Staff Reflections: Developing Nuanced Arguments In KS3 History

By Corinna Matlis

In asking the question of how to help students develop complex, nuanced arguments in their key stage three writing, I have been considering two options:  that students need more support with structuring their writing or that students need more support with deepening their knowledge.  

In the past term, in two of my key stage three history classes, I did assessments that included robust scaffolding for writing.  In both of the assessments, the answers I received were clearly written, well-organised and showed knowledge of the topic. But they were not in general nuanced or complex arguments. Thus, it began to seem that writing scaffolds were very helpful to students (the student-voice Google quizzes that I did after the assessments confirmed this), but that they do not sort out the problem of needing to help students come up with and articulate complex arguments.  

In trying to plan for my next steps, I turned to the history teaching journal, Teaching HIstory, where I read an article by a teacher who had given her year 9 class a nearly identical assessment to the one I had given my class and had come up with nearly identical answers.  Her solution to the question of how to nuance her class' arguments was to deepen their knowledge with more time spent on knowledge acquisition and less time spent artificially moving through Bloom’s taxonomy in each lesson.  The more I read in Teaching History, the more it seemed clear that most history teachers find that depth of knowledge is the first step toward complex, nuanced arguments, and so I’ve set out to try to make this a reality.  

In the coming weeks and terms, I am aiming to focus on the story of what my students need to know, letting them develop greater depth of knowledge before asking them to make connections between different parts of that knowledge. In our Humanities department meeting, I mined my colleagues’ ideas about developing nuance.  Although for many of us developing the ability to write nuanced arguments is nearly ineffable – it’s something that you are just able to do at a certain point – we kept coming back to the idea that the more you know, the easier it becomes. 

With this in mind, I’m planning to softly rethink how I structure my lessons.  For instance, rather than moving quickly through information gathering onto questions of explaining links between different bits of information and then assessment of how those different parts compare, I might spend more of the lessons developing deep knowledge and save the assessment for the next lesson.  As an example, in a lesson about England’s defeat of the Spanish Armada, I’m inclined to focus first on how it affected England and Elizabeth, then on how it affected Spain and Philip II, and then I will ask the students to explain how Elizabeth’s power at home and in the world  changed as a result of the defeat. In other words, the first two learning objectives would be descriptive, but they would prepare students for a much more complex attack on the third learning objective, when they need to explain, and perhaps even assess how far Elizabeth’s reign had changed over time.  

I’ll have to report back on how this goes, and in the meantime, if anyone reading has thoughts on how to deepen students’ knowledge and ability to make complex connections, please come talk to me!