Innovation and Excellence Grants celebrate their success in practice - Volume 1

Innovation of history teacher training – HistoryTeacher project at the Institute of History, Faculty of Arts, MUNI.

Our project for the development of excellent degree programmes is only in its first quarter. However, the autumn months of 2023 have already been filled with activities, some of which have already been concluded, some of which are continuing in the next three semesters of the project.

In late July and early August 2023, Dr. Václav Kaška participated in a three-day online course, Intro to Reading Like a Historian and Beyond the Bubble Institute, created and led by members of the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG). The SHEG group is one of the world leaders in the field of history didactics and inspires some Czech history didacticians and secondary school history teachers. The course contained both practical and theoretical aspects, and in three specific lessons the trainers showed how to work with sources in history lessons and develop key competences and historical thinking of learners, as well as how to evaluate such work. SHEG is one of the platforms that the current curricular revision of history in the Czech Republic (major revision of the RVP) is inspired by.

In November 2023, a group of four students from the History for Secondary Schools programme visited a secondary school and a university in Vienna. Although the event was a one-day event, it had a very rich, varied and above all inspiring programme aimed at exchanging experiences and sharing good practice. The morning was devoted to shadowing, listening and discussion with teachers and students at the Gymnasium Am Augarten. We were present for three history lessons, during which each teacher used different types of didactic methods and practices. Among other things, it was beneficial to find out how they work with inclusion (learners with a migration background, learners with hearing impairments), as well as to compare curricula, teaching materials, teaching practices and material resources of schools in the Czech Republic and Austria. In the afternoon we had a seminar on the didactics of history led by Bernhard Trautwein, who was also one of the teachers at the grammar school we visited. The seminar, which focused on the preparation and evaluation of student-prepared teaching materials and on micro-teaching, was a great opportunity to compare the preparation of future history teachers at MUNI and UNI Wien. Finally, we debated with Austrian students and Bernhard Trautwein about Austrian and Czech education and especially about history teaching, comparing the strengths and weaknesses, similarities and differences of both systems. We have tentatively agreed to establish closer cooperation in the form of mutual visits, which both sides consider desirable and beneficial. The experience from Austria was presented to the other students of the degree programme with a rich discussion.

Part of the innovation of didactic seminars is to deepen the contact with school practice and at the same time to keep up with the latest trends in history didactics. In this field, several lessons have been implemented, which have been evaluated by the learners as highly inspiring for their future profession. Milan Piták from the Gymnasium Křenová showed perfectly how to implement competence and literacy-oriented teaching in practice. He also guided the learners through his development from a novice teacher to an experienced teacher, pointing out crisis points and demonstrating varied didactic approaches on concrete educational content. Václav Sixta again demonstrated the possibilities and limits of using AI in teaching history at secondary school on a concrete lesson. Peter Sokol, a teacher at the Gymnasium Duhovka and lecturer of seminars for history teachers, demonstrated one of the variants of research-oriented teaching on a specific lesson about the Egyptian Queen Cleopatra. It was a lesson inspired by the Stanford history education group project. He then demonstrated how he evaluates (and grades) such a lesson using examples from high school. This was followed by a discussion of the benefits and pitfalls of such analytically driven instruction.

A teacher's guide for teachers supporting activist teaching in secondary school history, based on work with a diverse portfolio of sources covering the period from late antiquity to the communist era, has been prepared for publication by MUNIPress. In 2024 we will follow up with a similarly oriented handbook to support activist teaching of regional history, focusing on the Highlands Region. Foreign cooperation will also continue: at the beginning of March, four students will visit Polish partners - I Liceum Ogólnokształcące im. The students will take part in a visit to the Julius Slowacki Secondary School in Częstochowa.

Lukáš Fasora – Václav Kaška