Six lessons built around structured dialogue — from a crown under strain through thirty years of civil war to the question of whether Henry VII built something new.

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

Lesson 1 — The Kingdom of Henry VI: A Crown Under Strain. A king crowned at nine months old. A breakdown that left the throne empty in all but name. Rival royal cousins, magnates with private armies, and a war in France that came home unpaid. What does it take to make a kingdom fall apart? Lesson 1 opens with an Odd One Out starter — three contemporary statements about Henry VI — where the one students reject reveals the assumption they walked in carrying. They then work as a jigsaw of four, each student becoming the expert on one source covering a different fault line in the kingdom — the king’s own weakness, the dynastic rivalry, the over-mighty magnates, and the pressures bearing in from outside — before teaching their group and building the picture together. The crucial move: students derive the four causes of the wars through that integration, rather than being handed them as labels. There’s no formal writing in Lesson 1 — the synthesis plenary names the four causes so students carry them into Lesson 2.

Lesson 2 — Why Did Civil War Break Out? England in 1455 had laws, institutions, and centuries of constitutional history. So why did it collapse into civil war? Lesson 2 opens with a provocative statement — that the Wars of the Roses happened simply because England had no real king — and a position commitment that forces every student to take a view before the evidence arrives. Students then rank the causes of the war against authentic evidence, learning to separate the immediate triggers — a battle, a dismissal, a king’s collapse — from the deeper enabling conditions that made war possible at all, and using exploratory talk stems to justify, challenge, and revise their ranking. By the end they’ve written their first structured causation paragraph of the year, distinguishing the spark from the structure. The exit plenary asks them to name what shifted their thinking.

Lesson 3 — Inside the Wars: Towton, Tewkesbury, and the Cost of Civil War. Towton, 1461: the bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil, with as many as 28,000 dead in a single day — perhaps one in every hundred adult men in England. But here’s the twist historians now argue: across thirty-two years, there may have been only thirteen weeks of actual fighting. So how much war was there really? Lesson 3 opens with a Data Encounter that treats students as historians — they meet the casualty figures before any narrative explains them. They then work in split-evidence pairs, one partner holding the archaeological record from the Towton mass grave, the other holding the chronicle accounts and modern reconstruction — neither able to judge the true scale and cost of the war without teaching the other what they hold. The lesson is built to let the physical evidence land first, so the written record is read against the bones rather than the other way round. (Content advisory: this lesson deals soberly with the physical reality of battle.)

Lesson 4 — Bosworth 1485: Did Anything Actually Change? The last English king to die in battle. A challenger with a thin claim to the throne. A powerful family that backed neither side until the field decided it. And, five centuries later, a skeleton under a car park that let us see exactly how Richard III died. But did Bosworth change England — or was it just one more dynastic skirmish that happened to stick? Lesson 4 opens with an Odd One Out and moves into a Statement Sort: students take a set of claims about Bosworth and sort them into “supported by all the accounts,” “contested between them,” and “supported by only one” — a move that forces them to read three genuinely different accounts against each other. They meet a Tudor-commissioned history, a more neutral contemporary chronicle, and a modern revisionist reading, and confront the central problem of the historian’s craft: the same evidence can honestly support different conclusions. This is where students first learn to handle interpretation as perspective, not bias. (Content advisory: this lesson discusses Richard III’s death and the 2012 examination of his remains.)

Lesson 5 — Henry VII’s “Modern” Monarchy: Star Chamber, Bonds, and Marriage. A new court to prosecute over-mighty subjects. Financial bonds that tied two-thirds of the nobility to good behaviour. A marriage that closed the dynastic split for good. Clever innovation — or the oldest royal tricks in the book, used well? Lesson 5 puts students in the position of judges. They commit first to a position — was Henry VII modern or medieval? — then, crucially, build their own criteria for what “modern monarchy” should even mean before testing his policies against them. Working through a before-and-after comparison of the nobility in 1485 and 1509, they discover that significance is something you argue from criteria, not something you simply declare. The criteria they build here are the ones they’ll argue from in the capstone — this lesson does the structural work that makes Lesson 6 possible.

Lesson 6 — Was Henry VII the First Modern Monarch? (Capstone). Five lessons of evidence. One verdict. Today you commit. Lesson 6 stages a Balloon Debate in which five students each argue a different position — fully modern, partly modern, the last successful medieval king, simply lucky that his rivals had killed each other, or that “modern” is a Tudor invention and the question itself is wrong. Each must defend their case against the criteria the class built the lesson before, surviving round by round on the strength of their evidence. Students then annotate a unit-wide timeline running from 1455 to 1509, encounter a few sources from beyond that window — how the next generation looked back on Henry VII’s reign — and deliver the year’s terminal verdict on royal power and its limits. The synthesis plenary closes in three moves: students share their verdict aloud, the class names the whole arc in a single sentence, and the verdict becomes the draft for the formal written assessment.

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

The Balloon Debate Verdict — Five students each argue a different answer to the unit’s central question — fully modern, partly modern, the last medieval king, merely lucky, or that the question is wrong — and defend it round by round against the criteria the class built themselves. The rest of the class weighs each case against cumulative unit evidence, citing specific lessons. Why it works: it collapses six lessons of evidence into a single act of reasoned public position-taking, and because students argue from criteria they generated rather than ones the teacher supplied, the judgement is genuinely theirs — the highest-stakes oracy moment in the unit, and the oral rehearsal for the written assessment.

The Provocative Statement with Position Commitment — Students meet a deliberately defensible-from-both-sides claim — that the Wars of the Roses happened simply because England had no real king — and commit to a position before any evidence is introduced. They then revisit that position as the causes accumulate, using talk stems to justify shifts in their thinking. Why it works: commitment before evidence exposes assumptions; the persistent scale makes every change of mind a visible, explainable act of reasoning.

The Data Encounter — In Lesson 3, students meet the casualty figures from Towton — 28,000 dead, one in a hundred adult men in a single day — with no narrative attached, and are asked to do what historians do: react to the raw scale, then generate the questions they’d want answered before the explanation arrives. Why it works: handling un-interpreted data first makes students owners of the interpretation rather than recipients of it, and turns a number on a slide into a question they need answered.

The Statement Sort — Faced with three rival accounts of Bosworth, students sort a set of claims into “supported by all,” “contested,” and “supported by one only” — a move that cannot be completed without reading every account against the others. Why it works: the sort forces consultation across genuinely conflicting sources and teaches the year’s hardest lesson — that the same evidence can honestly support different conclusions, and that this is perspective, not bias.

Criteria-Building Before Judgement — Before students judge whether Henry VII was “modern,” they build the definition of “modern monarchy” themselves, then test the evidence against their own criteria. Why it works: it turns significance from something declared into something argued, and the criteria students generate become the load-bearing scaffold for the capstone debate — they leave owning the very terms of the argument.

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