Disrupted History

A Refreshed Perspective on History TeachingThis Teacher’s Journal: Blog Post 2 | January 30, 2025

The first week back in the classroom after my long sabbatical has been somewhat exhausting, yet deeply affirming. While I worked solidly on my research during my time of work last semester, I ensured that I did indeed have an appropriate long service leave (LSL) break. I’ve found it interesting to be returning to fulltime classroom teaching after having enjoyed copious amounts of unstructured time for about 20 consecutive weeks! (Schools are heavily structured spaces rigidly governed by bells At times, it’s been hard not to think of some scenes of John Cleese’s 1986 film, Clockwise.)

That said, I’ve enjoyed the return to work. Stepping back into face-to-face teaching has reinforced just how much my appreciation of history education has evolved through my studies. More than ever, I find myself drawn to focus on the purpose and values of history teaching. These foci encourage me to reflect daily on not just what I teach but how and why I teach it.

One of my major focuses this week has been implementing my seasonal analogy for flipped teaching, a framework I previously outlined in this blog. The seasonal metaphor proposes that I see values in structuring the ebb and flow of learning in my classes into distinct ‘seasons’.

This week, I worked to embed this analogy into my Microsoft Class Teams modules, ensuring that the learning experience aligns with my broader research into technology-infused historical inquiry and student agency. This week, I developed the first two modules for each of my classes, carefully designing them to reflect the rhythm of historical learning as a dynamic and evolving process. Module 1 of my classes corresponds to the “New Leaf Season” of my seasonal metaphor. Module 2 corresponds with the second season “A Season of Deep Green Leaves”.

Reframing Historical Narratives & Inquiry-Based Learning

A central theme in my teaching this week has been challenging traditional narratives and fostering inquiry-based learning.

My teaching of Year 9 History is typical of the approaches I take for all classes. This class are studying the Australian Curriculum v9 “Making and Transforming the Nation” unit. My teaching commences with the use of ‘flipped learning’ video lectures. When creating these lectures, I utilise Microsoft PowerPoint and ScreenPal screen recording software. In these lectures I address the Australian curriculum required yet present Australian history through multiple lenses, contrasting traditional celebratory narratives with some initial attention to First Nations’ Australia. This is a connection to prior learning of students. I pay attention to the development of frontier conflict and tie Frontier Wars experiences to local areas within the lived experience of students. My teaching identifies marginalised and the exclusion of Indigenous voices within the traditional Australian history narrative. My flipped video lectures also introduce seven additional conceptual themes in Australian history – such as race, gender, class, sectarianism, nationalism and empire. These will be explored in upcoming flipped learning video lectures over coming weeks.

Flipped Learning & Seasonal Analogy

My Microsoft Class Teams, Class OneNote and Classwork modules reflect my thinking on a seasonal model of flipped learning for history. ScreenPal video lectures frontload key content. This will allow me greater class time for historical thinking activities including analysis and evaluation of sources, student-led discussion, writing, and synthesis. This approach embodies Mazur and Bergmann’s flipped pedagogy principles and aligns with constructivist theories.

Some quick reflections on the lived experience of classes this week

In the first week of classes for a school year, it’s rare to teach a full timetable. For example, I met with my Year 12 Modern History class once (in the second last lesson of Friday afternoon … on the day before their ‘formal’. For American audiences, a formal is the equivalent of a a ‘prom’.) Once class of year 9s had 3 of their four allocated weekly lessons held this week. My other year 9 class and my year 10 class had 2 of the for allocated lessons. The teaching-learning experience of week 1 – part of my New Leaf Season 🌿 – reflected this reduced class time aspect of school life.

For all classes, a key part of my teaching was to begin to build relationships of trust and rapport with my students. I introduced students to use of Teams Classwork which will be our ‘one stop shop’ for their courses. They were able to access my unit overviews and a range of resources in that space. (You can see images of this space as it was this week in The Scrapbook.)

Most classes this week were introduced to the Teams Search Coach app which is embedded into each subject / year level group’s Class Teams General channel. A demonstration of Search Coach was especially well received by my year Modern History students who immediately saw benefits in the NewsGuard ratings and evaluations of websites which are inbuilt as a function of Search Coach. The year 12s also revealed by a ‘straw poll’ show of hands that the entire class make use of Generative AI in their studies. While a range of platforms are used, every student made use of the free version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Few, if any students, have specific training or guidance in their use of these tools. Microsoft Copilot is our school’s preferred model for students. It is used on some occasions by some students. Students were largely unaware of Google Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude. Activities have been designed for the year 12 to introduce them to these platforms.

