniques and symbols used and links to causation
work.

Assessment for Learning

An assessment activity can help learning if it provides information to be used
as feedback, by teachers and by their pupils, in assessing themselves and each
other, to modify the teaching and learning activities in which they are
engaged. Such assessment becomes formative assessment when the evidence
is actually used to adapt the teaching work to meet learning needs (Black et al,
2002, p. 1).
We had been introduced to some of the ideas and strategies linked to
AFL through the TLF pilot work we had been involved in. Initially, we had
looked at the sharing of learning objectives and comment-only marking. We
were very interested in developing this work, using mark schemes as the
criteria and peer-assessment and self-assessment activities to enable students to
mark their own or their peers work, thus linking it to the literacy work we
were developing.
Another AFL strategy we employed was the use of learning logs. We
devised small booklets to be used each lesson. The front sheet asked pupils to
note down their target grades and their mock exam results. They were also

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asked to list their strengths and their aspirations for post-GCSE. The format
inside the booklets was the same on each page, asking the following questions:
What were the aims of the lesson?
What did the teacher do?
What did you do?
What was your motivation and attitude?
What did I learn?
Did I enjoy or dislike the lesson? Why?
The first time we introduced the booklet about 15 minutes were needed to be
allocated to explaining the purpose of them and getting students to complete
the front cover and the first page. After this, they would just be slipped onto
the desks at some point in the lesson, and a few minutes allocated towards the
end of the lesson for students to complete the page for that day.
These learning logs provided the teacher with valuable information from
each pupil: this information included details about motivation, understanding
and perceptions. It helped the pupils to develop an overt accountability and
reflection on their approach and attitude towards learning: Enjoy because it
gives a chance for independent revision, to build up our knowledge in areas in
which we need to. The logs were a dialogue between student and teacher.
This feedback allowed the teacher to moderate the activities planned for the
next lesson in line with the needs of individual pupils within the groups.

Discussion
We feel that we gained enormously from working collaboratively. Trust and
enthusiasm were possibly our starting points. We both felt that learning
together would not only increase that learning but would help to ensure that
work got done. We were both busy people, with the usual teaching workload
as well as responsibilities outside of the department. By working together we
could encourage each other, and ensure that deadlines were met and that ideas
were developed and questioned. Our colleagues gained from this experience
because departmental time became training or continuing professional
development time, their ideas were valued and included and they were able to
select from the range of materials created and use them in their classrooms.
The results in 2003 were very good: of the 123 pupils who sat GCSE
History 76% achieved A*-C grade. Our take-up rate for AS from this cohort
was 32 students. Our pupils gained from these experiences, not only those
who fell within the 76%. We feel that we had involved them directly in their
learning; through techniques such as AFL and thinking skills, we had
empowered them with the language of learning, a range of useful and often
fun activities as well as an opportunity to reflect upon what they had done,
how they had done it and how they could do it differently. This new idea had
inspired me and has greatly improved my attitude for revision. We feel proud
of the work we carried out last year for a number of reasons. An important

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reason for us is that we know all the individuals involved and although 76% is
good the individual stories of some of those E to D or even F to E grades make
it all worthwhile.

Correspondence
Ian Price, 19 Hawthorn Grove, Heworth, York YO31 7YA, United Kingdom
(i.price@huntington-ed.org.uk).

Note
[1] Paula Mountford is Coordinator of History for the Postgraduate Certificate of
Education at the University of York, and Ian Price is Head of History at Huntington
School, York.

References
Black, P. Harrison, C., Lee, C., Marshall, B. & William, D. (2002) Working Inside the Black Box.
London: Kings College London.
Counsell, C. (2000) Challenges Facing the Literacy Coordinator, Literacy Today, 24, pp. 221.
Leat, D. (1998) Thinking through Geography. Cambridge: Chris Kington.
Walsh, B. (1996) GCSE Modern World History. London: John Murray.
Walsh, B. (2002) Essential Modern World History. London: John Murray.

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