Teaching Text-Based Whole-Class Discussion to Preservice History Teachers

• In Event: Core Practices in Teacher Education: Preparing Teachers to Facilitate Whole-Class Discussion

Abstract

Although rare, discussion has the potential to play an especially powerful role in social studies classrooms. If participatory democracy demands a citizenship capable of engaging in reasoned deliberation across diverse perspectives (Gutmann, 1987), then social studies classrooms should serve as training grounds for such deliberations (Hess, 2009). The study of history, in particular, invites students to wrestle with and reason across conflicting interpretations. Debate animates and sustains the discipline. At the same time, historians ground their interpretations in the documentary record, scrutinizing and corroborating sources (Carr, 1967). Whole-class text-based discussion affords students an opportunity to reach beyond the familiar and engage in the sustained, deliberative, textual analysis about the past.

In this paper, we discuss our shared understanding of discussion in history classrooms, we compare the design of practice-based instruction around whole-class discussion facilitation in two social studies methods courses (one elementary and one secondary), and examine intern uptake of the practice in their classroom placements.

Our data sources include: recordings of videoconference meetings of researchers and teacher educators, video recordings of methods course sessions that focused on teaching discussion facilitation, interviews with teacher educators, video recordings of interns facilitating discussion in their placements and their accompanying reflections, paper and pencil assessments of interns’ ability to analyze and plan for discussion. We conducted multiple analytic passes of the data collected and identified patterns that emerged (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). We developed codes iteratively by applying initial codes independently, comparing and discussing differences, and revising the protocol. We double-coded data to ensure reliability across researchers.

The research findings involve three themes:

Specification of the practice: As a subject matter group, we extended the shared consortium definition of discussion to reflect the particular demands of facilitating discussions about the past. Our addendum to the shared definition reflects the extent to which productive discussion in history class depends on the design and quality of the instructional materials as well as instructors’ focus on guiding questions and evidence-based thinking.

Comparisons across TE contexts: Although both teacher educators shared similar rationales for emphasizing discussion in social studies, preliminary analyses reveal interesting differences across contexts. Whereas the elementary social studies TE emphasized and had interns rehearse particular discursive moves to facilitate a discussion, the secondary TE placed far more emphasis on the design of materials that might foster discussion. However, when interns rehearsed discussion facilitation in each setting, the elementary interns did so with materials they designed, whereas the secondary interns rehearsed with materials provided by the TE.

Intern uptake: Despite variations in how discussion was presented in methods, we found patterns among intern enactment, all of which have implications for future methods instruction. First, while interns were able to elicit and respond to students’ ideas, they did not link or connect students’ ideas. Second, interns invested significant effort in facilitating student comprehension of texts, rather than engaging them in legitimate historical debates. Third, student discourse was closely related to the problem space opened by the materials and interns’ awareness of that problem space.

Authors

• Bradley Fogo, Stanford University

• Sarah Schneider Kavanagh, University of Washington - Seattle

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

• Abby Reisman, University of Pennsylvania