Thanks to Sally Burnham, History teacher and Lead Practitioner, Lincolnshire, and member of Secondary Committee for this blogpost drawn from her experience of a Covid change that has been worth keeping.

How do you get A Level History students to read? This was an age old problem for me. I know how important it is for students to be reading historians’ work both to deepen their knowledge and to help them develop their historical writing. I would always have a few students who read avidly and jumped on any book or article recommendation I gave. But I found increasingly that more and more of my A Level historians were not engaging in any wider reading beyond what I was explicitly setting as homework (and not all were doing that).

For many years I had been producing reading lists at the beginning of each topic where I gave chapters/pages that students could use as well as questions that might be asked at the bottom of the document (see below) but many students were simply using these to mark the beginning of a new topic in their folders.

I had also been using historians writing in my lesson. For example early in Year 12 I got students to read extracts from Figes’ A People’s Tragedy to identify how he writes, how he puts forward an argument, how he supports his arguments with evidence (see Caroline Massey’s article in TH 164 Asking Year 12, ‘What Would Figes Do?’ Using an academic historian as the gold standard for feedback). This was proving useful in helping students to move away from the very formulaic writing they had developed at GCSE, but it wasn’t helping me to get students reading on a regular basis and to immerse themselves in the work of historians. This reading problem became even more apparent when we got to reading for the NEA. Many were dependent on the few articles that I provided and found the demands of reading historians’ work just too overwhelming.

Then Covid 19 happened. It was Centre Assessed Grades for my Year 11 and Year 13 students but how was I going to teach Year 12? I couldn’t just set reading from the textbook, make notes, read this PowerPoint… I would never keep them engaged and learning so that they would be ready to potentially sit an A level exam the following year. In the end I decided to try something totally new. I did a 30 minute Teams call introducing the enquiry question and providing the skeleton knowledge required. I then sent students away with 2 articles or chapters to read (articles that gave differing interpretations) on Teams and we met again on Teams in the final lesson slot of the week to discuss the reading. The first two or three ‘seminars’ were hard work – a lot of prompting from me, a lot of me suggesting ideas and encouraging one or two word answers out of students. But then suddenly there was a transformation. Students were reading the articles (I wonder if it was through sheer boredom with nothing else to do) and were tentatively starting to discuss the ideas. Each article I gave had some prompt questions and we were still using Enquiry Questions to shape our lessons so students knew what they were looking to answer. Before long these Teams lessons were the absolute highlight of my week. It was reminiscent of seminars in my university days. Students were debating with each other, challenging what they were reading and they were even suggesting further reading to each other. When we returned to school in the September, my Head of Department asked what I had done with the class during lock down – I held my breath and felt rather sick, what had I done? But then he continued and said that their essays were so much better than when we had entered the first lockdown. We hadn’t written any essays during the lockdown – all we had done was read and talk.  

This gave me the opportunity to talk to the now Year 13s and to look at how we could keep the reading culture that we had developed going. Students were very keen to keep the seminar style discussions around reading and so at the end of each Enquiry Question we had a seminar style lesson, discussing the reading that students had done and wrestling with the key debates. Again these were an absolute joy. Now the question was how to replicate this with my new Year 12 class and involve the other A Level History classes too.

Discussing the successes of the lockdown project in my department, we decided that we could launch an A Level History Reading Group to complement the A Level history lessons. We run it at a lunch time so that all the History students can attend and it is so popular now we have to have Year 12 and Year 13 on alternate weeks. Each week we provide students with an article/chapter and then they come to the lunchtime group and we discuss the article – its argument, the evidence used, what we have read that supports/contradicts the argument. Sometimes we also look at what has influenced the historian in preparation for their NEA. Attendance is voluntary, although there are sometimes students who we recommend to attend as we judge them to need further support.

With daughters studying for their A levels now, I am also acutely aware of the problems that students have when reading about a topic for the first time. So, just as I did in lockdown, before students embark on the reading, I provide the skeleton of the debate and the narrative in lesson time. This means that even the students who find the course difficult have the initial knowledge required to begin to make sense of the reading.

Perhaps the key thing that I now do is that I expect all students to be reading. Reading is no longer an ‘optional extra’ in my classes. As students arrive to the lessons, the conversation is about what they have been reading or what podcast they have listened to. To be part of the discussion you need to have read… and so students are reading. It is very rare for there to be any student in my current Year 13 class who turns up to the seminar and hasn’t read at least two of the articles/chapters on the reading list. The back of my classroom has bookshelves covered in books to borrow. I always have a new book that I am reading on my desk. Reading is very simply what we do in History.

I still use the reading lists, the difference is that now they are used to choose articles/chapters to read rather than to separate out topics in a folder.

Top Tips

• Provide an overview of the enquiry question including a narrative before students embark on the reading so that everything they read isn’t new to them.
• Select reading carefully so that students are going to find it useful/thought provoking.
• Model your love of reading History.
• Talk about the reading in every lesson – ‘did you see that Ward argues…?’ as you are discussing a point. Or ‘What did you think of Harris’ argument?
• Try a reading group. Even if you only get two or three students at first, others will hear about it (I used to say ‘Oh, yes we were talking about that in the reading group last week’ it soon encourages more students to come along).
• Provide opportunities for students to put their reading to good use e.g. seminar style lessons.