Today I’m sharing with you one of my favourite double lessons on the Spanish Armada and its defeat.

I particularly love it for two reasons; firstly I was observed teaching part 1 by Ofsted and received a glowing report from the inspector, secondly it enables students to demonstrate their progress very easily over the two lessons.

The resources are an amalgamation of my own ideas and that of others from resources I’ve collated the past few years.

Lesson 1 – The lesson starts with an empathy exercise – putting yourself in the image – and has 3 options for students to choose how to approach the task. Students imagine they are in the image which zooms in and out, I also put sound effects on as students enter the classroom. The choice enables all students to access the task; no matter their ability or the time in which they entered the room.

I’ve edited a few bits out that were relevant to the previous lesson so this resource follows on with a bit of information about the Navy Royal and some rather famous ships. It’s at this point I assess prior knowledge asking questions to obtain what students already know about the Spanish Armada (usually very little).

Next we watch a video and carry out a true or false exercise followed by self-assessment of the answers. To print off the tables off go to the end of the PowerPoint slides for a printable version.

After further discussion we move onto interpreting sources, starting with carrying out an example together.

Finally it’s on to the main task.

This involves looking at sources to interpret why the Spanish were defeated. The activity has been differentiated into 3 bands of challenge for a very mixed ability group.

Spice Level 1 = designed for the lowest ability, many of these students struggled with reading and writing

Spice Level 2 = designed for the middle range most students choose to do this one

Spice Level 3 =  designed towards the most able in the year group

Students have the opportunity to choose the level of challenge  so they can go above but not below their target level. e.g. students working toward previous level 4 in year 8, would have been aiming to complete the bronze criteria for the topic and therefore would have been guided towards the Spice Level 1 task but could choose to do the Spice Level 2 task, whereas a student working towards level 7 would have only be allowed to do the Spice Level 3 task.

Students progress to different parts of the task sheet, dependent on the level of the task they are working on.

To finish the lesson, students select the criteria they would like assessed by their peer assessment buddy. See the criteria on the slide below. Students are encouraged to pick their weakness for peer assessment. Students then swap books and using the peer assessment pens (green) they use the marking codes or highlight relevant text. Finally they provide a kind comment and a level up target for the student to focus on next lesson.

Lesson 2

Students finish off the work they started the previous lesson, however this time every time the do the level up target they write in pink pen to evidence their progression.

I’ve found that when students use a different colour pen to demonstrate the their progress they work a lot harder at doing it correctly e.g. if in lesson 1 a student kept spelling Armada wrong, in lesson 2 they use the pink pen when they use the word in their work. For others it has been for example using punctuation, every time they did a capital letter and full stop it would need to be in pink, this approach made them more conscientious of their work.

Finally if time students self-assess and peer-assess their work using the feedback grid I would use to mark it. They would simply tick the criteria they felt they’d achieved.

When marking the work I would then highlight in one colour the achieved criteria and highlight in a separate colour the criteria they could improve on. For some classes I set improvements as homework others have time in a DIRT lesson later in the term.

If you’d like to download the resources click here.

Hope the resources can be of use to you.