AHA’s Standards and Guidelines

The following is a selection of the AHA's standards and guidelines focused on teaching and learning issues. All the AHA’s standards and guidelines can be found at Standards and Guidelines for the Discipline.

Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct

Whatever the venue in which they work, professional historians share certain core values that guide their activities and inform their judgments as they seek to enrich our collective understanding of the past.

Guidelines on Accessible Publishing

The American Historical Association urges that published material be accessible to scholars with print-reading disabilities.

Guidelines for Broadening the Definition of Historical Scholarship

These guidelines lay the foundation for a broad expansion of what constitutes historical scholarship.

Guidelines for Online Teaching

Recommendations from the Ad Hoc Committee on Online Teaching.

Criteria for Standards in History/Social Studies/Social Sciences

State departments of education periodically review and revise curriculum frameworks and standards for teaching and learning in history and related fields. In recent years, the American Historical Association has reviewed a number of efforts, contributing in several cases to some useful revisions and also confirming the quality of several completed standards documents.

Guidelines for the Incorporation of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in the Work of the History Profession

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) in History represents a major contribution to the mission of the American Historical Association (AHA) and the discipline and profession of History. Historians in this field present scholarly arguments about historical pedagogy, situate their work in the context of a larger literature on the topic, and rely upon evidence to support their claims.

Guidelines for Historians for the Professional Evaluation of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

These guidelines describe what a SoTL research agenda could look like for a working history teacher and scholar and how departments can evaluate and reward that research.

Guidelines for the Preparation, Evaluation, and Selection of History Textbooks

Good texts must share certain general qualities, which broadly speaking apply to materials from grade school to college. It is vital to utilize these general criteria, along with other selection preferences, in evaluating the range of texts available at any level.

Statement on Dual Enrollment/Concurrent Enrollment

The AHA encourages universities and colleges to strive to improve history education in which professors and teachers share resources and ideas, and that academic history departments have greater oversight of curriculum and instruction of DE/CE.

Statement on Excellent Classroom Teaching of History

The Teaching Division and the Council of the American Historical Association endorse the criteria presented in the following statement as an appropriate basis for evaluating the efforts of institutions at all levels of instruction to establish the prerequisite conditions for historians to provide excellent instruction.

Guidelines for the Preparation of Teachers of History

The study of history is at the heart of liberal learning and lives at the foundation of education in a democracy. Attracting, preparing, retaining, and continuing to develop well-educated and effective teachers of history at all levels is of critical interest to the American Historical Association and the historical profession that it represents.

Benchmarks for Professional Development in the Teaching of History as a Discipline

This document suggests that collaboratives for professional development in history teaching need to be planned and viewed from several vantage points.