Professional development for teachers is essential to improve the quality of history education through National History Day. Teachers in your Affiliate can participate in opportunities from the National Office, but many Affiliates provide additional opportunities for teachers in their program or in collaboration with nearby Affiliates. 

National History Day offers many different types of opportunities, both virtual and in-person. These include virtual opportunities, such as webinars or YouTube Live videos, in-person trainings, such as teacher workshops at the national contest or collaboration with Affiliate coordinators, and multi-day summer institutes.

Ask any experienced NHD coordinator about the best way to expand participation in NHD and use of the NHD program in classrooms, and "teacher workshops" will be their reply. There simply is no better way to grow the program than to plant a seed and provide clear instructions on how to nurture it. With steady and regular effort, it won’t take but a few years before your institution is regarded as the go-to resource for useful professional development.  

Affiliate sponsoring institutions have many options for providing the professional development opportunities that teachers want and need, from becoming approved by the state to collaborating with approved nearby institutions (including K -12 schools) to create unique partnerships. 

NOTE:  Portions of the text in this section are adapted from An Alliance of Spirit: Museum and School Partnerships, published by the American Association of Museums Press in 2010 and co-edited by Beverly Sheppard and Kim Fortney. The text adapted here was written by Kim Fortney in a chapter about professional development for teachers.

Workshop Planning

Gather Background Information

What History Day workshops has your institution offered before, and how did it go? Does any other program area offer professional development for teachers? What information can they share? Beyond what your organization has to share, think about:

• Teachers have many opportunities for professional development. Learn about the competition so that you can offer something distinctive. 

• Find out about your state’s requirements for certified teachers and if your institution can become an approved provider of hours, units, or credits (these terms will vary in definition and usage from state to state). Being able to offer credits to teachers who attend your workshops will immediately give you a significant advantage over those institutions that cannot. Obtaining approved provider status may take a lot of work, but the credibility that it provides is worth it. 

• For the target audience, review any state standards in the broadest range of content areas that apply to your program. These documents may be national, state, local, or, very likely, a combination. Always consider the applicability of content to the language arts curriculum.

Understand the Needs of Your Teachers

Talk with teachers with whom you’ve worked about their experiences with professional development. Ask about: 

• where they go to fulfill their requirements; 

• what resources they utilize; and 

• what has transferred well to the classroom.  

If you already have a group of participating teachers, you can get more feedback about workshop ideas and formats through a survey. Keep in mind that a survey like this may not yield a tremendous number of responses and that, with a small sample size, you will still need to make some judgment calls based on other data. Talking with your advisory group may give you more concrete feedback. 

Ask about:

• what the targeted teachers teach, when, for how long, and with what resources

• how they rate the resources for content that they’re currently using

• to what extent do they integrate content across multiple curriculum areas and present it via the pedagogical techniques that they have learned

• when the best times are for workshops, and what format would work best in their schedule

Understand the Limitations of Your Teachers

Teachers have a lot of demands on their time. Some districts have a strong culture of teachers participating in outside professional development. In others, teachers may be limited to internal opportunities or struggle to attend programs during the school day because of a lack of substitute teachers. Consider using your advisory committee or survey to understand the most effective day of week, length, and format (especially virtual or in-person).  Look at your whole portfolio of professional development opportunities and try different options to see what works best for your Affiliate. 

Think About the Time of Year

There are a few "sweet spots" for different types of opportunities listed below. Remember, teachers will need as much notice as possible to plan for their attendance, so get those dates on the calendar so you can start promoting!

• Most Affiliates hold workshops in the fall (the definition of which varies based on when school starts in your Affiliate). These workshops are often designed for teachers new to participating or participating in the current year.

• Workshops in spring, usually during contest season, can serve as an opportunity to engage with new teachers and give them a "jumpstart" in planning for their participation in the following contest year.

• Summer is a good time to plan any multi-day workshops or institutes. As summer ends, you may be able to connect with specific districts about offering professional development before students return to the buildings.

Leverage the Resources of Your Organization and Partners

Consider what skills or resources your institution or partners can bring to a workshop. Investigate:

• Is there a new exhibit or resource that you want to highlight? 

• Does another organization or program area have technical expertise that would benefit your teachers? Would the exhibits team talk about design? Could your local public television station talk about developing documentaries?

• Are there opportunities to piggyback on another professional development opportunity to promote History Day?

• Can you extend your reach by co-leading a workshop with a partner - a museum, university, state agency, or other non-profit - with a strong relationship with teachers?

Evaluate the Program's Success

Even the most effective programs have a life cycle. If attendance drops after the third year, it’s time to either revamp or eliminate. Evaluation is particularly critical in professional development programs. Through clear learning targets and mixed evaluation methods, you can assess how teachers experienced the session and their retention of content and implementation of new strategies. Conduct these assessments right after each program and at critical points over time, seeking information about how teachers are using what they learned at your session in the classroom, which is the ultimate measure of the success of your program. 

• See the Program Evaluation section for examples of teacher surveys.

