Teaching American History

Abstract

The Teaching American History program in Arkansas's Little Rock School District will target teachers who are new to the district or to teaching American history in 19 schools most in need of improvement and where student literacy levels are low. Only one percent of the district's history teachers have a degree in American history; therefore, Teaching American History will provide content-rich professional development: an American History Academy (a 45-hour online course and seven 1-day colloquia during the year); a 5-day summer history institute; a 5-day summer field study; three seminars on using history sources in an online environment; history book club meetings; community-based symposia featuring guest speakers; and a co-teaching program for high school teachers. A cadre of six lead teachers will create opportunities for collaboration among history teachers across the district. Teaching American History will begin with a core group of 28 teachers participating in the academy; by the end of Year 1, 53 teachers will be engaged, with approximately 50 teachers added in each subsequent year until all 201 history teachers in the targeted schools are included by Year 5. Participating teachers will explore how the concepts in the Preamble to the Constitution (justice, domestic tranquility, common defense, general welfare, and liberty) have been a refining and defining force in shaping a more perfect union. Instructional strategies will focus on historical thinking, reading and writing in the content areas, technology integration, and analysis of primary sources. Lessons learned and best practices will be disseminated within professional networks at the local, regional, and national levels.

East Meets Southwest: Traditional American History for Mesa Public School Teachers II

Abstract

Mesa Unified School District, the largest school district in Arizona, serves students from Mesa, Salt River, Fort McDowell, and the Navaho and Hopi communities. East Meets Southwest will focus on 10 of the district's most disadvantaged/underachieving schools as it immerses teachers in substantive professional development. Annual activities will include a day-long Library of Congress training and a 2-day National Archives Training (Year 1), summer mentoring institutes (Years 1 and 2), a 5-day summer colloquium, two 1-day seminars, a 2-day workshop, two half-day curriculum mapping sessions, and travel-study field experiences. Lectures, peer discussions, independent study, research, and electronic field trips will be embedded in program activities. Under the mentorship of teachers with experience in another Teaching American History grant, participating teachers will meet in Professional Learning Communities to accomplish vertical articulation of content and teaching practices, to develop assessments, to review lesson plans, and to develop new content that can be incorporated by teachers throughout the district. Thirty teachers from six elementary schools and four junior high schools will participate throughout all three years of the program. East Meets Southwest will explore the country's traditions, founding principles, and ongoing struggles by connecting regional history to a meaningful narrative of traditional American history. Teachers will learn to incorporate historical thinking, primary source materials, biography, content-based teaching strategies, and strategies such as debate, role-play, and historical reenactment. Professional Learning Communities will be sustained beyond the life of the program, and a Web site will provide district-wide access to lesson plans, alternative assessments, primary source information, and other resources.

Plowing Freedom's Ground

Abstract

The Lee County, Tallapoosa County, Alexander City, and Phoenix City School Districts in eastern Alabama include four schools that had not achieved Adequate Yearly Progress and two that were in Year 2 Delay status at the time of the grant application. Plowing Freedom's Ground will target schools with low student achievement in history and few teachers who have completed advanced course work in U.S. history. Yearly activities will include a week-long summer seminar, a week-long lesson study workshop during which teachers will prepare problem-based historical inquiry lessons, three day-long professional development retreats during the school year, and mentoring and technical support through affiliates of the Persistent Issues in History Network at Auburn and Indiana Universities. Lesson Study teams will visit one another's classrooms during the year to observe and videotape fellow teachers delivering jointly designed lessons. A cohort of 30 teachers will participate in the program each year and will be encouraged to develop themselves as curriculum leaders and mentors in their districts. The thematic focus of Plowing Freedom's Ground will be pivotal events in American history that exemplify the persistent democratic challenge of ensuring fairness and justice for all Americans. The primary instructional strategy to be employed is problem-based historical inquiry learning; Lesson Study workshops will help teachers develop technology-enhanced, problem-based historical inquiry lessons that promote student engagement, historical thinking, and reasoning and democratic citizenship. Each Lesson Study team’s refined lesson plan, support materials, and video products will become part of the Persistent Issues in History Web site.

Learning From History and Social Studies Textbooks

Image
A student completing a reading assignment from his text-book. NHEC
Article Body

Good teachers seek to build on their students’ basic notions about history, but the information must be presented clearly. In one important study, Isabel Beck, Margaret McKeown, and Erika Gromoll from the University of Pittsburgh identified ways that social studies content in textbooks could be improved, since better organization and presentation enhance students’ understanding.

The researchers examined four publishers' programs for grades 4-7. They reviewed each social studies textbook and teacher manual, including how fifth grade textbooks handled the period leading up to the American Revolution.

They found that the textbooks left out or misordered the cause and consequence of historical events and frequently failed to highlight main ideas. Three common problems were:

  • inadequate explanations
  • assumed background knowledge that was left unexplored
  • unclear goals

Inadequate Explanations
One key problem was a failure to explain the relationship between a cause and an event. For example, although two of the textbooks described colonial life, they didn't explain why or how the colonists became disgruntled with British rule.

