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Harnessing the power of community to expand students’ historical horizons
Teaching History article
Many history teachers will already be familiar with ‘meanwhile, elsewhere...’, a website offering freely downloadable homework resources on individuals, events and developments in world history. In this article the website’s creators, Richard Kennett and Will Bailey-Watson, set out a curricular rationale for the project. They argue that using homework tasks...
Harnessing the power of community to expand students’ historical horizons
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Using historical discourse to find narrative coherence in the GCSE period study
Teaching History article
When planning a GCSE period study on the American West, Alex Ford wrestled with reconciling the content demands of the examination specifications with the need to provide his students with a memorable narrative. In this article, Ford shows how he drew on the latest academic scholarship to construct a rigorous,...
Using historical discourse to find narrative coherence in the GCSE period study
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Write Your Own Historical Fiction Competition 2026
The Historical Association Historical Fiction Prize
Each year we are so impressed by the ever increasing number and standard of entries we receive around such a wide range of historical periods and settings. You can take a look at some of last year’s winning entries here.
Unleash the creativity of your pupils through the Write Your Own...
Write Your Own Historical Fiction Competition 2026
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Italian history teachers day
Partnership CPD from the Historical Association, Association for the Study of Modern Italy, University College London and Royal Holloway, University of London
Saturday 12 October 2024, 10am–3pmUniversity of London
This event will feature lectures from academics from the University of Leicester, UCL and Royal Holloway on a variety of topics within Italian history from 1900-1946. It will provide up to date academic knowledge on key topics within this period of Italian history...
Italian history teachers day
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How should women’s history be included at Key Stage 3?
Teaching History article
Susanna Boyd ‘discovered’ women’s history while studying for her own history degree, and laments women’s continued absence from the school history curriculum. She issues a call-to-arms to make the curriculum more inclusive both by re-evaluating the criteria for curricular selection and by challenging established disciplinary conventions. She also weighs up...
How should women’s history be included at Key Stage 3?
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What’s the wisdom on… Causation
Teaching History feature
What's the Wisdom On... is a short guide providing new history teachers with an overview of the ‘story so far’ of practice-based professional thinking about a particular aspect of history teaching. It draws on tried and tested approaches arising from teachers with years of experimenting, researching, practising, writing and debating their...
What’s the wisdom on… Causation
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Doing History at University 2025
Thinking of studying history at university?
Booking closed
(Registration is via Cademy which opens in a new window. Please read the HA CPD terms and conditions before registering)
We are pleased to be hosting a Doing History at University event for students and teachers in partnership with the University of Sheffield. The aim of the event is to...
Doing History at University 2025
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What kinds of feedback help students produce better historical narratives of the interwar years?
Teaching History article
Narrative has begun to take its place alongside the essay, for so long the stereotypical currency of the history teacher and student. In this work, based on his experiences as a PGCE student, Alex Rodker argues powerfully that it is time now to consider how to help students to produce...
What kinds of feedback help students produce better historical narratives of the interwar years?
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Cunning Plan 174: creating a narrative of the interwar years
Teaching History feature
The major aim of this sequence of lessons was to teach Year 8 how to create and refine a narrative. I chose a period I was substantively confident on, which lent itself well to the narrative form, had a number of prominent academic narratives published about it and followed neatly...
Cunning Plan 174: creating a narrative of the interwar years
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Teaching History 174: Structure
The HA's journal for secondary history teachers
02 Editorial (Read article)
03 HA Secondary news
04 HA update
08 Austin’s narrative: an exploratory case study, with Year 8, into what kinds of feedback help students produce better historical narratives of the interwar years – Alex Rodker (Read article)
16 Cunning Plan: Teaching Year 8 to create and...
Teaching History 174: Structure
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Online course: Teaching empire through material culture
HA online course for primary and secondary teachers
The topic of empire lends itself ideally to a material approach – the objects often provide the opportunity to bring in indigenous voices to our study of the imperial past, while our classroom experience has shown that objects provide a powerful channel through which to access complex and sometimes uncomfortable...
Online course: Teaching empire through material culture
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Questions to help you review your KS3 curriculum
Guidance for history teachers
This resource is free to everyone. For access to our library of high-quality secondary history materials along with free or discounted CPD and membership of a thriving community of history teachers and subject leaders, join the Historical Association today
With Ofsted incorporating curriculum into inspections from September 2019 and finally...
Questions to help you review your KS3 curriculum
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Identity in history: why it matters and must be addressed!
Teaching History journal article
Sophia Nzeribe Nascimento, a mixed-race teacher working in a diverse London school, set out to explore her students’ assumptions about who historians are. While her own ethnicity and gender may have convinced at least some of her students that history is not exclusively the preserve of old white men, she...
