The "History Mysteries" lessons are designed as stand-alone projects which each last 3-4 hours.
Through engaging historical topics, they teach skills of problem formulation, deductive reasoning, independent research, groupwork and structured writing.
There is a standard teacher lesson plan and student record sheet / markscheme for each activity.
How do they work?
Students are presented with a "starter image" and a brief roleplay - neither of which comes with any explanation.
Based on these, the class then comes up with a series of preliminary questions for investigation (e.g. "Who is this?", "Why did they...?", "When did...?", "What is...?")
The students are then presented with more images to help formulate fresh questions, amend existing ones or even forming provisional answers.
This question formulation / resolution process then continues with a series of information slips shared amongst the class in groups.
Finally, the class settles upon the most important questions to investigate and each student produces a written report which is graded against a standardised markscheme.
The "History Mysteries" serve a number of very useful purposes:
They develop important skills of question formulation, deduction, reasoning skills, groupwork and structured writing.
As "stand alone" projects they are a great way of adding variety into a scheme of work with a minimum of fuss.
They can be used with any year group and ability range: each investigation automatically expands in scope depending on the questions and research abilities of each student.
The allow the teacher to cover interesting topics which don't otherwise neatly "fit" into an existing scheme of work.