Presumptions of Background Knowledge
All four textbooks presumed a fund of knowledge that most fifth graders lack. One chapter even presented the motto “No Taxation Without Representation” without explaining the concept of representative government. The Pittsburgh researchers recommended that the texts help students understand what it means to be represented in a government body before tackling the cause of the Revolution.

Unclear Goals
If goals aren't clearly established, readers may struggle with a text. Researchers found that section headings were vague or didn't clearly tie into subject matter. One textbook introduced the Revolutionary War period with a brief overview entitled “Quarrels With England.” But the very next heading, “War Bring Changes,” concerned the French and Indian War. Thus, students studying one war would be confused by information about a different, seemingly unconnected war. According to the researchers, the textbooks assume young readers can connect cause and event without help, when this is not necessarily the case.

In the Classroom
  • Review your textbook and analyze how particular topics are covered.
  • Give students a meaningful introduction before assigning readings from the text.
  • Use additional materials to complement, challenge or provide context for information from the textbook.
  • Read more about teaching with textbooks.
Sample Application

Unclear Content Goals
The textbooks never fully established clear goals for studying the French and Indian War. Beck and her colleagues suggested they follow the lead of a good teacher who might introduce the topic the following way:

“We’re going to spend the next couple of weeks talking about the American Revolution. But fifteen years before the Revolution, there was an earlier war on the North American continent, this one between Britain and France. I’m going to talk about that war first, because it laid the groundwork for bad feelings between Britain and the colonies that led to our Revolution."

For more information

Isabel Beck, Margaret McKeown, Gail Sinatra, and J.A. Loxterman, “Revising Social Studies Text from a Text-Processing-Perspective: Evidence of Improved Comprehensibility,” Reading Research Quarterly 26 (1991): 251-76.

Margaret McKeown, Isabel Beck, Gail Sinatra, and J.A. Loxterman, “The Contribution of Prior Knowledge and Coherent Text to Comprehension,” Reading Research Quarterly 27 (1992): 79-93.

Bibliography

Isabel Beck, Margaret McKeown, and Erika Gromoll, “Learning From Social Studies Text,” Cognition and Instruction 6 (1989): 99-158.

Making Sense of Advertisements

Article Body

Advertisements are all around us today and have been for a long time; advertising-free "good old days" just don't exist. This guide offers an overview of advertisements as historical sources and how historians use them; a brief history of advertising; questions to ask when interpreting ads as historical evidence; an annotated bibliography; and a guide to finding advertisements online.

Website
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/ads/

History in Every Classroom

Article Body

Bringing History Home (BHH), a K-5 curriculum and professional development project, started in 2001 and was part of several TAH grants. Focused on moving history from the margins of the traditional elementary curriculum into the mainstream of the school day, the project prepares all regular K-5 classroom teachers in participating school districts to teach sequential history units.

. . . the project prepares all regular K-5 classroom teachers in participating school districts to teach sequential history units

The BHH curriculum consists of two instructional units per grade level, with lessons that center on trade books, historic images, documents and statistics, and activities to engage students in contextualizing, analyzing and synthesizing the information sources. Seven years after its inception, the BHH program is taught in six Iowa school districts, and elements of the curriculum are spreading to schools in various other states.

With approximately 1,000 student learning assessments collected from more than 120 K-3 classrooms, BHH provides additional evidence for the growing body of research into how children learn history. (See Evaluation of the Teaching American History Project: Bringing History Home II).

History in the K-5 Classroom

So how did history learning become a part of the K-5 classrooms in the project?

By exploring the intersection of our grant components with teacher attitudes and expertise, we begin to understand how and why the project impacts classroom instruction. The intersection of project and teachers includes the following elements:

  • School-wide teacher participation.
  • A longitudinal and sequential professional development design.
  • Teachers learning history through the process of adapting and teaching instructional units.
  • Respecting the reality of teachers’ working conditions.
  • When teachers encounter history as an interpretive, constructivist process, they become excited about teaching it.
  • Incorporating literacy and meta-cognitive strategies into history explorations to enhance student learning in history.
  • When history timelines and maps are transformed from static resources into dynamic construction activities, they are powerful learning tools.
  • Student learning enhances and inspires teachers’ interest in history.
  • When exemplary teachers serve as mentors, they jump-start new teachers’ enthusiasm and preparation to teach history.
Pragmatic Considerations

Our TAH grant proposals centered on preparing all K-5 teachers in participating schools to teach history. In order to secure and inspire the universal participation of teachers, our project design team prioritized pragmatic considerations when designing curricular units and workshop activities.

We knew we had to keep expectations for teacher time commitments to a reasonable level. While we always secure teacher participation through recruitment rather than administrative edict, we can’t count on teacher self-selection arising from a love of history. We found that fairly significant monetary and book stipends seemed to be the most powerful sign-up motivations for the initial participants, while the participants in the second grant were swayed to join the project by the enthusiastic testimony of veteran BHH teachers.

