I am a historian currently working as teacher of History and Politics at Brooke House College in Market Harborough. This website will serve as the place where I will upload lesson plans and other files reflecting my current and previous work under the specifications of different examination boards. In this way I hope that it will be possible for me to make accessible to colleagues and to everyone who would be interested files that have helped me in my work. They will be grouped under different headings corresponding to the different examination boards I have followed: the IBDP, CIE’s A Level and IGCSE, Edexcel’s A Level and OCR’s GCSE; to them, I will also add some work on Oxford University’s History Aptitude Test and on CIE’s Pre-U (with some more explanation attached).
Before I have continued further I would like to make clear the following. I am starting to make accessible the rather numerous files related to my work for CIE (2007-2014) and for other boards because they can prove what I have done in class until now. They will also make clear – hopefully – what has been and what is my understanding of the job of the history teacher, independently of the board where he/she is preparing pupils. It will be good form still to state this understanding already here, in a more or less succinct manner. The history teacher should, in my opinion, do his best to expand and deepen the knowledge of his pupils and in this way both educate them seriously and equip them with what is usually described as the necessary skills to sit their examinations. Here, ‘serious education’ corresponds to the following – not only studying in detail all important particulars that happened during a certain period of time in a specified place but also understanding, on the basis of concrete examples from at least two roughly similar contemporary societies, the dialectical relationship between continuity and change. This, in turn, requires taking into account everything that can be classified as ‘factor’ – starting with natural resources, passing through the economy, the political system and so on, and reaching what is, according to me, the most important part: individual people. As I hope will become clear from the file uploaded this evening, the primum movens of history are humans.