"To ask questions wisely is to teach"

Alcuin of York, c740-804,
scholar, teacher and adviser to Charlemagne

Enquiry questions began to appear in history teaching in the mid-1980s. My fallible memory suggests that they were being used by SHP as headings in specifications to give structure and coherence to what were otherwise bullet-point lists of content. By 1989 both Colin Shephard, then Director of SHP, and myself were running CPD sessions at SHP and HA Conferences and elsewhere on using questions – then usually referred to as key questions – to give coherence to KS3 courses and create direct routes into work on second-order concepts.

From there it was natural that such questions gave structure to the SHP KS3 textbooks written for the first National Curriculum in 1991. My own National Curriculum series for OUP used such questions to give coherence to whole units/books as well as individual questions for each chapter/topic within a unit. The Medieval Realms book, for example, had the over-arching question ‘Was the Middle Ages a time of change?’ and Y7 pupils explored the degree of change and causes of change in terms of key themes and events. None of this was very sophisticated use of enquiry questions but it was a start.

Looking back at this early use of enquiry questions it’s clear that, as later, there were two layers to the use of these questions:

The more common approach was to use questions to give coherence and shape to coverage of content and to lead in to explicit teaching about concepts such as change, causation and significance.

The second approach involved going beyond using questions for structural purposes and to introduce students explicitly to the process of enquiry as shown in this artwork from the 1991 KS3 NC book on The Roman Empire written by Ian Coulson that I edited for OUP:

 

 

Why is it important to introduce students to this enquiry process in a very explicit way?

Later in this article I explore a series of reasons why enquiry should have such a central place in history teaching and learning but I’ll introduce the most important of all here – that enquiry is central to students developing the ability to work independently. The capacity to study and think independently is clearly very much needed at A level, at university and in life beyond education and the enquiry process is so important because it provides a model for independent learning – so long as this process is made explicit so that students can describe and implement it.

The enquiry process builds independence by:

• providing a clear structure and a sense of direction so students are much less likely to simply read as much as they can and hope an answer emerges.

• reassuring students that it is acceptable to know little or nothing at the outset, that uncertainty is a natural part of studying history and that ‘changing your mind’, otherwise known as ‘developing your hypothesis’ is a positive part of the process, not a weakness.

As a result, students become confident that they can move from knowing little to knowing and understanding a great deal about new topics.

Enquiry is, in effect, a form of problem-solving.

Introduction out of the way …

In full, this article explores how to develop that understanding by making it explicit and visible, building it across students’ entire experience of history in school and using it effectively in planning courses.

The sections of this article are:

1. What is the process of enquiry?

2. How big is an enquiry? Using enquiry to give coherence to
courses at KS2 and KS3

3. How can enquiry be used constructively at GCSE and A Level? 

4. Why is the enquiry process so important?

5. Making and keeping enquiry visible – the essential task

6. How does the enquiry process contribute to work at historical sites and museums? 

Read this core article in full HERE …