Promises and Perils in Attempting to Change History Teachers’ Practices: Results From an 18-Month Teaching American History Grant Intervention

• In Event: When More of the Same Old Story Is Just Not Enough: Possibilities and Challenges of Teaching Students and Their Teachers to Think Historically

Abstract

After two earlier three-year efforts to shift history teachers’ practices under the auspices of federally funded Teaching American History (TAH) grant programs, one school system and its university-historian partners chose to embark on a different strategy. Specifically, the two earlier interventions sought to focus teachers around teaching history as an investigative practice following recent research (e.g., Donovan & Bransford, 2005; Levesque, 2008; Levstik & Barton, 1997; VanSledright, 2011; Wineburg, 2001). Yet, the broad, coverage curriculum pressed teachers toward traditional stand-and-deliver practices, thus undermining the spirit of the intervention. Consequently, school system administrators and university-based historians worked together to reduce the breadth of the curriculum and re-emphasize teaching history as investigation. The result was a program centered around the development of history labs, i.e., curriculum units organized as investigation of open-ended historical questions through the analysis of multiple primary and secondary sources, an approach that could facilitate student engagement with the way of thinking typical of history.
This paper explores the learning outcomes for the 20 elementary, middle-school, and high-school teachers involved in this reconceptualized intervention effort. Data were drawn from a multi-scale assessment instrument administered in a time-series design (pre/post) and from classroom observations of and interviews with participating teachers. We examine in particular growth (or lack thereof) in historical knowledge, epistemic positioning, pedagogical content knowledge, and interest as participating teachers designed and taught these investigative curriculum units. We also analyze the criteria that appeared to guide teacher pedagogical moves and the effectiveness of the program in fostering ideas about history and effective pedagogical practice in line with the overall goals of the intervention. We provide both aggregate results from participants as well as specific case study examples to illustrate our claims.
Results suggest that program-based cognitive growth and epistemic reconsiderations necessary for change in practice continued to be attenuated by incongruence between how U.S. history was expected to be taught in the technocratic, routinized culture of schools and that of the reform-minded, research-based professional judgment-oriented ideas cultivated within the TAH program intervention. In particular, teachers were resistant to abandon technical, generic goals and criteria to embrace and foster history-specific goals and ways of thinking. For example, they continued to focus on outcomes such as student respect for general rules of writing or formal reference to sources and were much less inclined to give priority to the nature of the arguments or discussion of the evidence provided by the students. Overall, common technocratic organizational routines in the internal environments of schools (sanctioned by school leaders and non-participating teachers) that were resistant to change consistently undermined the intervention influences rather than supporting them. The paper and presentation will discuss these routines and their school culture elements to show how they contrasted with the TAH program reform efforts as a means of understanding the outcomes. Several implications for future such efforts are also explored.

Authors

• Bruce A. VanSledright, University of North Carolina - Charlotte

• Liliana Maggioni, The Catholic University of America

• Kimberly Reddy, University of Maryland - College Park