[Music] hello historians and welcome to another purple shirt history in this video we'll be going over the coursework handbook this is primarily meant for teachers but students you can also watch it to get a perspective as to what is required for the coursework component which is component number three it's a deep dive so the video will be a bit longer but watch to the end so you don't miss any of the important information within as always if you find is helpful please like comment and subscribe and I'd be more than happy to respond to you in the comments so sit back relax grab your notebook and enjoy the video this is the coursework handbook that can be found on the school support Hub it's for examination 2024 and onward so it's a new update coming on to the table of contents this will be a longer video so we're going to go over all of these parts in detail planning and teaching coursework assignment marking and moderation example candidate coursework and classroom activities the majority of this video will be on the planning because that is what you will really need to concern yourself about it is a very long process the coursework it goes over the course of a semester and it's something that you need to kind of have mild stones for in order to make sure your students finish their work if you don't monitor it closely there is a big risk of students not finishing their work and that ultimately will affect their grade negatively cause a lot of stress for you and be a big problem so hopefully in this video you'll see how to kind of go step by step and have markers that students will need to complete throughout the course of the semester coursework is an optional component you have the choice of doing this component three coursework or paper 4 I don't like coursework to be honest or if to be charitable I like paper 4 more I'm not going to go on a big diet tribe about coursework I think most of it has to do with we did paper for at my old school and then converted over to coursework and it was a bit of a mess and it kind of put us sour taste in my mouth for coursework we were getting very good results with the paper 4 there was a decision made to change over to coursework and the results went down so I felt quite bad for my students that were in that first year of coursework so maybe it just has to do with that experience I had if you do coursework and you love it fantastic I'm I know there's pros to it it gets them to be more ready for University when they have to do long essays it has bibliography research skills how to do Works sited there's a lot to be done that is very positive about cour work but I do think the negatives for me really stick out in my mind in terms of having to rely on students to be responsible at a pretty young age it takes a lot of work on the teachers end to keep them on track making sure that work is original and all that kind of stuff so if you've done both I'd love to hear your comments like I have I've done the paper four and the cour workor you can absolutely disagree with me if you think horor is better than paper 4 it does offer the option of getting one giant component out of the way before the exam season so I think that's probably the best thing that they can get it taken care of and then they can just focus on their paper one and paper two in the springtime for for the you around um May and they don't have to worry about the paper for but there there you go to each his own the coursework will be on your depth study IGCSE is a two-year program or the way I've always taught it has been a two-year program if you have to teach it in one year godspeed because that's a lot to go over in one year under the usual circumstances year 10 or in the US a freshman year year that will be the year that you do the core content so what you'll do on paper one and paper two that whole year is that's a lot to do in the second year year 11 or sophomore year in the US this is when you'll do the depth study and when you'll do coursework do not try to do coursework paper one and paper two in the same year unless it's unavoidable it that isn't a lot to do for the students so we look at this section when to do coursework do it in that second year of the IGCSE course when you're doing your depth study the German depth study is what I'm doing I would not deviate into my coursework during the first year when I'm doing my core content it's just too many things for the kids to juggle I would not recommend doing any cours workor besides mentioning this is what you'll do next year in the first year of IGCSE when you're going over your core content that last bullet point is the most pertinent in this set of bullet points it is unwise to tackle coursework too early in the course because Learners will not be familiar enough with the overall period and will have made little progress in developing their skills and understanding unwise to me is an understatement they're basically starting from zero what they've had in history and or social studies in the previous years won't help them much the beginning of the second year is a good time to start the depth study and the coursework it's more working backwards meaning you'll have to kind of refresh the core content from the previous year when you have mock exams and when you have some assessments and things like that that is something that needs to be done to be comprehensive for the exam but do not bring in the coursework in year one role of the teacher teachers can offer General guidance on how best to approach a course or question but must be careful not to exert too much influence over the candidate's decisions first and foremost don't cheat we are living in the age of chat GPT we are living in the age of a lot of information being available that sounds like it's written by a student it's going to have big ramifications on the coursework I think in the next couple years we shall see what happens it's one of those things that technology and plagiarism and all these things are in play and may affect how cours work is done in the future I have no idea but that's my best guess teachers must be careful to avoid directly addressing the course where question or the issues implicit within it during teaching and learning of the depth study it is also the teacher's responsibility to ensure the work Learners complete is entirely their own work it is up to you to make sure that it is original content that they're producing we used a website called turnitin.com which is an anti-plagiarism [Music] site it is a paid service so you'll need to talk with your