Thanks for this blogpost to Martyn Bajkowski who is Head of History at Pleckgate School and a member of the HA’s Secondary Committee.

To set out my stall from the start, I am really concerned with the lack of a subject specific focus that I am witnessing in some initial teacher education. I am finding that some pre-service teachers I encounter or observe are not being introduced to the practical theorising of history teachers and history teacher educators that has shaped school history to this point. Without this knowledge, how can they teach history well? How can they become part of the conversations and work to ensure that history teaching continues to develop?  

I have been a head of department since 2010. In addition to leading a department of subject specialists, I am in a privileged position because I get to go out and visit schools through my role as an SLE and through paid CPD events. This means that my thinking about history is always being changed and challenged by contact and conversations with other history specialists. Moreover I get to think deeply about history teaching because I prepare and lead weekly sessions for all of my schools ITE trainees and ECTs. I facilitate some of the subject days for an ITE provider which I believe are of the highest quality. At Pleckgate, we also have on average around 4 visits per year by colleagues from other schools looking for advice and development. These contacts and conversations also help us to develop and improve our history curriculum and pedagogy. Most of my job is a joyous combination of teaching history and working to ensure history teaching continues to be high quality.

But I also come into contact with other ITE trainees/ECTs and I have a growing concern that they are not being supported and prepared to become the best history teachers they can be. Over the last two years I have found these beginning teachers commenting in a similar way about some of the lessons that they have seen in our school.   They give three broadly similar comments when observing:

●      I could not do that in my lessons because I  have to have certain slides in my lessons and to deliver lessons in a way that is predetermined and applied the same way to every subject in my school.

●      Your pupils did history work that is too advanced and my pupils could not do it.

●      Your lessons don’t always follow Rosenshine’s principles of instruction which I know is the right way to teach.

To hear pre-service teachers talking as if there is one way to teach, that teaching is the same in every subject, being so unambitious for their pupils, and thinking of themselves as unthinking deliverers of someone else’s thinking, rather than as creative professionals with agency, is deeply worrying. I can hear Christine Counsell’s voice resonating in my head: “You cannot Rosenshine your way to an outstanding curriculum” as I try to work out where to start with my responses to these comments.

I am actually a massive fan of Rosenshine’s work. I believe that my understanding of how pupils learn has been transformed by his work and by others like Lemov and Willingham, to name but two others.  Indeed, I have not only changed my own teaching,  I have also advocated their ideas to both my department and to the ITE trainees and ECTs in my school. But I know that all of these fine ideas are only useful to me as a history teacher if I really think about how they apply to history, to the teaching of history and to my pupils learning history. I think hard about this, I read and listen to other history teachers and history teacher educators who are wrestling with what these ideas mean, and then I think some more. I was taught how to do this as part of my own history ITE and I have continued to develop professionally ever since. What worries me is that I am encountering pre-service teachers (and now some history teachers and departments) who have not had a strong subject specific ITE and who follow these ideas as if they are a set of rules, with almost religious zeal. As a result, they are not seeking to understand what history teaching is. History teaching has become almost incidental to the lessons they plan and teach. They do not have professional agency. 

I know that many history teacher educators are deeply concerned and frustrated by the genericism of the ITTECF. I think they are right to be worried. I am seeing evidence that they are right. I am seeing a widening divide between pre-service teachers prepared by their ITE to think deeply about why they teach history, what history they teach and how they teach history, and those pre-service teachers whose training is leaving them without a beginning teacher knowledge of history teaching or how to continue to develop as a history teacher. This is worrying for their future pupils, and I have no idea how such colleagues will cope with specification changes when they come. These teachers are unlikely to get jobs in leading history departments and so how are they ever going to learn what they have missed out on in their ITE year? Those of us who are history teachers and subject leaders in schools need to work with the Historical Association and add our voices to those already expressing concern about what is happening to our subject and demand that rich subject specific ITE and early career development is mandatory. Will you make your voice heard too?