Successes and Challenges in Learning to Teach History: Novices’ Uptake of Core Practices

• In Event: Learning Ambitious Teaching: Cases From Across the Disciplines

Abstract

Novice history teachers must learn a great deal in their preservice programs if they are to meet expectations for today’s schools. For the past thirty years, reformers and researchers have called for a focus on historical thinking and understanding (Bain, 2005; Seixas, 1999; VanSledright, 2002; Wineburg, 2001) in classrooms. Research gives us some clues as to how teachers might successfully support their students’ understanding of history and related literacy practices (Monte-Sano, 2008; Nokes, Dole, & Hacker, 2007; Reisman, 2012). But what are the challenges of learning such complicated pedagogy?

Experts argue that preservice programs should focus on a defined set of teaching practices and structure their curriculum around them (e.g., Ball & Forzani, 2010). Practice-based teacher education offers candidates opportunities to “represent,” “decompose,” and “approximate” practices that they are to learn (Grossman et al., 2009), thus making the work of teaching more explicit and giving candidates supported opportunities to learn. In considering disciplinary demands, a recent Delphi Panel (2012) identified 12 practices that are central to teaching history in particular (see https://cset.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/Core%20History%20Teaching%20Practices%20-Final_0.pdf).

We use the Delphi Panel’s findings to guide our analysis of 5 novices’ history teaching after they graduated from one preservice program aimed at cultivating many of these core practices. We ask: (1) To what extent do participants take up core history teaching practices and how? (2) What do novices struggle with as they try to employ these practices? Data for each teacher includes observation protocols from four units of study across their first two years of teaching, classroom artifacts, and interviews. We coded a sub-sample of data together to establish reliability and then coded independently, looking for uptake of core practices and quality of implementation. We regularly met to share findings, refine codes, and challenge findings by considering alternative interpretations and comparing our cases (cf. Yin, 2003).

We found that three of the five novices regularly employed core history teaching practices. They used historical questions and concepts, employed historical evidence, engaged students in historical investigations, and modeled or supported historical reading. Two teachers used core practices peripherally and were less successful in doing so. The two teachers who used the core practices most successfully were most attuned to students’ ideas; others focused more on whether students had correct answers or gave little feedback. In contrast to the Delphi Panel’s findings, we found that instead of selecting and adapting historical sources, these five novices integrated primary sources by using existing curriculum materials (even though the quality varied). Also, novices rarely modeled and supported writing or facilitated discussion, despite an emphasis on these practices during preservice. Last, novices gave surface-level opportunities to learn relevant historical context and concepts, link content, or make personal connections.

In terms of implications, novices need calculated, program-wide support in several areas: eliciting and taking up students’ ideas, facilitating discussion, offering assessments that elicit student reasoning, integrating writing, and teaching background knowledge alongside inquiry. And more than selecting and adapting primary sources in preparing their own lessons, novices should learn to adapt existing curriculum materials.

Authors

• Chauncey Monte-Sano, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

• Jared Aumen, University of Michigan

• Anne Bordonaro, University of Michigan