Developing Workshop Content

As for what to present in your workshop, there are several options. You could devote an entire workshop to history content, perhaps local history content. You could devote an entire workshop to thoroughly examining NHD, its benefits, and how to incorporate the program in the classroom. You could spend all the available time drilling deep into one of the categories. The possibilities are many, and most of the time, you’ll want to combine elements of each of these themes. 

In any teacher workshop, however, it is critical to relate the content to NHD and provide pedagogical techniques and strategies so that teachers will leave the workshop knowing what you want them to do and how to begin using it in the classroom. Without the pedagogical piece, the chances that your attendees will implement any of what you taught them are significantly reduced. 

Consider the following types of workshops in developing opportunities:

Presenters

As in any profession, presenters who share the experiences or skills of their audience have a significant advantage over those who do not. This does not mean that a coordinator who has never taught in the classroom cannot be an exceptional presenter to a room full of teachers. In these situations, you may be the expert on the program but can leverage the expertise of teachers to provide practical guidance. 

Leading the Workshop Yourself: By all means, if you have coursework or a degree in teaching and any classroom experience, be sure to state this when you introduce yourself at the beginning of the workshop. It will aid in the bonding process and immediately signal to the audience that you speak their language and (may) understand their concerns. 

Working with Co-Presenters: If you do not have training or experience in teaching, and even if you do, it is a very good idea to invite a current or very recent classroom teacher to present for or with you. Think hard about who the best speakers would be for each topic on the agenda.  A good rule of thumb is to ask yourself whether you feel qualified to work directly with teachers on your own. If you are unsure, you may not be qualified; thus, it is even more important to ask others to help or present for you. 

• Do you want to present suggestions to help kids prepare for judging?  Invite one or two of your experienced judges. 

• Do you want to address the reading levels of a few historical documents? Ask an educator with archival experience or a reading specialist.

•  Do you want to provide strategies for explaining the efficacy of NHD to administrators? Ask a teacher who has done just that. 

• Consider your NHD colleagues as presenters. If you want to do a workshop that delves deeply into one of the categories, send a message to your fellow coordinators to find out who does a workshop on a particular category very well. Invite that person to visit your workshop.

The workshops that the NHD delivers utilize, where possible and applicable, a team of presenters, which may include a classroom teacher and a historian in addition to the director of curriculum. All workshops are planned jointly to balance the content and the pedagogy. Special care is taken in selecting the individuals to match the audience's needs. 

Strategies for Presentation

Participants are generally more engaged in workshops where the presenters lecture less, and attendees have a chance to be hands-on and ask questions. An effective strategy is modeling. It is an important teaching tool because attendees can see exactly how to use the technique that is being modeled. Hence, you will want to model the type of instruction you want to see in all history classrooms. At NHD workshops, the director of curriculum takes into consideration the newest research on how teachers and students learn best and continually varies the mode of instruction to maximize participant engagement.

Always develop objectives for what you will present and learning outcomes or statements of what your audience will hopefully take away from your workshop. Include these in the emails or print descriptions of your workshops and evaluate the learning outcomes via the post-workshop survey you provide to your attendees. 

Other Types of Professional Development

District-Specific PD: If there are a large number of participating teachers in a school or district, you may want to offer a workshop just for them. Workshops like this give you a chance to not only deliver content but also give teachers valuable prep time to collaborate with their colleagues. These types of opportunities can be easier for teachers to attend, since they can be scheduled on teacher work days.

Conference Sessions: If you want more information about presenting at conferences, see the Teacher Recruitment section.

Working with Pre-Service Teachers: Build relationships with the pre-service teacher programs in your Affiliate. A one-hour presentation giving them the big picture overview of the program can introduce future teachers to History Day and your organization and build a pool of potential judge recruits.  

FAQ about Teacher Workshops

What if I don't have the expertise to run a workshop? Not all History Day coordinators have a background in education - and that's okay! Talk about what you are the expert at - History Day - and bring in teachers to serve as experts on classroom implementation. 

When is the best time of year to run a workshop? Many programs focus on workshops in the late summer (to prepare teachers to implement the program) and early fall. You want to catch teachers early enough, so they have a reasonable time to introduce and implement the program in that academic year. 

Should I charge registration fees for workshops? This is as much a question of your organizational revenue needs to host workshops as it is about your abilities to collect fees and your Affiliate's teacher culture. Different programs vary widely. Some programs have seen better follow-through on attendance when they charge a fee, some programs have to, and in some, it is unheard of. You can make a good case for charging fees if you provide materials, food, and parking for the workshop. Keep in mind that teachers/schools are already "investing" in the workshop by traveling and getting a substitute. 

How effective are recorded workshops/webinars sessions? I think we are all still figuring it out. Many of us have had better virtual workshop attendance numbers than those who show "live," we hope we reach teachers through the recordings. When possible, try to break longer recordings into smaller segments so teachers don't have to start and stop longer videos. 

Multi-day workshops can be a great deal of work for coordinators but can often be some of the most transformative for participants. In many of these experiences, teachers get to "be the student" and encounter some of the same highs and lows their students will by doing their own historical research. Through the length of the experience and social activities like meals that are often involved, teachers also benefit by building their professional networks with other educators.