Subject knowledge updating is enjoyable and a huge challenge in a busy teacher life. There are fantastic initiatives, such as The History Teachers’ Book Club which featured in a previous post, which make this more collegiate. Connected to this, some historians are super generous with their time and engage with history teachers on social media and at conferences. Nevertheless, there can’t be many of us who look back and don’t get a bit embarrassed about what we used to say about topics that we would never say now we know more. It’s a career long challenge!

Something we have had a number of colleagues ask for is a list of reading, roughly by topic, with a review attached. As the HA Secondary Committee we’ve started putting a list together for colleagues new to topics here: history-teacher-subject-knowledge-2  It’s just a start, but the idea is to have useful, accessible books with a quality review on one easy to access list. Please help us make it better by sending in suggestions for us to add via @histassoc or enquiries@history.org.uk.

You can find even more book reviews on the HA website here. Even better… write a review of your own that includes how you have been inspired by reading history to change how you teach and we will feature it here! You can read reviews by other history teaching colleagues by going to the ‘reviews’ category here on OBHD.

On his website www.thinkinghistory.co.uk Ian Dawson provides an introductory reading list for the Middle Ages and for the Wars of the Roses.

This all adds to the list of useful free resources we are trying to bookmark in one place to help colleagues in a hurry. Please let us know if you have other ideas for helpful collations. Lists and indices of sources of substantive and disciplinary knowledge