History
Essential Characteristics of a Historian at St. Alban's
• An excellent knowledge and understanding of people, events, and contexts from a range of historical periods and of historical concepts and processes.
• The ability to think critically about history and communicate ideas very confidently in styles appropriate to a range of audiences.
• The ability to consistently support, evaluate and challenge their own and others’ views using detailed, appropriate and accurate historical evidence derived from a
range of sources.
• The ability to think, reflect, debate, discuss and evaluate the past, formulating and refining questions and lines of enquiry.
• A passion for history and an enthusiastic engagement in learning, which develops their sense of curiosity about the past and their understanding of how and why
people interpret the past in different ways.
• A respect for historical evidence and the ability to make robust and critical use of it to support their explanations and judgments.
• A desire to embrace challenging activities, including opportunities to undertake high-quality research across a range of history topics.
At St. Alban's we use the Essential Curriculum which is built on threshold concepts for long term memory.
The essentials Curriculum follows a simple model as outlined in our
Curriculum Design statement
At St Alban's we use the Curriculum Companion for History to support our approach.
The Curriculum Companion is designed to aid teachers in helping pupils to form a History Schema within their long term memories. The Curriculum Companion by Robin Bone and Chris Quigley helps the children to reach the milestones at the end of Year 2 , 4 and 6 through knowledge webs and POP tasks (explained below)
Milestones are the goals that pupils are aiming for. At St.Alban's we beleive the route to those goals is not as simple as stating the goal - pupils need a strong schema, based on knowledge - vocabulary and tasks to meet the milestones. The Curriculum companion we use provides teachers with three elements to help the pupils meet the milestones.
- The knowledge needed to build an art and design schema - this is presented in various kknowledge categories
- The vocabulary needed to articulate an understanding of art and design.
- Tasks that help the teacher identify if the children have made that progress -- POP tasks or proof of progress tasks.
The Curriulum Companion for Art and Design is made up of Knowledge webs and Pop Tasks.
