The Night Before: Last Minute Tips for AQA Paper 1H (23 May 2025)

The night before the exam... A room full of nervous students. What advice to you give?

It’s tempting to “throw the kitchen sink” and bombard students with everything they could possibly need to know. But at this late stage, I don’t think there’s much to be gained from this – what knowledge they have now is basically what they’ll have tomorrow morning, and anything else they might want to recap and revise they’ll be much better doing at home by themselves (or, preferably, they’ll get an early night and good sleep).

I’m also not a fan of predictions. It’s a serious risk that trying to second-guess the exam writers will send students off on the wrong scent.

Instead, I’ll suggest here a more targeted, concepts- and skills-focused approach. The brief resource to accompany this can be found here.

 

Language and Substantive Concepts: Part 2 – Speaking in Tongues

This is the second of a three-part post focusing on what I term, following Caroline Coffin, the “language of history” and substantive concepts.

After the first post set out a broad theoretical framework, this post aims to set out an approach to teaching a specific sub-category of substantive concepts: foreign-language terms.

I’ll be presenting on this topic with colleagues at the upcoming Schools History Project (SHP) conference in Leeds in July 2025, so this is also a first attempt to set out and develop a broad methodological approach to this work.

Questions, comments, and criticisms are very much welcome!

 

Language and Substantive Concepts: Part 1 – Weighty Conceptual Terms

This is the first of a three-part post focusing on what I term, following Caroline Coffin, the “language of history” and substantive concepts.

It aims to set out an approach to teaching substantive concepts by explicitly engaging with the linguistic structures of the historical discipline. I’ll be presenting on this topic with colleagues at the upcoming Schools History Project (SHP) conference in Leeds in July 2025, so this is also a first attempt to set out and develop a broad methodological approach to this work.

Questions, comments, and criticisms are very much welcome!

“Just Write More Essays”? Rethinking Strategies for Deliberate KS5 Writing and Exam Practice

With so little time to play around with in lessons, what can we do to help prepare students with their essay practice and exam preparation?

This year, rather than the blanket instruction to “just write more essays”, I’ve begun to hone in on particular elements of essay planning, writing, and the deconstruction of questions in order to make the best use of our remaining classroom time.

Cities, Railways, and Revolutions: Drawing the Links

In the late-Tsarist period, an urban revolution hit Russia. Major cities exploded in size. The population of St. Petersburg, the imperial capital, trebled from just over 500,000 in 1864 to 1,500,000 in 1900, rising to 2,500,000 by 1917.

It wasn’t just Russia’s capital city that was on the rise. By 1917, approximately 20 percent of the population of the entire empire lived in cities. Some of the most remarkable examples of city growth took place in Siberia, a traditionally underpopulated (by Slavic Russians, at least) region of the empire. And it was here, especially, that another factor came into play. Transportation.