Six lessons built around structured dialogue — from a society reading its own mortality figures through to a verdict on whether catastrophe broke medieval England or remade it.

Six lessons. One overarching enquiry. Every lesson built for structured dialogue.

Lesson 1 — England Before the Plague: A Society Reading the Numbers. Perhaps four and a half to six million people in 1348 — but living in a society already shaken by the Great Famine of a generation earlier. The plague did not land on a stable world; it landed on one already volatile, and that complicates every “rupture from stability” story that follows. Lesson 1 opens with a Data Encounter that treats students as historians: they meet population estimates, famine mortality figures, and pre- and post-plague wage records, sorting each piece of evidence into the dimension of medieval life it speaks to — population, food supply, labour and wages, and what the records quietly leave out — before ranking those dimensions on a scale of social disruption and defending their ranking aloud with sentence stems. There is no formal writing in Lesson 1: the sorted, ranked, argued-over board is the thinking. The plenary closes with a prediction — what would mass death do to a society like this? — that Lesson 2’s survivor evidence will test.

Lesson 2 — When Death Walked Through England: The Chroniclers Speak. What can the words of two survivors reveal — and what do they hide? Lesson 2 opens not with a source but with a shared act of care: students co-construct the ground rules for talking about mass death respectfully, because this is the unit’s most graphic lesson and the dialogue needs to be worthy of it. They then work in split-evidence pairs — one partner reads a chronicler’s account of an abandoned village and the collapse of ordinary labour, the other an account of corpses piling beyond the reach of normal burial — annotating closely before teaching it to a partner who has not seen it. The pair then writes a source-inference paragraph drawing on both accounts, naming provenance, inference, and corroboration as the analytic moves that turn a vivid description into reliable history. The plenary bridges forward into how a society makes sense of a catastrophe on this scale.

Lesson 3 — Faith Tested by Death: A Society Wrestling with Catastrophe. Was the plague God’s punishment, the Church’s chance to grow richer, or something most people simply prayed through and survived? Lesson 3 opens with an Odd One Out starter pitting three claims about the plague’s religious effect against each other — and the claim a student rejects reveals the assumption they walked in carrying. Students then investigate four pieces of evidence drawn from four causal dimensions for how the religious order survived: the theological response, the institutional crisis of clergy mortality, the popular world of plague-saints and persistent parish ritual, and the longer critique that grew into Lollardy. They rank the causes by which best explains the Church’s survival and defend that ranking against partners who ranked it differently. The lesson deliberately holds open whether the Church emerged stronger or weaker — both cases are real, and the work is the weighing.

Lesson 4 — “The Revolt of 1381”: Whose Account Do We Trust, and Why? A flat tax that fell hardest on the poorest. A boy king. A march on London. And four very different writers reaching for very different verdicts on what it all meant. Lesson 4 opens with a Think–Discuss–Share starter — was Wat Tyler a hero, a traitor, or is that the wrong question entirely? — that primes students for judgement rather than verdict. They then work in seated jigsaw groups across four sources written from four vantage points: Jean Froissart’s hostile aristocratic chronicle, the more procedural Anonimalle Chronicle written by a contemporary urban witness, Thomas Walsingham’s monastic account from St Albans, and Richard II’s own revocation of the Mile End manumissions — the Crown’s framing of the revolt in the days after Smithfield. Each student becomes the expert on one source, then teaches it — so that judging the utility of the evidence means integrating three perspectives no single student personally read. The careful work of the lesson is reading across the partisan record: noticing what Froissart, Walsingham and the Anonimalle agree on (and asking why even hostile chroniclers admit certain things), and weighing the Crown’s legal language against the chroniclers’ narrative drama. The plenary carries the question of utility forward into the unit’s weighing of consequences.

Lesson 5 — Weighing the Wreckage: What Did the Plague and Revolt Really Change? Across five dimensions — demographic, economic, social, religious, political — what actually changed, and how would you even decide? Lesson 5 stages the unit’s central operation in microcosm. Students commit to a starting position before the evidence arrives — was the change mostly economic, mostly social and religious, or mostly political? — then move through three thematic stations where sources are paired before-and-after: a wage law set against the manorial record of its failure; a marker of social continuity set against a record of recovery; a royal proclamation set against the law that followed it. The crucial move is that students build their own criteria for what “remade” should mean, then test those criteria against the evidence — discovering that different criteria produce different verdicts. The plenary draws two contemporary parallels, because a unit about consequence generalises in more than one direction.

