The History Curriculum at Mounts Bay Academy seeks to inspire the next generation of historians. Substantive and disciplinary knowledge are taught to students through enquiry at Key Stage 3 in preparation for the rigour of the two year GCSE. We believe that successful preparation for the GCSE will enable our students the opportunity to take their love of history further. We have chosen both our Year 9 KS3 topics and GCSEs to reflect the requirements of our students. As a provincial school in the far west of Cornwall we feel it’s our duty to enable students to become inclusive and truly global citizens, sympathetic to the historic diversity that they do not experience on a daily basis. We teach migration and the people in Year 9 as a vehicle to widen student horizons as to what it means to be British. In addition, we teach study the lives and traditions of the Native American Plains’ Indians to allow our students to explore the results of culturally ignorant encounters. We teach Tudors and Stuarts to allow our students to understand the complex relationship between Church, Crown and Parliament. We close Year 9 with a study of persecution in the 20th Century, allowing students to explore the concept of similarity and differences when cultures collide.
We implement our curriculum via our Firefly VLC. This allows for a blended approach to learning where we believe students can reach their potential in and out of the classroom. All of our units of study start with an Essential Question which forms the enquiry. Knowledge organisers are used to provide students with an overview of a unit’s substantive knowledge. To ensure that students understand the material deeply we use a variety of didactic and independent learning approaches. Technology use is maximised with iBook resources being extensively used in both KS3 and KS4. Students are given clear learning objectives for each lesson and scaffolded to reach mastery via solo taxonomy learning outcomes. Learning in school is supported by a menu of consolidation and flipped learning opportunities. Feedback on students’ learning follows a Feedback, Feedforward and Question (where appropriate) model. Students are encouraged to reflect on where they have demonstrated High Performance Learning attributes and disciplinary concepts are highlighted to students. Finally, we have introduced an acronym to our students to facilitate them using historical evidence more effectively – STEPD.
To assess the impact of our curriculum we assess learning rigorously. All humanities subjects follow the faculty assessment policy to inform teacher understanding of student progress. In each learning quadmester students will complete:
The impact of the learning journey is communicated, and the students can assess the impact of the curriculum via the Learning Maps.