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The Dawson Lectures
Multipage Article
In 2021, Ian Dawson suggested there should be a place and a way for us to honour and respect those who have gone above and beyond to help support, nurture and promote those involved with teaching, as well as producing resources and guidance that can assist teachers with developing their...
The Dawson Lectures
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Monty’s school: the benign side of Viscount Montgomery of Alamein
Historian article
Field-Marshal Montgomery has a reputation as a strong-willed battle-hardened leader, with a touch of the impetuous. Few know of his charitable side and yet in his later years this side was just as important to his activities. In this article we find out a bit more of this often simplistically...
Monty’s school: the benign side of Viscount Montgomery of Alamein
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The mechanics of history: interpretations and claim construction processes
Teaching History article
Holly Hiscox was concerned that many of her A-level students – asked to evaluate three different historical interpretations for their non-examined assessment task – still tended to hold unhelpful misconceptions about the nature of interpretations. In this article she explains how she created an introductory scheme of work to help them understand...
The mechanics of history: interpretations and claim construction processes
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Investigating students' prior understandings of the Holocaust
Teaching History article
Students make sense of new learning on the basis of their prior understandings: we cannot move our students' thinking on unless we understand what they already know. In this article, Edwards and O'Dowd report how they set out to scope a group of Y ear 8 students' prior learning and...
Investigating students' prior understandings of the Holocaust
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Film: The Making of Early England 500-1066
Virtual Branch Lecture Recording
In this Virtual Branch lecture Michael Wood returns to his popular territory of Early England 500-1066 using the lives of specific stories and individuals to cast light on the period. This lecture was recorded on the 9 July 2020 as part of the HA Virtual Branch and is available to all...
Film: The Making of Early England 500-1066
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Modelling the discipline
Teaching History article
David Hibbert and Zaiba Patel decided to work together after becoming concerned that school history curricula might not enable students to interrogate popular British mythologising about World War II. Building on these pre-existing concerns, their collaboration with the historian Yasmin Khan yielded an Interpretations enquiry which asked students to consider...
Modelling the discipline
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The Great Debate 2026
The HA's public speaking competition open to school years 10-13
The Historical Association is delighted to announce Rayburn Tours as the official sponsor of the Great Debate 2026. Find out more
What is the Great Debate?
The Great Debate is a public speaking competition where students have 5 minutes to present their speech arguing their answer to the question.
Over the past couple of...
The Great Debate 2026
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What’s the wisdom on… Interpretations of the past
Teaching History feature
How often do your pupils actually look at the products of historians – their scholarly writing, their debates, their to-and-fro of argument?
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...
What’s the wisdom on… Interpretations of the past
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Bob Dylan and the concept of evidence
Teaching History article
No edition of Teaching History devoted to creativity could be complete without returning to the riches that popular songs offer to historians and history teachers alike. The five Bob Dylan songs that Christopher Edwards explores here are chosen not merely for their ‘literary qualities' and ‘emotional charge'; they also provide...
Bob Dylan and the concept of evidence
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Film: The new Ofsted education inspection framework (EIF) 2019
HA Conference Keynote Speech
The film below was taken at the HA Annual Conference in Chester May 2019 and features Heather Fearn, Inspector Curriculum and Professional Development Lead, Ofsted.
This session aimed to explain Ofsted’s approach to inspecting the curriculum under the new education inspection framework (EIF) that will come into effect in September 2019, with...
Film: The new Ofsted education inspection framework (EIF) 2019
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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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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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‘Through the looking glass’
Journal article
Danielle Donaldson began to notice the verbs that her pupils used to express their ideas. She noticed that more successful pupils were using carefully chosen verbs to express their conceptual thinking about causation or change, and wondered how this might relate to, and reflect, the breadth and security of their...
‘Through the looking glass’
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Seeing beyond the frame
Teaching History article
History teachers frequently show pupils visual images and often expect pupils to interrogate such images as evidence. But confusions arise and opportunities are missed when pupils do this without guidance on how to ‘read’ the image systematically and how to place it in context. Barbara Ormond gives a detailed account...
