My students love this lesson. They begin with an odd one out activity designed to get them thinking about Stalin as the ‘man of steel’ before working their way through detailed notes. They then proceed to take part in a tale of the tape activity where they identify Stalin’s strengths and Trotsky’s mistakes/weaknesses. Following this students complete a piece of structured piece of writing before completing a plenary exercise in which they create a pentagonal plan of reasons which address the Key Question. I hope your students enjoy this lesson as much as mine do.

I am very proud of the precision and amount of detail in this lesson and its designed to be engaging and to ensure students make measurable progress. The class begin by exploring an odd one out exercise for the starter activity and this draws their attention to early Chinese views of westerners. This then leads into an extremely detailed set of notes (which I created when teaching in China) before students attempt a 30 piece hexagonal card sort which is colour-coded into factors. The class then make links and explain the Key Question before finishing with a fun ‘Just-a-Minute’ plenary in order to test their understanding and knowledge gained. I hope you enjoy this lesson as much as my students do.

This lesson will really get your students actively engaged. They begin by figuring out the anagrams of key terms and phrases from the course before working through a detailed set of notes on how China changed after the 1911 Revolution. From here students proceed to complete a 15 piece card sort, arranging them into social, political and economic impacts of Warlordism. Students then complete the lesson with a fun activity (Dingbats) designed to test how well they have understood the key vocabulary and events from the lesson. This lesson was one I created and planned while teaching in China so I really invest as much precision in the historical detail as possible. I hope your students enjoy it as much as mine.

In this lesson students explore the Key Question ‘How successful was the League of Nations in the 1930s?’ They begin by acting out cards which they will have covered in the 1920s as a game of charades. The class then work through a set of detailed notes before playing a game of snakes and ladders bingo. It needs to be printed in colour and laminated but these work great with students and as an activity the league’s successes (ladders) and faults (snakes) become very clear. The lesson concludes with an angram plenary to test student comprehension of key terms. I hope your students enjoy this lesson as much as mine do.

In this lesson students work through a comprehensive set of notes before attempting a Tarsia card sort activity to consolidate knowledge acquired. The lesson concludes with a game of Nazism Guess Who whereby students ask only questions which require a yes/no response (they can use the internet to help respond). Please note prior to purchase this game works best if you already have a board upon which you can stick the pictures! I hope your students find this lesson on Widerstand as useful as mine always do.

In this lesson students begin by identifying what’s behind the squares in the starter activity which leads to source analysis which is designed to introduce the Key Question - What were the motives of the Big Three at Versailles? The class then explore a detailed set of notes before being issued a character card. The class then hotseat in role using the masks provided before concluding with a ‘Have I got News for You?’ style plenary in which they have to fill in the gaps to show comprehension. I hope your students gain as much from this lesson as mine do.

My students love this lesson. I created it for a local history unit when I worked in Shanghai but now use it as part of my unit on C20th China. The class begin with an odd one out activity designed to get them thinking about the period. They then work through a detailed set of notes before being divided up into high society and seedy underbelly. Students create a collage of their aspect of society using the card sort and take part in a freeze frame activity. The lesson concludes with a fun game of Dingbats to test subject knowledge.

This is one of the most controversial lessons on the curriculum and it always produces excellent and thought provoking history for able secondary students. Students work through detailed information on the bombing of Germany before being drip-fed 41 pieces of precise historical information. They have to compile these in groups into evidence which suggests it was morally right to bomb Germany (it took anti aircraft guns away from the Eastern Front for example) and evidence which suggests it was morally wrong (even Churchill by March 1945 felt the bombing should be reduced). This in turn leads to great student debate. I really hope your classes get as much from this very stimulating lesson as mine do.

Ideal for an end of unit fun quiz on the USA in the roaring Twenties and thirsty Thirties … Seventy eight slides with fourteen categories and a whole range of activities to help students think about the key areas in this period. Tasks include anagrams, photo fit faces, chronology activities, dingbats and lots more. You might wish to allow students to use phones or devices to help them throughout the quiz or you may wish them to attempt it without them. I hope your students find this as fun and useful a revision activity as mine do.

