Building a strong historical argument happens through conversation, far more than through a checklist of mistakes on a feedback sheet. With online Year 11 Ancient History tutoring, they do the work live on a shared screen instead of watching someone else do it.
Ancient History lends itself to working online. Site plans, artefacts and inscriptions can be examined together on screen, and written sources analysed side by side in a shared doc.
Why investigating together helps
Ancient evidence rarely speaks for itself. Looking at a site plan or an artefact together, and asking what it does and doesn’t show, teaches a student to think like a historian instead of repeating a textbook’s conclusions.
It also makes the gaps visible. Seeing how little survives about some groups is often what prompts a student’s first genuinely nuanced argument.
How a session works
Sessions run on Google Meet, with a shared Google Doc and a shared digital whiteboard.
- Check-in: how they’re feeling, and what’s due in class.
- Set the focus: a case study, a feature of an ancient society, or the historical investigation.
- Examine the evidence: images of sites or artefacts on the whiteboard, or written sources in the doc.
- Ask the hard questions: who made it, when, why, and what’s missing.
- Write and review: your child drafts a paragraph using the evidence, then they and the tutor review it together.
- Next steps, written into the shared doc.
How we check it’s landing
Signs it’s working
- Your child asks how close a writer was to the events they describe.
- They treat archaeological evidence as something to interpret.
- Their arguments acknowledge what the evidence can’t tell us.
- Their historical investigation has a clear question and a planned approach.
Every session’s notes and drafts sit in the shared Google Doc, so you can see what was covered at any time.