Case Study Teaching and Learning Robert Bollard

Case: I began my placement at a Prep to Year 9 College in a Year 7 class. Upon

learning my background as an historian, my mentor immediately asked whether I
knew anything about Ancient China and, when I responded in the affirmative,
suggested I take their Humanities lessons. He later showed me a document with
a bare sketch of a unit involving a few lessons on Ancient China followed by a
three week project where the students would research a topic of their choice
related to Ancient Egypt, Greece or Rome and produce a website.
Only one lesson plan had been written, involving a video regarding the Terracotta
Warriors (the only thing any of the Year 7 teachers knew about Ancient China). So
I set about writing about three different lesson plans and delivering them to a
range of the Year 7 classes. This all went well and I followed up with a
brainstorming class regarding Ancient Greece, Egypt and Rome to prepare the
students for the task of picking a topic for their report.
All so far so good; I thoroughly approved of a general strategy of engaging the
students and getting them to choose their own research topic. But I noticed a
problem the moment the students began to work on their reports. They had been
given an instruction sheet prepared by one of the Year 7 teachers which required
them to address two questions which were clearly lifted straight form the
AUSVELS Curriculum: the role of a significant prominent individual and the
impact of geographical factors on the development of the civilisation.
I raised with my mentor my concern that not all the topics that the students had
chosen would lend themselves to addressing these criteria (which I had, in any
case, already covered in some of the lessons). He agreed that I could tell the
students to ignore the two criteria.
The students worked on their assignments over the next three weeks, and my
mentor asked me to mark them. He handed me a rubric. To be honest I hadnt
even thought about designing a rubric myself and realised immediately that
there was a problem. It included the two criteria I had told the students they
could ignore. I raised this problem but was told that nothing could be done about
it as the assessment was standardised across Year 7.
Nothing makes me more upset than this sort of basic injustice. It was immensely
frustrating to be forced to inflict it myself a sour note at the end of such a good
experience.
Commentary
A number of issues are raised by this experience. At a basic practical level, Ive
learned a lesson about preparation, about working as part of a team and about
how schools operate. Hopefully it should be easy to avoid such problems in the
future by making sure Im on top of all elements of a unit Im teaching at the
beginning.

It raises, however, a whole series of wider questions. One is about assessment.

Assessment to a large extent determines what is taught. If there is a test,
teachers teach to it. VCE teachers teach to the curriculum items and questions
they know their students will face in SACs and exams.
All of this can be a problem for teachers who want to teach in new ways, but one
advantage of teaching at a Year 7 level is that there is less concern with meeting
external assessment requirements and hence greater scope for autonomy for
teachers.
What then do history teachers want to teach? The obvious answer might appear
to be history which is usually understood to be a bunch of facts about things
that happened in the past. Those more familiar with the academic subject will be
aware that theres more to it than that analysis of why things happened and
understanding of their significance to the present, for instance.
My approach however does not primarily focus on any of this and I have been
influenced in this by my own evolution from a child who discovered a fascination
with history to an adult historian. Only a minute fraction of my historical
knowledge has been taught to me in a class, and this includes, not only the
history I learned through private reading as an adult, but the history I learned
when I was an actual school student.
I have observed on many occasions how people who had never studied history
sometimes can develop a fascination with a particular topic like the customer in
my brother in laws restaurant who was obsessed with the American Civil War, or
the 12 year old Vietnamese boy I was hired to tutor in English when I was an
honours student who knew more about Greek mythology than I did due to a
video game he played.
The point is that if they are sufficiently fascinated with a topic people, and
children even more so, can acquire factual knowledge at an astonishing rate. In
depth analysis is not automatic and usually requires guidance, but that guidance
is going to be much easier if you are dealing with an engaged student who has
acquired a grasp of the historical framework within which any analysis has to be
set (its not that facts arent important in other words so much as how they are
acquired).
The value of the basic structure of the unit I was asked to teach was that it
maximised the chance of students finding that inspiration. In the lessons about
Ancient China my strongest focus was on making the material interesting,
bringing in the topic of human sacrifice in Shang Dynasty tombs for instance not
primarily due to its historical relevance (it prefigured the Terracotta Warriors) but
because I guessed the students would find it gruesomely fascinating. The second
focus was on developing their research skills by such exercises as a Tomb
Raider lesson where they were shown pictures of strange objects that
archeologists had discovered in tombs and asking them to find out what they
were.

