Passive Replace sits at the Passive row and Replace column of the PICRAT grid. Below: real History lessons for middle school (KS3, Years 7 to 9, ages 11 to 14) that sit in Passive Replace, plus anti-examples that look like it but sit elsewhere.
Grade 6 watch a documentary clip on the Black Death before a significance debate
Year 7 are near the end of their medieval England unit, and next lesson they will argue whether the Black Death was the most significant event of the period. The teacher shows an eight-minute documentary clip, vetted in advance, on the board covering how the plague reached England in 1348, its symptoms, how it spread and its effects on villages and the Church. Students take notes in their books under three headings the teacher sets: what people believed caused it, what happened, and what changed afterwards. When the clip ends the teacher brings the class together to clarify the difference between bubonic and pneumonic plague and the rough death toll, between a third and a half of England's population. Students finish by writing a paragraph on the change they think mattered most, such as labour shortages leading to the Statute of Labourers in 1351.
The Industrial Revolution: slide story of steam power from Newcomen's pump to Watt's engine
Year 8 know that the first cotton mills stood beside fast rivers, and today they find out what freed them. The teacher talks through a slide deck: Thomas Newcomen's engine of 1712, pumping water out of a coal mine near Dudley and burning so much coal that it was little use away from a pit; James Watt, an instrument maker at the University of Glasgow, repairing a model Newcomen engine in the 1760s and seeing that cooling the cylinder on every stroke wasted most of the heat; his separate condenser, patented in 1769; his partnership with Matthew Boulton in Birmingham from 1775; and the 1781 patent for turning the piston's stroke into rotary motion that could drive machinery. Students copy a table from the board into their books, with columns for engine, problem, fix and what it could now do, and fill it in as the story goes. The lesson ends with a written answer: why could a mill owner in 1800 build in the middle of Manchester instead of beside a river?
Tools: PowerPoint Nine ideas for your own version in Generate
Grade 7 read a teacher-built Sutori timeline of the Tudor monarchs
Year 8 have a timeline assessment next week on the five Tudor monarchs: Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I, with Lady Jane Grey's nine days in 1553 as a footnote. The teacher has built a Sutori timeline with one section per reign, each giving dates, a portrait and three key events, such as the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, the break with Rome in 1534 and the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Students read through it on their iPads from a view-only link, with none of Sutori's question elements added, and fill in a blank printed timeline in their books as they go. In the last ten minutes the teacher calls out events and students place them on their timelines without looking back at the screen.
Grade 7 Sutori timeline of the Industrial Revolution with question checkpoints
Year 8 begin their Industrial Revolution unit with chronology, because every later lesson leans on it. The teacher has built the spine in Sutori: fourteen events from John Kay's flying shuttle in 1733 to the Factory Act of 1833, each with a two-sentence entry and an image. At four points down the timeline the teacher has added a text box with two questions, such as which came first, the spinning jenny or Stephenson's Rocket, and students answer them in their books as they reach each one. For the final task students close the timeline, rebuild the five turning points from memory, then reopen it and check. The teacher collects the books, marks the answers after the lesson and opens the next one with the two events the class most often placed wrongly.
Causes of the First World War: documentary extract on the Dreadnought race
Year 9 are working through the long-term causes of the war, and today's focus is the Anglo-German naval race. The teacher plays a twelve-minute documentary extract on the board covering Tirpitz's Navy Laws of 1898 and 1900, the launch of HMS Dreadnought in 1906, which made every older battleship obsolete, and the 1909 campaign in Britain summed up in the slogan 'We want eight and we won't wait'. Students take notes in their books under three headings, what Germany did, how Britain responded and why each side felt threatened, and the teacher pauses the extract twice to check the headings are filling up. The lesson ends with a paragraph on whether the naval race made war more likely, using at least two dates from the notes.
Grade 8 slide-deck recap of the MAIN causes of the First World War
Year 9 have spent three lessons on the causes of the First World War, and next lesson they analyse a German political cartoon as a source. The teacher recaps on a six-slide PowerPoint on the board: one slide each for militarism, alliances, imperialism and nationalism, and one on the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 as the trigger. Each slide carries one date, one statistic and one image, such as HMS Dreadnought, launched in 1906, for the naval race. Students write a one-line summary of each cause in their books, then spend the last 15 minutes ranking the causes and writing a paragraph to justify their top choice.
Tools: PowerPoint Nine ideas for your own version in Generate
Lessons that look Passive Replace but sit in another
Useful counter-examples when you are checking your own lesson placement on the PICRAT grid.
This page is one of a growing set of PICRAT examples by cell, subject and grade. Page maintained by Andy Perryer.