Planning is always best done backwards. Always start by identifying the desired outcomes of courses, beginning with the specification and the subject knowledge, skills and understanding the students need to display at the end of the course. However, that does not mean that the first lesson should start with a photocopy of the specification and an exam board mark scheme! Enthusiasm and curiosity are essential for success so it is crucial to create opportunities for that enthusiasm and curiosity to spark into life. Instead of just launching students into ‘the specification’, first build a sense of engagement by starting every exam unit with a historical puzzle, an in-depth story that hooks students’ attention and fires their passion for the topic.

The stories of individuals often provide excellent hooks. For example, an exam unit on the struggle for Civil Rights for black Americans might start with the story of Jesse Owens and the prejudice and discrimination he faced growing up in the United States. His grandparents had been slaves and his parents were sharecroppers. Jesse returned from the infamous 1936 Olympics in Germany as the greatest athlete in the world yet found that the colour of his skin meant that he could not ride in the front of a bus or live where he wanted. An opening exploration of the life of an individual such as Jesse Owens, Billie Holiday or Paul Robeson can build strong contextual knowledge, introduce students to key themes such as segregation and entrenched attitudes and enable the ‘big picture’ of the course to emerges from one person’s story.

The stories of individuals can continue to be used as the hooks for sections of courses as well as for introducing a whole course. This is especially important if a section of a course seems dominated by legislation, policies or the consequences of a big event such as the English Reformation or the Norman Conquest. History is fundamentally about people but there are times when that can be easy to forget! The attached examples (Resource File, Pages 6&7), demonstrate the use of individuals to introduce what might otherwise by dry subjects.

A second hook is to use brief fictional accounts which introduce situations to be studied. These can introduce and sum up dilemmas and competing pressures and grab students’ attention simply because it is not the approach they are expecting. The attached example from my Tudor Century A level book from 1993 also leads into the introduction of an overall enquiry for a study of the 16th century, providing further exemplification of Principle 1 above.

See Resource File, Page 8

A third type of hook is to make links to the students’ local area. A unit on the First World War could begin with a focus on the local war memorial as such memorials demonstrate that the First World War had a significant impact at local as well as national and global levels.  Local buildings of various degrees of grandeur could be used in the same way and do not need to be visited to fulfil this role – who lived at X? what kind of person might have lived at Y? What impact did it have on the local community? What does this building tell us about …?

War memorials and buildings are examples of the potential of objects and images as hooks, at the same time using those visual images to build a sense of period and help students visualise the people and world they are studying. Such objects raise a host of questions for students to discuss and suggest answers to – what kind of person owned, used or held this? what skills were needed to create it? What does it tell us about life at the time etc etc.

See Resource File, Page 9