How to develop pupils’ understanding of chronology at key stage 3

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4. How should teachers plan for the development of chronological understanding across key stage 3?

How to get started

As part of a review of your current scheme of work for key stage 3, consider the following questions to see if pupils’ progression in chronological understanding is adequately addressed. Your responses to these questions will help determine the extent to which you need to revise your existing plans and departmental policy for history.

1. How and when do you diagnose pupils’ levels of chronological understanding developed by the end of year 6? Does the development of chronological understanding form part of discussions with feeder schools?
2. To what extent does your existing scheme of work enable pupils to develop and continually reinforce their knowledge and understanding of chronology throughout key stage 3?
3. Where and how in your existing enquiries do you build further your pupils’ ‘vocabulary of chronological understanding’ and ‘sense of period’? Do any of your enquiries, for example, focus explicitly on sense of period, making links across centuries, eg Was the life of x in the sixteenth century really very different from the life of y in the thirteenth century?
4. Does your scheme of work make some of the themes running through key stage 3 explicit to pupils? Are these revisited at appropriate intervals to enhance pupils’ understanding of ‘a framework of past events’? Suggestions for such themes are as follows:
• who decided how the country was run? Who held power – king or parliament?
• how much say have individuals had in government? Changes in forms of protest and participation, including the struggle for the vote
• freedom, toleration and equality – from villeinage to the vote for equal human rights. This also includes education, religious beliefs and the growth of toleration
• how has daily life changed? eg housing, diet, health, leisure, transport, communications
• working experiences – what did people do, how much time did they take and how has it changed? How has technology changed human experiences?
• empires from Norman and Angevin to the British Empire, including also understanding of other empires, such as Rome, the Aztecs, Spain, USA and USSR, depending on the topics chosen in the optional units
• diversity – the evolution of Britain’s multi-ethnic culture
• England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales and the changing relationships between them
• Britain’s relationship with Europe and the world. This could include changing patterns of warfare, trade, culture and religion.
5. When studying topics such as 1066 or the English Civil Wars, do you take the opportunity to demonstrate the importance of precise chronological understanding for developing effective explanations?
6. Do you take the opportunity at the end of each year to enhance pupils’ chronological understanding by looking back to identify which events, people and issues have had the greatest significance?
7. Do any of your enquiries in years 8 and 9 draw on information from topics and periods covered in earlier years?
8. Does your scheme of work ensure that pupils gain ‘a knowledge and understanding of a wider overview of history’ and, if so, when and how?
9. Do you use a sufficient variety of activities to meet the range of learning styles among pupils? For example if a significant number of pupils learn most effectively through kinaesthetic activities, is sufficient emphasis placed on such approaches?
10. Do you challenge the most able pupils so that they are able to reach the highest levels of chronological understanding?

Next steps

To enhance chronological understanding the following should inform planning and teaching.

1. Ensure diagnosis
• Make no assumptions about what has or has not been taught, learnt or remembered from earlier years. Failing to do justice to the quality of earlier teaching and learning causes as many problems as assuming that pupils have been introduced to all aspects of chronological understanding.
• Undertake formative assessment of pupils’ chronological understanding at regular intervals, not just at the beginning of year 7. The end of year 7 and the beginning and end of years 8 and 9 are natural occasions for such diagnoses but formative assessments can continue to be made informally within the context of individual enquiries.
• Focus on resolving learning problems diagnosed in previous work.
2. Plan for sustained teaching and learning
• Regular and systematic reinforcement is essential. Focus on teaching to explicit objectives for chronological understanding.
• Build chronological understanding deep into the framework of planning, rather than add it in the form of discrete exercises alongside existing units of work.
• Reinforce chronological knowledge and understanding through units of work introducing and concluding key stage 3, and also introducing and concluding each year of study.
• Make objectives and vocabulary relating to chronological understanding explicit to pupils. This will also help new teachers who need to understand, for example that teaching topics in chronological order is not the same as teaching for chronological understanding.
3. Link chronological understanding into historical enquiries
• Create opportunities to relate each new topic or enquiry to pupils’ existing mental chronological framework, thus steadily reinforcing and adding to their depth of knowledge and understanding. As noted previously this is about links between the themes and stories of key stage 3, not just the dates and sequences.
• Plan links across key stage 3 in detail and, perhaps, build links into some enquiry questions in years 8 and 9 which refer back and make comparisons and contrasts with topics from previous years, rather than being solely concerned with content covered in that year.
• Make use of particular opportunities for developing chronological knowledge and understanding that arise in enquiries about understanding of interpretations and significance, as well as through the more obvious contexts of causation, change and continuity.
• Place a topic or enquiry in its wider historical framework after it has been studied in detail. Pupils are more likely to focus on an event or individual’s place within the broader framework once they have acquired some detailed understanding.
4. Use visual images
• Visual images can build up pupils’ sense of period and help them use associated vocabulary with accuracy and confidence. For example using a term such as ‘Tudor’, remembering key dates, relating individuals and events to the period, is immensely difficult unless pupils have acquired a mental package of images related to the Tudor period. Timelines are more likely to be successful in reinforcing chronological knowledge and understanding if they contain visual images rather than simply words and dates.
5. Use stories and themes
• Activities which ask pupils to sequence a series of unrelated famous events or people (such as Domesday Book, Agincourt, the Reformation) are unlikely to be successful in the early stages of key stage 3 because the sequence has no internal logic to help pupils make sense of them. Sequencing events and individuals from themes (such as the developing story of monarchy and parliament; the stories of home and working conditions) is more likely to be successful because pupils can use their knowledge of the story to give some order to the sequence.
• Recall of individual key events, people and dates is enhanced by being understood as part of a story, including long term thematic stories.
• Planning across key stage 3 needs to pursue major themes and stories which create opportunities for reinforcing ‘the story so far’ and, in year 9, perhaps recapping the full stories that have been unfolding across years 7–9.
6. Use a variety of learning styles
   • It is becoming common practice to use teaching activities linked to a variety of learning styles – the auditory, visual and kinaesthetic. This is just as relevant to enhancing chronological knowledge and understanding as to any other topic or concept. Some pupils will respond positively to tasks involving creating, drawing and illustrating timelines, others will prefer to take part in organising physical timelines or family trees across the classroom, while others will be happy to repeat dynasties or lists aloud as if learning tables. They key is variety to meet individuals’ needs.

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