Teaching History - Beginner Teachers Session with Jonathan Dallimore

A little while ago I had the pleasure of presenting at the HTA Beginner Teachers Conference. One of the highlights of doing something like this is that it then means I get watch Jonathan Dallimore share his insights into historical thinking. This time around, Jonathan Dallimore's session started with a primary source, introduced with very little context, and the prompt for beginner teachers to read and discuss with the person next to them... what is this source? What do we think of this extract? What can we deduce? 

As some answers were tentatively offered, Dallimore made the point that our lack of orientation and potential confusion was perhaps a reflection of how our students feel when a source is placed in front of him. 

The source transpired to be part of a letter from Dallimore's grandfather, written in 1943, in World War II Germany. The issue is that students often don't have this background knowledge when they look at a source; as History teachers we fall into the trap of looking at sources in isolation, which is contrary to what historians actually do. A historian has a purpose for looking at a source and they know the context of what they're looking at... in fact, more often than not, context is what they start with. 

There's a delicate line that needs to be walked here. There's a need to teach the facts and have students be able to recall these but, also, there's a need to have "an understanding of how historical knowledge is attained, its relationship to evidence, and the way in which historians arbitrate between competing or contradictory claims." (Peter Lee, Teaching History). History should be hard because it's not a 'natural' way of thinking - if students don't find it hard, then it's not focused enough on historical thinking. Dallimore zooms in on this and highlights some key elements of subject History. As we spiral into a world of politicised history wars and ongoing discussion, argumentation, and pseudohistoricising of conspiracies, Dallimore points out our responsibility as teachers to set students up to be able to navigate this violently contested space with appropriately disciplined and critical historical thinking. So yes, this involves providing some degree of context when students look at sources.

Dallimore boils down our role as History teachers as essentially being about the following:

• Historical Confidence and Agility
• Build students' substantive knowledge - provide meaningful data required to make sense of an issue (EG. 17 dictatorships in Europe by 1939 - this fact is meaningful because it raises important questions, EG. Why did this happen at this point in time?).
• Disciplinary knowledge - facilitate an understanding of key disciplinary concepts (EG. Causation, significance)
• Procedural knowledge - teaching the skills needed to 'do' history (EG. Communication in essay form, undertake historical research). 
  

Sources fit in all of the above strands of History teaching- we need sources to build our substantive knowledge but also to help us answer questions. Sources work in a variety of ways within a subject History context:

• Stimulus - to start a discussion
  
• Illustration - to provide an example of something
• Investigative - in an analytical sense, testing a source'sreliability and how/why they've been created.
  
• Construction - using evidence to describe, argue, etc.
• Extension - to research and add layers to what's being discussed.

To keep the balance, each of the above should come into our source analysis. To get to a point where we are taking this robust approach to sources, Dallimore highlighted the importance of choosing your moments - deep source work doesn't have to happen all the time; we have a syllabus with a range of elements that need to be taught but you have a year to teach them so there's no need to focus on all of them all of the time. One topic might focus on chronology and key terms/concepts, another might bring in contestability and analysis and use of sources. The next topic might then shift to significance and communication, with continuing analysis/use of sources. The final topic for the year could then look at perspective/empathy alongside continuing communication and significance. Other skills that might come into play in the following year are change and continuity and causation. Or perhaps they would work better in the first year and you could swap some of the skills around - it's a flexible approach.

The subtext here is that there should be room to interpret the syllabus in accordance with our professional judgement - and we're lucky in the sense that our current syllabus allows for this.

Source analysis in the context of a classroom can be approached in regard to three strands of pedagogy:

• Asking questions
• Finding and analysing meaningful data
• Communicating, sharing and challenging stories and arguments. 

Each of these elements are worked through in three stages - for example, establishing what asking questions looks like, guiding student negotiation in asking questions, and then guiding student creation of their own questions.

As usual with all of the Dallimore sessions I've watched, this was a thought-provoking seminar that helped me to rethink how I do things in the classroom. Great professional learning does this... it lets you watch a subject-expert who speaks the shared language of your subject area. In the course of this discussion, we learn new concepts within this shared language, and we re-energise ourselves as subject-area experts for our students. If I want to get better as a History teacher then I'll watch experienced and passionate History teachers talking about History. That's what this day was... I'm not a Beginner History Teacher; I was in attendance as a presenter in another session, but I'm thankful that I got to tag along and watch this session. Sessions like this aren't just for beginners.