Thanks Celia. It is great to see what others are doing with Year 9 pupils related to WWI as it seems to be a popular topic for this year group. We focussed on whether the war had a positive or negative impact on human progress – which was quite a tricky concept for the pupils to get their heads around, especially as they were given considerably more freedom over what they investigated in order to answer the overall inquiry question than they were used to. It took a good number of them several lessons to realise that the ‘I can sit and do very little because the teacher will just tell me the answer in the end anyway’ approach was not going to work on this occasion. If you ask me, the fact that most of them made that discovery and produced work that fitted the requirements by the deadline, is an indicator that the inquiry was a success. It remains to be seen what the feedback from the historians is – but that might have to wait until school reopens.
View “War and regression inquiry journal” here.