This is a terrific first lesson if teaching a unit on Russia from the turn of the Nineteenth Century until the Revolution. Students are introduced to the lesson with a ‘what’s behind the squares PPT’ which reveals a Social Revolutionary poster displaying Russian society as a wedding cake. They are then given a detailed 8 page set of notes broken down into population, cities, geography, rule and government and so forth and are asked to research and present 8 physical items that explain what life was like for different groups for their main task. They are given some examples (such as Faberge eggs or rubles buried under peasant homes or Cossack knouts/whips to guide them). I have also included a plenary (Dingbats) with some of the key terms students come across in this lesson to test comprehension at the end of their presentations. I hope your students enjoy this lesson as much as mine do. It is designed for secondary aged students who can use detailed information as well as their own research to present their findings. Any questions please let me know and I’m always happy to help.

This lesson begins with a chronology exercise designed to recap students’ prior learning (from events dating back to 1905 onwards) in the forms of a ‘Play Your Cards Right’ activity. The class are given two events and simply need to state whether or not the second of these took place earlier or after the preceding event. The final event given is of course the Russian Civil War which is the focus of this lesson. The class then work through some background information and are given reasons why the Reds won the Civil War (ranging from Trotsky’s leadership skills in charge of the Red Army through to the lack of uniformity in the White Army’s motives through to the Reds’ access to the Tsarist arsenal etc). From this students are asked to design a storyboard to recap the reasons, leaving out one (so they are discriminating between factors and deciding which is least/most important). The lesson concludes with a plenary where students have to stand on one side or the other of the class to decide on whether one of the 11 statements is true or false and in this way they test their subject knowledge acquired in the activation and consolidation tasks. I hope you find this lesson and its resources as useful as my students do. It has been designed by myself and pitched at high achieving secondary school students. Please do let me know if you have any questions.

In this lesson’s starter activity students are introduced to some of the weird ideas that existed before Marco Polo’s travels (such as headless men and women with single giant feet) and there are graduated learning outcomes provided (all of you will/some of you will/most of you will). Students are then provided with background information about Marco Polo’s voyage and are given a list of key events on slide 14. The main activity is that students are asked to use this information to create an Instagram style storyboard to narrow this down to the ten key events of his life (examples are given). The lesson concludes with a Dingbats plenary designed to get students to shout out some key words relating to Marco Polo’s voyage. I hope your students enjoy this lesson as much as mine and thanks for your interest. Please be aware this lesson is pitched at high ability secondary aged students (11+). I hope your students enjoy it as much as mine do (I teach in China so this is always an extremely popular lesson with my students!) and please let me know if you have any questions.

In this lesson students begin with a starter activity in which they recap prior learning (by designing a question about events previously studied using the rubric provided). Students then read background information about the Provisional Government’s actions prior to moving onto the main activity which is a spectrum card sort. Students are given eight things the Provisional Government did, ranging from continuing the war through to its handling of the July Days through to the Kornilov Affair, and have to rate them on the spectrum provided (over a double page in their books/notes works best) in terms of good/bad policy. The lesson concludes with a plenary activity designed to ensure students have acquired the key knowledge in the lesson (in the form of a ‘Find someone who can’ walkabout activity). This lesson is pitched at high ability high school students with some prior knowledge of Russia before 1917. Please do ask if you have any questions and I hope your students get as much from this lesson as mine do.