school administrator to get the budget for that so it is a real issue that you need to make sure that the work is original they cannot be directly helped by you as the teacher and they must have original content one bit of advice that I would give over a couple years of doing the cour workk now is do the same question every year at the previous score I said there were some difficulties with with the coursework we were changing the question every single year and you don't have to it's completely fine by Cambridge it's not against the rules to do the same question year after year I spoke with a teacher who did the same question for over a decade and it was fine you can't direct the student in answering that question of course it has to be original by the student but you as the teacher if you do the same question or they're there abouts the same question you can continue to hone your resources you can hone your understanding of that particular question and you can make excellent lessons to write coursework for that depth study that you're doing so you'll be a better teacher more prepared instead of having to constantly make new resources and start from scratch every single year with a new coursework question which was something that I experienced and it was a mistake coursework should be no longer than 2,000 words any words Beyond 2,000 words will not be assessed on the length of the coursework yes 2,000 words may seem like a lot for a year 11 student but it should be broken down into 500w chunks I would say for the body paragraphs so three body paragraphs we go over the big themes and this works for any question so you may have a 500-word assignment on the economics of Nazi Germany or Russia or the us or whatever that's a a big bucket where a lot of different things can be stored so that gives a nice general idea of what can be done if there's anything about the question concerning the economy and then another big bucket would be the politics the politics of the country you're talking about if it's Germany there's the Nazi takeover if you're doing Russia it's Lenin and Stalin if it's the US there's a number of different topics there and changes in presidents and political parties controlling Congress or whatever all of this stuff can be seen in a 500-word paragraph that would give them an overview of the political situation so Society can be the third big bucket religion uh ethnicities minorities and majorities how they get along or don't get along oligarchy or autocracy or democracy or whatever all the different things how the society functions the media I had a student do a great project on the film Metropolis by Fritz long which was a kind of which was a gem a movie classic of the viar period And it showed the openness and the experimentation of the viar government which the Nazis hated so things like this you know this can be used later in the coursework it's not directly you're not giving them the question and they're directly answering it but they have a general idea of what's going on in society in the economy in politics in military in gender in you know family life in education and all these types of different things so the body paragraphs are about 500 Words a piece and then you that leaves you 500 words for your introduction and conclusion so you've budgeted out the coursework the citations and stuff like that don't count toward your word count but if you break it down like that into smaller pieces it makes it much less daunting to write 2,000 words than it would be if you just said oh okay by the end of Christmas you guys have to have a 2word essay for me you'll see some Jaws hit the floor it seems very intimidating but if you go at the beginning of the year by the end of the month we're going to write a 500w essay on economics I find economics is a good one to start with because most students understand that money is important to politics and Society yeah who knew these types of economic issues if there's the Great Depression if there's boom times if whatever there's going to be impacts on the society the coursework must be a single question there are a number of examples you can look at this coursework handbook and take from directly you can have a question that you make up yourself and Cambridge can approve it so if you're the head of History you can look into that if you're not you can check it out with your head of History so it should have a single question should not be a multi-park is significance significance is I think I've written it 5,000 times over the past couple years students need to write the word significance for each aspect of the coursework and then in the conclusion the overall significance of what's going on the word is significance the word is significance the word is significance the word is significance the word is significance you can see in constructing a question and in the answers is the command word if you haven't thought of a question or if you don't want to make one up yourself just grab one of these from the hand handbook the following questions would be suitable assess the significance of Lenin in the period 1917 to 1931 so assess how significant was autarchy for the Nazi regime how significant how far do you agree with the statement in the area of civil rights President Kennedy was a very significant figure how far do you agree with this statement there isn't a mandatory referencing system so I use MLA that's what I'm used to that's that's what I'm very familiar with I give the students an excellent website owl. purdue.edu and it's called the online writing lab from the University of Purdue in Indiana Indiana I'm pretty sure it's Indiana yes this is a positive for coursework they learn how to do referencing they learn how to write a bibliography and this is a skill that they will need down the road so I'm putting this firmly in the the pro side of coursework how many sources do the students need to include in their coursework I've heard six is okay but I always like to give more so between 8 and 12 is what I'm looking for so there should be a variety of sources of course they're going to use their textbook or textbooks so they have the core content textbook where there's depth study material in the back the Ben Walsh book and they have the access to history books from Jeff Leighton and Michael Lynch I believe are the two that write the German books for access to history depth study websites there's BBC bsize Spartacus educational Alpha history uh the historical Association websites please be on the lookout for Wikipedia IIA do not let them use