All classes this week, were introduced – or reintroduced (if I have already taught the student) – to the basics of flipped learning approaches. The basic premises were outlined. All classes, with the exception of my year 12s, were given an opportunity to practice the approach under supervision in an “in-flip” lasting at least approximately 20 minutes of a lesson. During this time, students engaged with video lectures I had created. They had autonomy and agency over all controls of delivery of the video in terms of playback speed, pausing / rewind / skip forward functions. When interacting with the videos students were required to begin developing individual unit mind maps (or ‘concept maps’ – I’m not precise in my wording of this) using styluses in a section of their OneNote. Students were introduced to the metacognition skills involved in the process of building their own mind map. The mind map construction exercise is an example of students grappling with and ill-defined project in a safe and supported, scaffolded manner. Scaffolding was both hard and soft. Students saw and engaged with a range of example mind maps which indicated to students some success criteria – essentially, ‘what a good one looked like‘. These examples were draw from previous students in a variety of different years levels. They indicated a development of student ability and skill over time.

A final feature of requirements for each class this week was for every student I teach to respond on Flip video – at home as homework – to a Teams Assignment. The video required every student to introduce themselves to me as a learner. The prompt for their 3-minute videos required them to share their ‘history with History’. This entailed open ended response to three prompts:

1. “What’s been going well for you in History? What’s been successful? What have you liked? What’s interested you? What’s been enjoyable? Valuable?”
2. “What’s not gone so well? What do you want to work on? What do you find challenging? What do you struggle with?”
3. “What do you want to work on next? How can I (your teacher) help you?”

My homework for each class is to watch and respond to these videos. All responses will be through Microsoft Class Teams in a safe and authorised school space in accordance with the school’s acceptable use policies and codes of conduct. These videos help me to ‘know my learners and how they learn’. They will inform my practice in coming months.

Developing Historical Agency Through AI & Digital Tools

A major goal of my research is to foster student agency through AI and digital historical inquiry. These elements are coming up in future lessons, where students will engage in the development of a class Playlab.AI chatbot tutor. It is anticipated that students will complete a Teams based assignment that requires students to apply the skills of source evaluation to the process of selection a secondary source for integration into the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) documents used by a Playlab.AI app (or bot). This assignment will be set in Class Teams within the next two weeks for my Year 9 “Making the Nation” class. This is an important tie to my focus on AI in history teaching, a core aspect of my PhD research. AI-supported inquiry tasks will soon be integrated to align with research (such as that of Pratschke) on generative AI in education, fostering personal agency in learning.

At this stage of my teaching setup, I have also ensured that students will engage in collaborative activities to which encourage and model civic and global agency in historical research. The use of digital platforms will encourage participatory historical practice, reinforcing history’s role as a tool for action and transformation in upcoming activities.

Student Voice and Digital Interaction: “Your History With History”

To give students agency and voice regarding their learning, I assigned a Flip video introduction task across all my classes in week 1. In this task, students recorded a short video message about their experiences with history, their challenges, and their goals. I will personally respond to each video, creating a dialogic, student-centered learning experience. This supports student agency, digital literacy, and relational pedagogy, reinforcing a participatory and reflective approach to history education.

Bridging Research and Classroom Practice

This week has reaffirmed the intersections between my teaching practice and my PhD research. Key themes from my literature review – such as Cutrara’s reparative history, Wineburg’s historical thinking, and observations (by Mollick, Pratschke, and others) reagarding the development of AI-enhanced pedagogy – are now directly shaping my classroom experiences. The seamless integration of flipped learning, AI tools, and inquiry-driven history pedagogy is bringing what seemed at times a disconnected and/or abstract research into concrete, student-centered practice.

Looking ahead to coming weeks, my focus will be on refining the effectiveness of these strategies. Are students engaging more effectively as a result of my use of the seasonal model? Are digital tools enhancing, rather than replacing, critical thinking? And most importantly, how can I continue to create spaces where students see history as a living, breathing discipline with the power to shape their understanding of the present and future?

So far, my students appeared positive and engaged in the approaches to teaching I am taking. While it is, for many, as deviation from what they have experienced previously, they appear to both understand and appreciate the logic of my approach and pedagogy. In coming weeks, data generated via Teams Insights may give further information for my consideration.

This first week back has left me tired but with a renewed sense of why I teach history – not just as a subject, but as a means of empowering students with knowledge, critical inquiry skills, and agency. And that, more than anything, is why this work matters.

Note: A photo-journal has been added to this site to support my journaling. You can view my photo-journal via The Scrapbook.

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