Lesson 6 — How Far Did the Black Death Remake England? (Capstone). Five lessons of evidence. Five dimensions of change. One verdict — and today you commit. Lesson 6 opens with a Prediction Game: five candidate dimensions of change, and students lock in which they think made the biggest “how far” case before the unit-wide timeline is revealed. They then annotate a timeline running from the Great Famine through the plague’s arrival, the wage law, the Poll Tax, the revolt, and the slow normalisation of the labour market decades later — before staging a Balloon Debate in which five students each argue why their consequence dimension is the strongest case. The oral debate is the rehearsal for the unit’s first full extended writing block, where students answer the overarching enquiry in their own words, drawing evidence from at least three different lessons, with the scaffold faded back to a quality ladder and peer review alone. They finish by writing their own one-sentence verdict on the question that has run through every lesson: How far did the Black Death remake medieval England?

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Oracy that improves students’ learning: a taster — try it to believe it.

The Balloon Debate Verdict — Five students each represent one consequence of the plague and revolt — demographic, economic, social, religious, political — and argue why theirs is the strongest case for how far England was remade. The rest of the class weighs the cases against cumulative unit evidence, citing specific lessons. The debate collapses six lessons of evidence into a single act of reasoned public position-taking — and serves as the oral rehearsal for the capstone written assessment. Why it works: the format forces every dimension to make its strongest case out loud, so students hear the counter-arguments they will have to answer in writing before they pick up the pen.

The Data Encounter — In Lesson 1, students meet raw mortality, population, and wage figures with no narrative attached, and are asked to do what historians do: sort the evidence, decide what it measures, and rank what it reveals — before anyone tells them what it “means”. Why it works: handling un-interpreted data first makes students owners of the interpretation rather than recipients of it, and the ranking turns silent number-reading into defensible public argument.

The Odd One Out — Three claims about the plague’s religious effect, only one of which is the “odd” one — except the choice tells students more about their own assumptions than about the claims. Why it works: rejecting a statement surfaces the belief behind the rejection, opening the lesson’s central question through students’ own reasoning rather than the teacher’s framing.

Split-Evidence Partner Teaching — Each partner reads a different survivor’s account of the plague, annotates it closely, then teaches it to someone who has not seen it — so the inference task genuinely cannot be completed alone. Why it works: only one partner holds each half of the evidence, so the talk is necessary rather than performed; every student speaks as the source’s expert and listens with a real gap to fill.

Seated Jigsaw with Source-Utility Judgement — Students become the expert on one source on the 1381 revolt — Froissart, Walsingham, the Anonimalle Chronicle, or Richard II’s revocation proclamation — then teach it within their group before judging, together, which sources are most useful for finding out about the rebels’ demands. Sentence stems scaffold both the teaching turn and the listening-to-challenge turn. Why it works: a real judgement about utility requires integrating perspectives no single student read, so the dialogue does the analytic work. And because all four sources are written about the rebels rather than by them, the lesson surfaces a hard truth about the medieval evidence record itself — that whose voice survives shapes what later generations can know.

Exploratory Talk with Sentence Stems — Four move-types — justify, challenge, build, shift — give students a shared grammar for productive dialogue. Stems sit visibly alongside the task, so the cognitive load shifts from how do I disagree politely to what evidence supports my shift. Why it works: the EEF evidence base for dialogic teaching rests on making high-quality talk moves teachable. Stems make exploratory talk learnable in a way that open prompts alone cannot.

The Class Thinking Board — A three-column public record — What We Think · What Challenges Us · What’s Next — updated live as pairs share their findings. Students are asked not just to report their own thinking, but to listen for connections, disagreements, and surprises across the room. Why it works: builds the habit of responding to each other rather than to the teacher. The board becomes a collective artefact of how the class’s thinking changed — dialogue as a visible, shared practice.

What’s included:

A complete, classroom-ready pack — built around structured dialogue,
mapped to the oracy framework, and grounded in the EEF evidence base.

Teacher resources

• 6 fully-planned lessons (starter, main, plenary)
• Lesson-by-lesson teacher guidance
• Unit overview with enquiry arc and oracy framework mapping
• Ground rules for talk and exploratory talk stems

Student resources

• Student-facing lesson slides with embedded tasks and talk frames
• Sentence stems for justifying, challenging, building, and shifting thinking
• Evidence cards, source extracts, and data sets
• Modelled writing and structured writing scaffolds

Framework alignment

• Mapped to the four strands of the oracy framework (Physical, Linguistic, Cognitive, Social & Emotional)
• Built on EEF evidence for dialogic teaching – including exploratory talk
• Aligned to the KS3 National Curriculum for History

Format

• Free to download and use in your classroom

• Delivered as a single downloadable pack

• Editable throughout