At the HA, we understand the importance of creating the next generation of history students who can not only write about history, but who can also effectively communicate their thinking through oracy. Current academic research highlights the importance of oracy for learning and the close relationship between being able to...

This series of webinars will consider how disciplinary thinking has perhaps become something of an afterthought in curriculum planning, for a range of valid reasons, and start to explore ways to build it back in. It will encourage colleagues to hold up a mirror to how they approach what is...

In recent years, many history teachers have done lots of exciting work to develop the curriculum they teach, incorporating new content, new scholarship and new enquiries. As part of this work, it is vital to uncover how far pupils are learning all that was intended, and the ways in which...

Being an excellent history mentor is very different from being an excellent history teacher.  In this series of five webinars, Laura London and Victoria Crooks will outline the core principles that underpin the effective subject-specific mentoring of beginning and early career history teachers.  With plenty of practical examples from their book Mentoring History Teachers in the...

Embracing messiness: teaching disciplinary thinking in history Session 5: Helping the past take shape with historical enquiry This session focuses into enquiry and on second order concepts. It offers practical advice to how second order concepts can be introduced in a way that is historically rigorous. We will explicitly address...

Webinar series: Effective oracy in the secondary history classroom Session 4: 'But Miss I don’t know what to write, or even how to start!'Focus: Key Stage 5 | Presenter: Dani Hilliard The transition from GCSE to A-level is a big one and sixth-form students often struggle with a variety of...

Mentoring beginning and early career history teachers in the secondary school Session 5: 'Move Me On’ skills practice This final webinar of the series brings together the strands of mentoring through a ‘Move Me On’ style case-studies workshop, with participants tackling common mentoring quandaries together. Release date: Tuesday 22 April 2025Expiry...

Webinar series: Meaningful and useable assessment in the secondary history classroom Session 6: A history teacher’s 'markbook' This session will consider what it might be most useful for history teachers to keep a record of over the course of a year. Every time we read pupils’ work or listen to...

Webinar series: Meaningful and useable assessment in the secondary history classroom Session 5: A year in assessment This session will put forward a couple of examples of what meaningful and useable assessment could look like across a school year at Key Stage 3. The session will explore the range of...

Webinar series: Meaningful and useable assessment in the secondary history classroom Session 3: Assessing pupils’ answers to enquiry questions  This session will consider how history teachers can go about ‘marking’ pupils’ answers to enquiry questions in a way that values the pupils’ own voice and independent thinking, and avoids restricting...

Webinar series: Meaningful and useable assessment in the secondary history classroom Session 2: Assessing the historical parts This session will explore how history teachers can isolate and assess individual components, or parts, of pupils’ historical knowledge, but without reducing this to an assessment of isolated facts. The session will include examples...

Webinar series: Meaningful and useable assessment in the secondary history classroom Session 4: Assessing the historical whole  This session will set out a range of tasks and questions, beyond answering an enquiry question, that require pupils to draw on the knowledge they have built cumulatively throughout the curriculum. The session will...

Mentoring beginning and early career history teachers in the secondary school Session 1: Developing subject knowledge This first webinar will begin with the question: What do beginning and early career history teachers need to know about history? It will explore the substantive and disciplinary subject knowledge that is essential for...

Embracing messiness: teaching disciplinary thinking in history Session 4: Historical writing This session focuses on how we can support our students to write like historians. We will explain why PEE models and other simplistic frameworks actually limit our students and instead we should look to the work of historians as...

Webinar series: Effective oracy in the secondary history classroom Session 2: How can we support strong oracy in history classrooms?Focus: Key Stages 3 and 4 | Presenter: Toby Dove This session will explore different strategies for promoting and embedding good oracy within a history classroom. The session will consider the...

Webinar series: Effective oracy in the secondary history classroom Session 3: How might we go about assessing oracy in history classrooms?Focus: Key Stages 3 and 4 | Presenter: Toby Dove This session will put forward and then critique a framework for assessing oracy within a history classroom context. It will...

Embracing messiness: teaching disciplinary thinking in history Session 3: Interpretations: complexity without confusions This session delves into interpretations. It analyses how we can be both too simplistic and too complex with our approach. It will explore a different approach to interpretations and give practical approaches to exemplify what this could...

Embracing messiness: teaching disciplinary thinking in history Session 2: Keeping sources messy This session looks into how source work has often been too tidy in the classroom setting and the reasons behind this. It will explore a different approach to working with sources and evidence and give practical approaches to exemplify what...

Mentoring beginning and early career history teachers in the secondary school Session 4: Navigating sensitive, emotive and controversial histories The fourth webinar considers how to support beginning and early career history teachers to tackle more sensitive, emotive and controversial histories in the classroom, and harness the potential of their mentee...

Webinar series: Effective oracy in the secondary history classroom Session 5: OK! Talk to me, let me hear your argumentFocus: Key Stage 5 | Presenter: Dani Hilliard This session will look at potential solutions to some of the problems that students have writing history at A-level. At the core of this session...