From my experience in the history classroom, students have similar problems expressing themselves clearly & coherently in a historical writing style. In the past I was quick to prescribe extended writing as an activity without explicitly teaching it in a careful sequence of logical steps. I have assumed that students will pick up historical writing skills through some sort of osmosis. However, extended writing is one of the hardest tasks we can ask students to do. And my own anecdotal evidence suggests that very few students become good historical writers on their own.

Jan 17th: This webinar will cover practical strategies to improve our students historical writing abilities at Junior Cycle. The ideology behind this will be to improve historical writing at JC level as this should provide a solid foundation & translate to Senior Cycle.

Jan 24th: This webinar will provide teachers with an extensive breakdown of how to write LC history paragraphs and how to use the marking scheme to maximize the marks students can pick up. Furthermore, Lee will cover how to plan for essays at macro and micro levels to enable students to develop their historical writing ability. Additionally, the webinar will provide teachers with a student assessment plan for LC History that aims to scaffold their ability to write full essays. Lee will provide multiple sample answers throughout.

Jan 31st: This webinar will provide teachers with practical strategies to help students understand a wide range of historical texts with technical vocabulary & high density of facts by guiding them to identify patterns & structures of the text. Additionally, Lee will share multiple templates of guided readings to be used in both JC and LC classrooms with explicit exemplars of each completed by students.