Innovations in Teaching History: Promoting Historical Learning, Historical Understanding, and the Common Core Standards

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium brings together researchers of history education who are engaged in designing and studying innovative curriculum interventions that promote historical learning, historical understanding, and writing and speaking about history – domain-specific skills that appear in the Common Core Standards. Specifically, they: 1) examine how middle school students express their understanding of history in writing and speech, and 2) discuss the underpinnings and affordances of instructional models and materials, especially designed for middle school students, to improve their historical understanding and the skills they use to express it. The studies offer new insights on how students can connect meaningfully to the past through personalized instruction, online learning, intellectualized classroom discourse, and curricula that integrate content and the Common Core Standards.

Sub Unit

• Division C - Learning and Instruction / Section 1b: Humanities, Social Sciences, Fine Arts

Chair

• Christopher C. Martell, Boston University

Papers

• Historical Reading and Writing Apprenticeships for Adolescent Readers: Framing Instruction Within a Disciplinary Cognitive Apprenticeship - Susan De La Paz, University of Maryland; Chauncey Monte-Sano, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor; Mark K. Felton, San José State University

• Writing Like a Historian: An Analysis of the Writing of Heterogeneous Middle School Learners - Cynthia M. Okolo, Michigan State University; Carol Sue Englert, Michigan State University

• Defending the Public Good With Texts: Urban Middle School Students’ Classroom Debates About Ancient Civilizations - Leslie Duhaylongsod, Harvard University

• Evaluating Eighth-Grade Social Studies Teachers’ Implementation of a Common Core-Aligned Literacy Intervention - Abby Reisman, University of Pennsylvania

Discussant

• Michael Nussbaum, University of Nevada - Las Vegas