This is a fully-resourced lesson which will help your class understand the reasons the Bolsheviks came to power. Please note though that this lesson does not cover the weaknesses of the Provisional Government (that is done in a previous lesson) but instead focuses solely on the strengths of the Bolsheviks and Lenin. The lesson includes learning objectives which are broken into all of you / some of you / most of you will and begins with a starter activity designed to encourage students to consider a range of different historiographical perspectives on the importance of Lenin and the Bolsheviks (Pipes, Merridale, McMeekin etc). From here the class work through background notes before attempting a Diamond 9 activity where they place different factors into a sequence with the most important at the top and the least important at the bottom. After this students are prepared to complete an assessed piece of written work and a detailed and graduated rubric is provided for this based on the second order concept of interpretation. The lesson concludes with a plenary where students are asked to vote on which side of the historiographical debate they side with. I hope your students get as much out of this lesson as mine do and please do let me know if you have any questions. This lesson is pitched towards high-achieving secondary aged students.

This lesson begins with an ‘Odd One Out’ starter activity where students are asked to look at four people (Honecker, Emperor Qin, Emperor Hadrian, and Donald Trump) and to offer reasons for one of them being the odd one out. The answer we are looking for is that they all built walls bar Trump whose proposed southern wall was never built. That introduces the concept of walls and their purpose. The class then take part in an escape room activity. (Please note this takes a bit of setting up to be done properly, but can be done more simply if missions and codes are just printed back to back - just tell students they can’t turn over the page until you have verified they have got the code correct). Nevertheless, if you can it is a whole lot more enjoyable with boxes and padlocks! There are six missions - each with background information about key turning points in the Wall’s History (from the end of WWII and the split through to the Berlin Blockade through to the border being closed through to barbed wire Sunday through to the Next Gen Wall through to Escape attempts). Each mission is then completed on the worksheet. Please note I do not cover the collapse of Communism or the fall of the wall here (because I cover that in a separate lesson). The lesson concludes with a ‘play your cards right’ chronology activity in which the students use the knowledge they have gained to test their awareness of key events and dates. The lesson comes with an accompanying 11-page set of notes. I hope your students get as much out of this fun lesson as mine always do and please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.

In this lesson students read background information on the fall of Singapore in the Second World War before completing an extremely detailed card sort activity (26 cards) to help them decide on the key reasons Yamashita’s Japanese army defeated that of Percival. The card sort itself is incredibly detailed and was drawn up during my time working and researching in Singapore and has been broken down into colour-coordinated factors (Percival’s mistakes, Japanese strengths, British high command decisions, technological shortcomings, and issues with British troops) to promote a structured and factor-led student approach. This activity helps students scaffold historical responses and prepares them well for extended written analysis in a follow up piece of work. It is one of my favourite lessons and I hope your students enjoy it just as much as mine do. If you have any questions please let me know. This lesson was designed for high achieving secondary aged students.

This lesson has clearly defined learning objectives and a starter activity which asks students to consider two very different historian’s perspectives on the reign of Alexander II. The 56-slide PowerPoint then provides very detailed information on the reforms Alexander put in place including the Emancipation Statute of 1861 before giving students a task of creating a mind map showing the positive and negative aspects of the reforms. There is a two part plenary - a fun DingBats exercise which goes over some of the key vocabulary - and a voting exercise based on the starter and main activity. This lesson is pitched at high-achieving post-16 students and has been created by a UK teacher so is in English rather than American English. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions and I hope this lesson helps you deliver this fascinating topic! Have a terrific day, Daniel

