Learning Labs for Social Studies: Supporting Teachers Practice Through Collective Work With Students

• In Event: Designing for and Studying Teacher Learning: Analyzing Recent Professional Development Initiatives for Social Studies Inquiry Teaching

Abstract

Purposes and Perspectives
We take up the challenge to support social studies teachers who are learning to teach inquiry by adapting a PD model that is embedded in the everyday work of teaching (Kazemi et al., 2018) and assessing its impact on social studies teacher and student learning. We share the theory and structure of this model - Learning Labs for Social Studies (LLSS) - and the data that helps us understand it as a mechanism for change.

We conceptualize teacher learning as change in instructional practice, teacher thinking, and student outcomes. Teachers learn by doing (Chi & Wylie, 2014), through active engagement with content and colleagues over time focused on work aligned with their everyday demands (Desimone et al., 2015). Teachers learn through learning cycles of collaborative engagement in planning, enactment, and reflection as they consider their students’ needs (McDonald, Kazemi, & Kavanagh, 2013). LLSS involve co-planning, co-teaching in classrooms, and reflecting.

Method
We use Design-Based Research (Brown, 1992) to study teachers’ learning to teach social studies inquiry during one year of LLSS in comparison to teachers who participated in conventional PD while using the same curriculum.

We use videorecorded and transcribed teacher interactions during multiple LLSS learning cycles. We compare teachers’ talk across the day to identify ideas they take up during co-teaching or lesson revisions. We compare their discourse and instruction to student writing and talk to identify improvements in teachers’ asset-based thinking. We focus on one LLSS session that centered Black abolitionists, challenging dominant narratives framing white abolitionists as responsible for ending slavery, and compare to one PD session on the same topic without LLSS. Secondary data documents individual teachers’ student outcomes and instructional practices outside PD.

Findings and Significance
Several features of LLSS supported teachers’ collective thinking and engagement: common lessons; artifacts of students’ thinking and centering student thinking; time for co-planning, co-teaching, and debriefing; and pausing instruction to discuss teaching. Teachers’ interactions illustrate the changes in their thinking and practice over the course of the PD day.

While planning, teachers collectively built pedagogical content knowledge when sharing challenges they noticed in students’ thinking (e.g., students conflated abolitionism and the civil rights movement), and developed pedagogical reasoning together as they modified questions to center students’ incoming knowledge of/experiences with silenced stories and Black freedom fighters. Teachers developed nuanced content knowledge, evident in interactions about how to support students’ thinking about the sources and central question while planning. Later, they implemented both sets of ideas when co-teaching. Tracking student talk and written work while co-teaching and debriefing student thinking led some teachers to see students’ strengths where they had originally fixated on deficits, and led teachers to build on students’ thinking in the future.

Teachers overwhelmingly supported LLSS and developed their social studies inquiry teaching as they participated moreso than those in conventional PD. This paper develops our understanding of the mechanisms that support teachers learning to make significant instructional shifts called for by the C3 Framework while also taking a critical approach to social studies.

Authors

• Chauncey Monte-Sano, University of Michigan
  Presenting Author

• Mary J. Schleppegrell, University of Michigan
  Presenting Author

• Amanda B. Jennings, University of Michigan
  Presenting Author

• Martha Epperson, University of Michigan
  Presenting Author

• Logan Day Eiland, University of Michigan
  Presenting Author