Lucy expressed this at its most extreme: 'students need to be aware of exactly that nothing is essentially, necessarily true'.
Core historical skills
If five of our schools emphasized the importance of 'life skills', the three remaining teachers could be described as promoting 'core historical skills' in particular. This is, in fact, too crude a distinction; all eight teachers would argue that they developed both. But it became apparent when analysing the data that three teachers - all of whom teach in high achieving schools -emphasize the skills necessary to getting better at history more than the others. For example, Rachel felt that:
At the end of the day the baseline is, am I enabling those children to do good history? And I think that is, to be honest, the most important question that anybody should ask walking in a classroom … and history to me is, setting questions, finding out, coming across the problems of methodology ... and patterns being thrown up that then raise more finding out.
Similarly Mark had this to say:
The things that we're concentrating on particularly - again, this is where they cut across each other in KS3 and GCSE - ability to explain why things happen, the causation side of it. That again is a crucial element, the 'why' questions which dominate both still, if they go on to GCSE and indeed A-level. To recognise changes and continuities.To appreciate evidence in the way historical evidence works, and the way it can vary and be used in a variety of different ways.To empathise with people in the past. To organise their ideas in an historical way, to be able to present information in a way which is understandable to the rest of the group, and so on. Those sorts of things.
Interestingly, both teachers, while placing the greatest emphasis on 'core historical skills' because it's 'what historians do', were also among the most critical of 'sourcework' which they regarded as a necessary, but rather dull, part of history. Mark feels that 'preparation work on evidence' is not 'the most enjoyable thing...it's quite demanding and not always the history they really want to do'. Similarly, Rachel admits to 'fighting shy' of sourcework: 'The kids hate it, which is probably a reflection of how we feel about it.'