There are today many teacher-training routes into the teaching profession. The teacher-training year is always a difficult balancing act between gaining enough classroom experience and enough understanding of the theories that underpin the discipline's key skills. As a result, each teacher-training route has advantages as well as disadvantages. With a lack of uniformity of experience amongst trainees during their training year, the first part of this E-CPD is to help trainee teachers to ‘survive' this challenging year. As a result, it provides trainees with the basic principles of what makes a History teacher? What are the key components of the subject we teach? How can we reflect on our practice in order to improve?

The Survive units also asks us to question some fundamental axioms of the how History is taught today. For example, why do we teach and what do we learn in History? What is progression in History? What are we really assessing in our use of assessment? How can we make intelligent use of assessment systems which we are expected to use? Is there any point to marking? There are no quick-hit answers to be found in such questioning, but these chapters are designed to help you reflect on these big issues while you are in your training year and immersed in the teaching environment anew.