Teacher Adaptation of Document-Based History Curricula

• In Event: 70.057 - Prospects and Challenges in Teacher Curricular Adaptation Across Disciplines

Abstract

Purpose and Perspectives
Research on history curriculum, in general, is scant (Brophy, 1997). Research on teacher adaptation of history curricular materials is almost non-existent. The Reading Like a Historian Project, a document-based history curricular intervention in five high schools, represents one of the few examinations of the effects of a history curriculum on student learning (Reisman 2012a, b). After the initial study, the curriculum materials were refined, expanded to include world history, and made freely available online. Since 2009, they have been downloaded more than 1.2 million times. Here, we discuss our analysis of teacher adaptations of Reading Like a Historian curricular materials.

The purpose of each lesson in the Reading Like a Historian curriculum is to engage students in active historical inquiry, rather than passive retention of facts. The lesson plans contain a predictable arc of activity structures, including: the introduction of background knowledge; inquiry examination of 2-5 modified historical documents; and whole-class discussion. Since the online launch of the curriculum, teachers have received training in the Reading Like a Historian approach in both pre-service teacher education and in-service settings. Until this study, we had not examined how teachers adapt existing Reading Like a Historian lessons for particular groups of students.

Methods
This study asked the following questions: Which of the more than 100 Reading Like a Historian lessons have teachers chosen to adapt? What do these adaptations suggest about the needs of their students? What do the adaptations suggest about teacher understanding of historical inquiry? We invited teachers via email to submit an example of a Reading Like a Historian lesson plan that they had adapted for their students and taught. We contacted two groups of teachers: teachers who had received pre-service training in the approach and teachers who had attended an intensive summer professional development workshop in the approach. We randomly selected 25% of respondents from each cohort and conducted follow-up interviews, where we asked teachers to explain the reasoning behind their adaptations.

Results and Significance
Preliminary analysis of the data suggests some compelling patterns in teacher adaptation. First, we found no correlation between the lesson plans that teachers chose to adapt and overall popularity (as determined by total number of downloads). Second, we coded for which aspect of the lesson was most dramatically adapted (e.g., warm-up/hook; background knowledge; documents; reading/analysis scaffolds), and found that teachers were most likely to adapt the warm-up and background knowledge sections of the lesson. Preliminary analysis of interview data suggests similar patterns: when asked for what motivated adaptations, in general, teachers most often mentioned concern for student engagement, on the one hand, and concern about content coverage on the other. However, we also encountered examples where teachers added additional documents or tweaked the central historical question. In all cases (that we subsequently interviewed), these teachers did so after having taught the lesson in its original form at least once. These findings suggest that teacher adaptations are strongly influenced by feedback from classroom use of curricular materials.

Authors

• Bradley Fogo, Stanford University

• Abby Reisman, University of Pennsylvania

• Joel Breakstone, Stanford University