History Intent, Implementation and Impact

Intent

Our History curriculum draws upon many powerful sources of History:

1. Substantive knowledge 

This is the subject knowledge and explicit vocabulary used about the past. Common misconceptions are explicitly revealed as ‘non-examples’ and positioned against known and accurate content. Misconceptions are challenged carefully and in the context of the substantive and disciplinary knowledge.

Substantive concepts, such as invasion and civilisation are taught through explicit vocabulary instruction as well as through the direct content and context of the study. The substantive concepts that we develop through our History curriculum are: Community           Knowledge            Invasion            Civilisation            Power             Democracy 

1. Disciplinary knowledge 

This is the use of substantive knowledge and how children construct understanding through historical claims, arguments and accounts. We call it ‘Working Historically.’ The features of thinking historically in our History Curriculum are:

Chronology        Cause & consequence        Change & continuity        Similarity & difference        Evidence        Significance

Historical analysis is developed through selecting, organising and integrating knowledge through reasoning and inference-making, in response to our structured questions and challenges. We call this ‘Thinking historically’. History is planned so that the retention of knowledge is much more than just ‘in the moment knowledge’. The cumulative nature of the curriculum is made memorable by the implementation of Bjork’s desirable difficulties, including retrieval and spaced retrieval practice, word building and deliberate practice tasks. This powerful interrelationship between structure and research-led practice is designed to increase substantive knowledge and accelerate learning within and between study modules. That means the foundational knowledge of the curriculum is positioned to ease the load on the working memory: new content is connected to prior learning. The effect of this cumulative model supports opportunities for children to associate and connect with significant periods of time, people, places and events. Our history curriculum strategically incorporates a range of modules that revisit, elaborate and sophisticate key concepts, events, people and places.

Implementation

We implement our intent using CUSP History. A guiding principle of CUSP History is that pupils become ‘more expert’ with each study and grow an ever broadening and coherent mental timeline. This guards against superficial, disconnected and fragmented understanding of the past. Specific and associated historical vocabulary is planned sequentially and cumulatively from Y1 to Y6. High frequency, multiple meaning words (Tier 2) are taught alongside and help make sense of subject specific words (Tier 3). Each learning module in history has a vocabulary module with teacher guidance, tasks and resources.

Please see the Overall Curriculum Statements for more on our Intent, Implementation and Impact.