Identity in history: why it matters and must be addressed!
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A search beyond the classroom: using a museum to support the renewal of a scheme of work
Teaching History Article
How many times have you been to a museum or a historical building or a significant place and thought that you want to capture some of its essence to bring back to your pupils? The challenges of geography, risk, expense and staffing can all act as limitations in the planning...
A search beyond the classroom: using a museum to support the renewal of a scheme of work
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Eleanor and Franklin: Women and the New Deal
Annual Conference 2018 Film: Presidential Lecture
As a pioneering First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt refused, as one admirer put it, ‘to step into her little mould in the biscuit tin of President’s wives that was ready and waiting for her’. She broadcast on the radio, wrote a newspaper column, travelled endlessly and spoke out fearlessly in defence...
Eleanor and Franklin: Women and the New Deal
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Webinar series: Making substantive and disciplinary knowledge work together in the secondary history curriculum
HA on-demand webinar series for secondary history teachers
The last few years have, rightly, seen a lot of discussion about 'what' we include in the history curriculum. This has meant that many schools now teach a wider-ranging and more inclusive form of history. As this work has an impact, it is important to continue to think about how...
Webinar series: Making substantive and disciplinary knowledge work together in the secondary history curriculum
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‘Its ultimate pattern was greater than its parts’
Teaching History journal article
Identifying the challenges his students faced both with recall and analysis of the content they had learned for their GCSE course, Ed Durbin devised a solution which focused not on exam skills and revision lessons, but on using Key Stage 3 to build the ‘hinterland’ of contextual knowledge and causal...
‘Its ultimate pattern was greater than its parts’
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Dealing with the consequences
Teaching History journal article
Do GCSE and A-level questions that purport to be about consequences actually reward reasoning about historical consequences at all? Molly-Ann Navey concluded that they do not and that they fail to encourage the kind of argument that academic historians engage in when reaching judgements about consequences. Navey decided that it...
Dealing with the consequences
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Couching counterfactuals in knowledge when explaining the Salem witch trials with Year 13
Teaching History journal article
Puzzled by the shrugs and unimaginative responses of his students when asked certain counterfactual questions, James Edward Carroll set out to explore what types of counterfactual questions would elicit sophisticated causal explanations. During his pursuit of the ‘gold standard’ of counterfactual reasoning, Carroll drew upon theories of academic history in...
Couching counterfactuals in knowledge when explaining the Salem witch trials with Year 13
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Women’s Suffrage: history and citizenship resources for schools
Article
Are you teaching 20th-century history? Do you want to refresh your teaching of the campaign for women’s rights and equal representation?
Don’t forget to register for the Suffrage Resources website, a free resource developed specifically for schools to help teachers and students explore the rich history of the suffrage movement and...
Women’s Suffrage: history and citizenship resources for schools
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Trampolines and Springboards
Teaching History article
Frustrated by his pupils’ tendency to compartmentalise source analysis into two discrete parts of ‘source’ and ‘own knowledge’, Jonathan Sellin reflected that his use of scaffolds might be to blame. Inspired by recent work by teacher-researchers Hammond and King on the importance of secure substantive knowledge in the area of...
Trampolines and Springboards
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Triumphs Show 171: preparatory reading for A-level essays
Teaching History feature: celebrating and sharing success
The first question my A-level students always used to ask when receiving back an essay was, ‘What mark did I get?’ The second question I used to hope they would ask was ‘How could I improve my work?’
I stress ‘used to’ because increasingly I do not give marks when...
Triumphs Show 171: preparatory reading for A-level essays
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The great Liberal landslide: the 1906 General Election in perspective
Historian article
On 1 May 1997 the Conservative party suffered an electoral defeat so overwhelming that political commentators were left rummaging through the statistics of the previous two centuries to find anything similar. The Times concluded on 3 May that it was the party's worst performance since 1832, though 'The disaster suffered...
The great Liberal landslide: the 1906 General Election in perspective
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Women and power
Historian members' resource spotlight
Echoing the theme of the autumn issue of The Historian, this resource highlight examines aspects of the broad theme of women and power. We start by looking at some of the most overtly powerful women in history, from well-known Tudor monarchs to lesser-examined figures such as Æthelflæd. Power can be wielded in other...
Women and power
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Continuing your professional development as an early career history teacher
Guidance for secondary school teachers
This document is designed for history teachers in years 2-4 of their career. Whilst teachers with more experience will find inspiration here, its primary purpose is to nurture subject-specific career development immediately after the intense NQT year. Working with these ideas will help prepare an early career teacher for academic...
Continuing your professional development as an early career history teacher
