Fairfield’s Mr Warner-Meanwell leads on History webinars

Well done to our very own Mr Warner-Meanwell and teacher Paula Lobo-Worth who, during a series of four webinars, will show how they support students in reading and writing history. Writing history is hard, and motivating students to read long texts can be difficult after recent Covid lockdowns. Dan and Paula will demonstrate, with plenty of practical examples, how they have helped their students to meet the challenges in reading and writing history. They haven’t done this by bolting-on generic activities or churning out cookie-cutter task sheets; rather, Dan and Paula show that history can serve literacy best by being itself.

The webinars will begin with a discussion of how to motivate teachers and students to wrestle with the challenges of reading and writing history: by choosing engaging and compelling stories for students to ‘live inside’, for example, and by rehearsing arguments in speech. In the second webinar, Dan and Paula will show how they use modelling in their lesson sequences: by using historical scholarship and historical fiction, by drawing attention to grammar, metaphor and structure, and by choosing words carefully to ‘let the linguistic release the conceptual.’

The third webinar is called ‘moving on up’: Mr Warner-Meanwell will discuss how to draw on students’ knowledge of sentence construction and grammar at Key Stage 2 in order to help Year 7 students hit the ground running at secondary school, and Paula will discuss successful strategies to help post-16 students make a success of their essays, and to handle sources and interpretations with confidence. The final webinar will focus on how to embed successful strategies to support literacy into the curriculum by ‘making it routine’: Paula discusses the importance of preparing students to access long texts in medium and long-term planning, and how to plan for successful essays by avoiding endless exam practice and rooting literacy in a diverse range of puzzling and engaging enquiry questions.

Mr Warner-Meanwell will end the webinar series by showcasing an example lesson featuring a wide range of the strategies covered in the webinar series, from vocabulary-based starters to oral rehearsal.

Well done to Mr Warner-Meanwell and Paula Lobo-Worth for being such pioneers in their field.