Seeing beyond the frame
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The Establishment of English Protestantism 1558-1608
Classic Pamphlet
The Reformation which Queen Elizabeth and her ministers created was a series of acts of state, but if we consider it only at the level of official hopes and pronouncements, we will paint a picture of hopeless unreality. For the Reformation to success, the government needed to follow up its...
The Establishment of English Protestantism 1558-1608
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Attempting to reach the heart of the matter
Journal article
Michael McIntyre and Vanessa Hull explain the work of Facing History and Ourselves, an education organisation based in the United States and working internationally.
Facing History aims to engage students in reflection on why violence occurred in the past, on what this teaches us about the world today and on...
Attempting to reach the heart of the matter
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Thinking about… the Partition of British India in August 1947
Article
Shortly before midnight on 14 August 1947 Jawaharlal Nehru, leader of the Indian National Congress (the main nationalist organisation in British India), rose in India’s Constituent Assembly in New Delhi to deliver his famous ‘Tryst with Destiny’ speech that marked the end of 200 years of British rule in the...
Thinking about… the Partition of British India in August 1947
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Polychronicon 167: The strange career of Richard Nixon
Teaching History feature
If you know just one thing about the career of the 37th President of the United States, it is likely to be this: Watergate. Nixon’s resignation in August 1974 was caused by his decision to cover up a burglary at the Democratic Party’s campaign headquarters for the 1972 election, which...
Polychronicon 167: The strange career of Richard Nixon
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Polychronicon 166: The ‘new’ historiography of the Cold War
Teaching History feature
A great deal of new writing on the Cold War sits at the crossroads of national, transnational and global perspectives. Such studies can be so self-consciously multi-archival and multipolar, methodologically pluralist in approach and often ‘decentring’ in aim, that some scholars now worry that the Cold War risks losing its coherence as a distinct object of...
Polychronicon 166: The ‘new’ historiography of the Cold War
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The Great Charter
Classic Pamphlet
The following introduction to and translation of Magna Carta was made for the use of my pupils and is here published in response to a suggestion that it may be of use to others. The Charter bristles with technical legal terms and its Latin is often ambiguous since the language...
The Great Charter
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Teaching the Historic Environment
Guidance for teaching the Historic Environment in new GCSE courses
The GCSE History criteria specify that the courses should cover three geographical contexts: local, British and European/wider world. The requirement to include some local history has been developed into the study of a locality in its Historic Environment. This has been developed in four different ways by the Awarding bodies...
Teaching the Historic Environment
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The Second World War
Classic Pamphlet
On 5 September 1939 the German Führer, Adolf Hitler, paid a surprise visit to the corps which was in the forefront of his army's ferocious assault upon Poland. As they passed the remains of a smashed Polish artillery regiment, the corps commander, General Guderian, astonished Hitler by telling him that...
The Second World War
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The knowledge illusion
Teaching History article
Focusing on students’ attempts to explain the relative significance of different factors in Hitler’s rise to power, Catherine McCrory explores the vexed question of why students who seem able to express necessary historical knowledge on one occasion cannot effectively reproduce it on another. Drawing on a detailed analysis of what...
The knowledge illusion
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The Victorian Age
Classic Pamphlet
This Classic Pamphlet was published in 1937 (the centenary of the accession of Queen Victoria, who succeeded to the throne on June 20, 1837).
Synopsis of contents:
1. Is the Victorian Age a distinct 'period' of history?
Landmarks establishing its beginning: the Reform Bill, railways, other inventions, new leaders in...
The Victorian Age
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Tracking the health of history in England’s secondary schools
Teaching History article
In 2009 the Historical Association conducted the first of what has become an annual survey of history teachers in England. Its aim was to get beyond bare statistics relating to subject uptake and examination success to examine the reality of history teaching across all kinds of schools and to map...
Tracking the health of history in England’s secondary schools
