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Different approaches to teaching and learning In many cases, your trainees’ own experience of learning history will have been dominated by work with text, with little attention to visual or physical dimensions. Similarly, they may have had little experience of learning collaboratively in small groups or pairs. They may, therefore, be inclined to provide a limited diet for the pupils they will teach. In recent years considerable attention has been given to analysing how different people learn (see Unit 7.1) in the belief that teachers should adjust the way they teach to match these preferences. While there are debates about the relevance and validity of some of these approaches for the history classroom, you will want to help trainees form their own judgement and to develop a suitably wide range of teaching styles. Whatever shades of opinion exist about ‘learning preferences’, you will want to help trainees realise that there is more to teaching than just ‘telling’. Activity 9.2.1 is designed to help you find a simple but effective way of raising this issue by investigating what helps pupils to recall prior learning. It could be used alongside Activity 2.1.2. This unit cannot tackle all the various approaches to teaching and learning that are currently being promoted. Instead it will take as a focus what is often known as the VAK (Visual, Auditory and Kinaesthetic) approach. Activity 9.2.2 suggests one way of illustrating and evaluating how recent attention to VAK learning preferences can influence planning and teaching (see references in unit 7 for critiques of learning styles). It is based on a primary school history lesson. At appropriate points in the course, you could also use secondary based video extracts (e.g. from the National Strategy) and focused observations in school based training to stimulate discussion of how effectively teachers vary their teaching and to introduce new teaching strategies. The use of purposeful role play has become more widely accepted in history teaching in recent times. It may be worth giving particular attention to this as an in depth example of more active learning. It can be used to help pupils to grasp important concepts (e.g. about social relationships, different perspectives or the motivation of individuals or groups). Activity 9.2.3 suggests a way of investigating aspects of role play in the context of a university-based session and stresses the need for a clear, valid teaching intention. You may wish to devise a similar in depth session on making the most of the visual dimension in teaching history. You will want to help trainees build a wide and varied range of teaching activities and to give them confidence to create their own original but purposeful approaches. You can model a healthy variety of activities in your own teaching of the course, and work with mentors to ensure that trainees are seeing and applying a suitable range of approaches in school. Activity 9.2.4 may help you to introduce an overview of a range of teaching strategies that are broadly matched with visual, auditory or kinaesthetic learning preferences – always accepting that this threefold division is far from universally accepted. Some would argue that history remains largely a literary subject involving complex, abstract ideas and that there are limits on how far it can be grasped through, for example, kinaesthetic learning.
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