Stimulated by this, and by the brainstorming class, they were unleashed to do

their projects with, as inevitably happens, mixed results. You could tell the
students who had not been successfully engaged. They mostly chose to do Greek
Gods because they had spent the previous term reading Percy Jackson and it was
the path of least resistance.
There were, however, some great success stories. One of the weakest students in
class, who was at a Grade 3 level of literacy, was given permission to do his
report as a poster rather than creating a website because he struggled with
infotech. Amazingly, for someone who struggled to spell single syllable words
with the Roman alphabet, he chose to do hieroglyphics as his subject and
produced a creditable poster. At the other end of the scale, one of the strongest
students in the class, grappled with issues of analysis that would challenge most
tertiary students explaining why slavery was central to the Roman economy.
She also traced our knowledge of the life of Spartacus to its original classical
source, Livys life of Crassus!
A close look at the Victorian Curriculum reveals a focus on two types of things
that students are expected to acquire: content knowledge and skills. In terms of
both their hierarchy of importance and the logical order in which they are
acquired I would argue that above both these categories in importance is student
engagement followed by skills, with content knowledge last. The importance of
engagement is widely recognised by educational theorists (see for instance:
Zyngier, 2008; Cumming, 1996; Christie, 2005). Yet for all the recognition of its
importance, there is a problem that the task of ensuring student engagement
appears to remain a consideration only for determining how teaching is delivered
and not what. The development of curriculum content tends to be driven by
considerations other than educational practice or pedagogical theory, including
political considerations, differing agendas of nation building and panics about
falling standards. (For a discussion of all these issues with the development of
the national curriculum and the problematic of how it relates to actual classroom
teaching see: Luke, 2010.) Teachers are then asked to make their lessons
engaging while at the same time adhering to a curriculum which was designed
without consideration of student engagement.
The question then is what the implications are of this for assessment. At a
general level it is clearly problematic given the inevitable role curriculum plays in
determining not only what is taught but how it is assessed. This can be seen both
in everyday teaching, most obviously at the pointy end of VCE, as well as in
the literature regarding assessment (one example of this is Blankenship, 1985,
but a search under Google Scholar for curriculum based assessment reveals a
veritable mountain of literature). With regards to the case discussed here, it was
clearly more important to assess the students projects on their own terms rather
than forcing the students to shoe-horn into them content to match what is, to be
honest, a rather arbitrary selection of historical subtopics in the curriculum. This
is quite apart from the serious concerns I have, as an historian about
emphasising the role of significant individuals it smacks of the great man
view of history. Teachers have to make compromises with regards to the fights

they fight, what elements of the structures they work within they are willing to
challenge and what they accept. Despite coming from an academic environment
where I am on record in peer-reviewed literature arguing passionately for history
from below(see: Bollard,2005) I was nevertheless happy to conform to the
curriculum requirements in this case to the extent of teaching about significant
historical individuals, but putting this at the centre of assessment is another
question.
How then does one assess engagement? You can do so either informally though
observation or indirectly through the evidence of the work the students do. When
the student who normally struggles to complete basic tasks and has a literacy
level several grades below the rest of the class produced an impressive poster on
hieroglyphics there was no doubt that he was engaged. When a normally good
student produced a basic website with a list of Greek Gods and a short paragraph
for each, it was evident that engagement had not occurred. There will be no
place on the rubric for engagement as such, but it will be implicit in all the other
things that are assessed.
What needed to be assessed was the depth of engagement with the topic
evident in the students reports. Did they simply record a range of interesting
facts or did they ask and attempt to answer questions that demanded some
analysis? The most useful element of the rubric turned out to be the one
requiring they access some primary sources. This led to some of the most
important learning outcomes: the student mentioned above who accessed a
classical source (Livys life of Crassus), the student who used the opening lines of
the Iliad to illustrate a project on the Trojan War, or even the more mundane
discussions with students about how best to illustrate their entries on the Greek
Gods whether to use a cartoon or a renaissance painting of the God or an
actual representation from the time. Assessment here addressed content, but
only as an indicator of engagement and skills.

Blankenship, C. S., 1985, Using Curriculum-Based Assessment Data to Make

Instructional Decisions, Exceptional Children, vol. 52, no. 3, 233-238
Bollard, R., 2005, The solidarity was misapplied: the historiography of the Great
Strike of 1917 in: The Past is Before Us: Proceedings of the Ninth National
Labour History Conference 2005, (Eds: Greg Patmore, John Shields and Nikola
Balnave) ASSLH: Sydney, 2005, 245-252.
Christie, P., 2005 Towards an Ethics of Engagement in Education in Global
Times, Australian Journal of Education, Vol. 49, no. 3, 238-250.
Cumming, J., 1996, From alienation to engagement: Opportunities for reform in
the middle years of schooling: Key findings and recommendations, Australian
Curriculum Studies Association, Canberra.

Luke, A., 2010, Will the Australian national curriculum up the intellectual ante in
classrooms? Curriculum Perspectives (Journal Edition),30(3) Accessed via QUT
ePrints: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/32392/ , 31/7/2016.
Zyngier, D., 2008, (Re)conceptualising student education: Doing education not
doing time, Teaching and Teacher Education, Vol. 24, Issue 7.