This book features 11 high scoring IB essays for the Paper 3 topic Imperial Russia, revolution, and the establishment of the USSR 1855-1924. Teachers – this book is for you if you have high-performing students asking what a good one looks like (WAGOLL). Set an essay and staple the corresponding exemplar to your students’ effort for instant assessment for learning. Included are over 70 annotations by an experienced IB examiner offering tips and tricks to improve your students’ Paper 3 technique. Don’t just tell them what to do, show them. Students - this book features high-performance essays for popular IB examination questions from real past papers. You’ll learn great essay mechanics and clever ways to dazzle the examiners. Learn how to apply Q SPEND, write an introduction using the DCO technique, and use fancy words like panegyric, quixotic, potentate and more to make your essays stand out from the rest. What is ‘snowballing’ and how is an essay like a Grand Prix? Look at real examples of how to evaluate perspectives effectively. Discover how topic sentences can help you and how anecdotal evidence can add colour to your response. Are you guilty of post hoc ergo propter hoc? How can you ensure you are more conceptual and when exactly should you challenge the premise of a question? If you are a student achieving Level 6 but want to reach for the very top grade in IB History this book is for you. Parents - this book will help you support your child to think critically and to produce deluxe essays. Essays include: To what extent do you agree that Alexander II was the Tsar Liberator? (May 2021) “Alexander III was a political reactionary, but an economic moderniser.” To what extent do you agree with this statement? (November 2013) How significant were the weaknesses of Russia by the end of the Nineteenth Century? (May 2008) Discuss the causes of the 1905 Revolution in Russia. (November 2018) How effectively did Nicholas II respond to the 1905 Revolution? (November 2005) Why did Russia lose the First World War? (May 2003) Discuss the reasons for the final crisis of autocracy in February/March 1917. (November 2019) How effectively did the Provisional Government rule Russia in 1917? (November 2017) Evaluate the reasons for the overthrow of the Provisional Government in October/November 1917. (May 2021) Why did the Reds win the Russian Civil War, 1918-21? (November 2001) “The Bolshevik state under Lenin between 1918 and 1924 was a ruthless dictatorship, caring little for the Russian people.” To what extent do you agree with this statement? (November 2008) Daniel Guiney is a highly experienced IB teacher, examiner and assessment author. He has led highly successful History departments in the UK as well as Singapore, Egypt, and China.

This book features 12 high scoring IB essays for the Paper 3 topic: The USSR and post Soviet Russia 1924-2000 Teachers – this book is for you if you have high-performing students asking what a good one looks like (WAGOLL). Set an essay and staple the corresponding exemplar to your students’ effort for instant assessment for learning. Included are over 70 annotations by an experienced IB examiner offering tips and tricks to improve your students’ Paper 3 technique. Don’t just tell them what to do, show them. Students - this book features high-performance essays for popular IB examination questions from real past papers. It will teach you how to unpack popular Paper 3 IB questions and to write an introduction with a thesis statement which pivots your response perfectly, using the DCO technique. It will also give you ways in which to evaluate historians’ perspectives as well as schools of thought and teach you how to forensically dissect historical evidence. It will also introduce many of the world’s leading experts to you. You will learn how to effectively embed words such as martinet, kleptocracy, multivalent, panoply, dialectical, polity, nomenklatura, gerontocracy, encomium, casus belli, opprobrium, polemic, and quinquennial to make your essays stand out from the rest. You will also read about how to use topic sentences and how to challenge the very premise of a given question. It will also provide fun and creative ideas for IB projects. If you are a student achieving Level 6 but want to reach for the very top grade in IB History this book is for you. Parents - this book will help you support your child to think critically and to produce deluxe essays. Essays include: Analyse the reasons for Stalin’s emergence as Lenin’s successor by 1929. (May 2012) “Propaganda was not a major factor in Stalin’s maintenance of power between 1929 and 1953.” Discuss. (November 2020) To what extent did the cult of personality contribute to Stalin’s maintenance of power more than terror? (November 2011) “Stalin’s Five-Year Plans and the policy of collectivisation failed to improve the Soviet economy by 1941.” Discuss. (November 2017) What were the consequences of the Second World War for Russia? (May 1994) Analyse the successes and failures of Khrushchev’s domestic policies in the years 1955 to 1964. (November 2012) Evaluate the success of Khrushchev’s foreign policy. (May 2014) Examine the view that Brezhnev’s domestic policies had a very limited impact on the USSR. (November 2015) “Brezhnev’s foreign policy was successful in reducing Cold War tensions.” To what extent do you agree with this statement? (November 2019) Evaluate the impact of Gorbachev’s domestic policies on the USSR. (May 2021) To what extent were Gorbachev’s policies responsible for improved East-West relations between 1985 and 1991? (May 2019) Evaluate the impact of political and economic developments in post Soviet Russia between 1991 and 2000. (November 2020)