The (Passionately) Boring Teacher

Every year in terms one and two, year 9 learn about the Holocaust. It would be wrong to say that this is a topic which I enjoy teaching. However, having studied World War Two during my GCSE, my A level and my degree, it is topic which I have regularly encountered and which I find interesting. Despite this interest, when I first started teaching the Holocaust, I found it incredibly difficult. I would spend hours sat at my computer at a loss of how to approach topics. More often than not my lessons would end up centred around opinion and big philosophical questions. My students either produced mediocre work or their written pieces were littered with misconceptions. I believe this discomfort and poor quality ultimately came down to two factors: my lack of in-depth knowledge (despite the hours spent in classrooms and lecture theatres) and the Holocaust’s extremely sensitive nature. I felt that this topic morally precluded two, then popular, methods of teaching history: teaching ...

I have written extensively about what knowledge organisers should be and how I write them. However, I also believe that, just as when teaching a class, it is important to look and dissect examples of strong and weak knowledge organisers. In this post, I will be looking at what I see as an example of an ambitious but poorly written knowledge organiser. This document was written for a cohort of year 7s who were being introduced to Elizabeth I for the first time. WWW: This teacher clearly has high expectations of their pupils: as well as a number of pieces of complex vocabulary, this document briefly covers a number of complex concepts, such as the tension between Protestantism and Catholicism. The use of quotations and dates demonstrates this teacher's emphasis on concrete examples. The timeline at the bottom of the page attempts to fit Elizabeth I within the narrative of other Tudor monarchs. Assuming that pupils had already studied Edward VI and Mary I, this knowledge ...