Raising performance in history teaching while improving secondary students’ essay writing skills

Abstract

This paper describes an attempt to improve secondary students’ essay writing performance during history lessons. Experienced history teachers intuitively know that stimulating pedagogy will probably result in better quality student essays. However the authors of this paper wanted to see if case-study research evidence can support or question this hypothesis. It aimed to improve students’ historical understanding in history lessons through focusing on the processes of essay writing, as normally it is only after writing an essay that students receive feedback in the form of a mark or grade. In the case-study the researchers wanted to create a situation where they involved students, through a range of teaching activities, in the gradual development of their essay writing before final composition. At the same time the case-study firmly kept in mind the time constraints of real classroom situations. The case-study also raises the impact of dialogic teaching based on oracy, discussion, debate and cooperative problem solving with the teacher taking a central role in guiding and supporting interactive learning. The contrast was stark, between the lessons in which students passively assimilated knowledge that the teacher transmitted and the interactive lessons in which the students were challenged and played an active part in developing their ideas and historical understanding. The quality of the essays resulting from the transmission mode of pedagogy and the interactive mode supported the hypothesis that the case-study was testing: there was a major improvement in the quality of essay writing from the interactive lessons.