Wikipedia as a source please historical articles there's journals I think podcast are excellent and there are great YouTube channels for history as well besides this one of course so Dan snows history hit I think he'll be my shout out for this particular video documentaries yeah BBC TV documentaries the BBC One for the Nazis uh warning from history is is amazing I remember watching that in the '90s and it was uh yeah one of the best things I ever saw at that time so I think that would be great to use as a resource all right marking and moderation you will need to internally mark this so get your whole department together you should ask the head of humanities or whatever line manager you have for some time off or get cover for that particular day and then have an internal moderation session these are the two objectives ao1 and ao2 so what we did is we got the students that were high middle and low up to that point in class made photoc copies for the people marking it and just compared and contrasted and moderated based on the bands and I found that to be a good process they will be externally moderated in the course where handbook goes through significance and how to measure it for pages and Pages breadth and width and significance across time and all these different things you can take your time reading all those pages but this is a key aspect of marking this piece of work you must annotate the coursework pretty heavily so grab a red pen and make sure you're making ample notes for the people like Cambridge to look at as well to justify the marks that you're given so the people at Cambridge will look at all your annotation to make sure that they've reached the level that you've given them and then you need to write a summary at the end the level and Mark awarded should be shown at the end of the answer with summi of comments there are examples that you'll see here in the handbook we'll briefly look at one of the summi of comments and what needs to be done is just to make sure there's consistency around the marking any leniency or severity will be ironed out if three people look at the same piece of work and an agreement can be reached you're not going to have to remark every single page of every single coursework but samples should be remarked until everything is nice and consistent so the coursework of a sample Learners will be externally moderated the sample of work submitted for external moderation should represent the range of marks like we said High middle and low and include a balance of work from candidates across all teaching sets and assessors this is all incredibly important if you're the head of history and you're the person submitting it so you need the candidate numbers for the students uh your Center so that your school's number from Cambridge copy of forms and all this type of stuff so this is for the person who's going to submit it you can read this and see what needs to be done here are some websites where you can find all the forms samples administration of coursework and all that so that's great let's go down to the summit of contents the first paragraph you'll have will just be an overview then the second paragraph will be the positive aspects of the coursework and lastly you'll State the weaknesses of the coursework so you're showing balance and your overall evaluation of the cours work assess the significance of the USA in the 1964 coup in Brazil inline comments as you can see and here is a lot of summi of comments this was a 25 out of 40 level three pros cons overall evaluation last one was Al Capone an important figure in American history again we see comments right from the beginning for the introduction the boy doesn't boy or girl doesn't use as we see right in the beginning there's no annotations you could read this on your own time but down to the summit of comments this is an excellent piece of coursework according to the assessor so we see the focus on Al Capone the significance nicely deployed information balance on the argument little negative marks about organization relevance and focus so this is an excellent essay so it got 38 out of 40 which is a strong level five finally we'll end up with some classroom activities organize all of the names within your depth study so every single person of significance pick them out of the textbooks of any of the websites any of the podcasts any of the documentaries any of the articles that you've come across and make a list and see how significant they are so kids can make a poster if they're very significant the picture of them can be huge and they can have a big write up if they're of smaller significance they can have a little tiny picture or maybe only one or two lines about them but yeah great people Activity one I like that events same thing as the people how much impact do they have how big were they how long lasting were they the example that they give here is somebody selling gingerbread in by Manchester in England being killed versus the arch duuk France Ferdinand of austr Hungary being assassinated and starting World War I so what's the difference in terms of impact of those two murders so you can compare and contrast you can show how events again what do you think had the long EST lasting impact the biggest impact the breadth of the impact all that kind of stuff so I like that activity as well and have students agglomerate the past learning what always keeps coming up in the history books and their research if they see something brought up six seven eight times so if something about the Great Depression is mentioned in every single document about the rise of the Nazis be it a textbook or any other type of historical research yes the Great Depression needs to be mentioned in the coursework yes the Great Depression is incredibly significant Knight of the Long Knives is also highly significant but it may be restricted only to books about the Nazis after 1933 or how they were running the government or the rise of Hitler consolidation of power night of the Long Knives may not be as well known as the Great Depression but it is also in a lot of books so the students will pick them out as significant and it's up to them to see how significant they think it is and explanation cards I love flash cards I mean flash cards are the best especially when you have students who speak English as a second language just to do language skills and to learn facts it's excellent so explanations categories you can check out how to use the flashcards cause and effect consequences categories all these types of things very good stuff