This multi-faceted session starts with students having to shape their understanding of the reasons for the building of the Berlin wall in 5 optional ways:
- Read the historian’s mind. Students are presented with a historian’s view of how the causes of the crisis should be seen (RS1) and then they have to find supporting evidence to back up a recent historian’s analysis (using information cards RS2), OR
- Big point little point. Students have to come up with their own 3 headings, without knowing what the historians say using supporting evidence from cards RS2 to build their own explanation. OR
- Reconditions, precipitants and triggers. Students analyse the causes in terms of long, medium and short-term reasons using information cards from RS2 and placing them on an template RS3 which is enlarged to A3.
- ‘Sound bite’ students have to think of the reasons Khrushchev himself would have given for building