. . . monetary and book stipends seemed to be the most powerful sign-up motivations for the initial participants, while the participants in the second grant were swayed to join the project by the enthusiastic testimony of veteran BHH teachers

Regardless of the motives that led to their involvement, 100% of the regular classroom teachers in BHH schools participated in the program. This is an important element of the sequential model we use. The self-contained nature of most lower and middle elementary classes means that almost every regular classroom teacher conducts lessons in social studies. If only a few teachers in a school participated in the BHH workshops, only a fraction of students in a school would learn history each year. This would completely derail our goal for students to develop increasingly more sophisticated skills and understanding in history from year to year throughout the elementary grades.

While the project probably would not be successful if we didn’t privilege pragmatic choices, our emphasis on the practical also stems from a desire to not take advantage of teachers’ generosity of spirit and time. It is humbling to work with groups of people whose professional lives are already quite taxed, but who are willing to rise to the occasion of learning new skills and perspectives.

Bibliography

This essay is drawn from "History in Every Classroom: Setting a K-5 Precedent," found in The Teaching American History Project: Lessons for History Educators and Historians by Rachel G. Ragland and Kelly A. Woestman (Routledge, 2009).

What to Do When You Teach It All

Article Body

Teaching American History (TAH) has been an exciting opportunity for me in several ways. As a participating middle school teacher, I gained access to materials, ideas, and knowledge that enhanced my ability to teach American history. After the TAH experience, students left my classroom with more than the traditional rote memorization of historical facts; they developed a wider outlook on historical events and people. I wanted to share that positive experience, so I now work as the History Content Coach for elementary school teachers in another TAH grant.

Teachers who participate in the Savannah-Chatham County Public School grant are involved in a number of content-rich activities. They read scholarly books, such as The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War by Leonard L. Richards, and answer reading response questions. For each book or topic, they participate in an all-day symposium where they hear from the author or an authority on the topic in the morning and spend the afternoon focused on teaching the new content.

Teachers receive a binder with additional background information on the content area and teaching resources, such as vocabulary activities, poems and songs from the time period, reading comprehension activities, lesson plans complete with primary sources, Internet links, and rubrics. Participating teachers leave the symposium with materials ready for immediate classroom use.

The Boon of Multi-Disciplinary History

Addressing the needs of elementary teachers has been a different kind of learning experience for me. They are eager for content and resources, but also for ways to present the content that appeal to a myriad of learning styles. Elementary school teachers are responsible for many subject areas and have limited time to devote solely to social studies. Integrating historical content into other academic areas allows them to teach history throughout the day. Connections with reading and language arts work for a range of topics, but history also works with other parts of the curriculum. For example, sources on Lewis and Clark fit into a unit in science on biomes, minerals, plants, and the environment. The possibilities are endless.

Integrating historical content into other academic areas allows [elementary school teachers] to teach history throughout the day.

Our local TAH program provides a Resource Library that supplements limited supplies at individual schools and facilitates this integration. Teachers can check out class sets of biographies, autobiographies, and historical fiction, helping them combine language arts standards with history content. Access to resources has allowed more elementary school teachers to incorporate social studies reading into their classes.

The Resource Library also provides primary and secondary sources, as well as advice on using the sources in the classroom. Photographs and pictures work especially well with younger students. One teacher created a "walk through" gallery of pictures showing daily life in the 19th century. She asked students to explain what the pictures told them about the time period, appealing to both visual and kinesthetic learners. Students are very observant and can learn much about a person, event, or time period by analyzing images.

One teacher created a "walk through" gallery of pictures showing daily life in the 19th century. She asked students to explain what the pictures told them about the time period, appealing to both visual and kinesthetic learners.
Keeping Lessons Concise

Time is always a key factor, especially for elementary school teachers. When finding or developing lesson plans, we try to keep a realistic time frame in mind. A lesson can be very exciting, but if it requires one hour a day for seven consecutive days and focuses on a narrow topic, teachers will not use it. In many schools, social studies is taught at most three days a week for 30 to 45 minutes. Taking that same lesson and pulling out a part that pertains to a grade-specific standard is a good solution—it presents an interesting lesson that fits with the existing schedule. Another strategy for saving time in the classroom, especially for lessons that rely on online resources, is to put reading selections and primary sources together ahead of time on a CD for easy access.

Elementary school teachers who participate in grant activities are excited to learn new content. The challenge is taking what they have learned back to their classrooms and students. One answer is to provide lesson plans that are ready to use, address various learning styles, and can be incorporated into other subjects such as reading and language arts. This is one of my most important "lessons learned." To facilitate this, I focus on the standards each grade teaches—for elementary school, this includes social studies and language arts—and then emphasize strategies for teaching history within the existing framework.

. . . provide lesson plans that are ready to use, address various learning styles, and can be incorporated into other subjects such as reading and language arts.

Presidents, Politics, and Social Content

Description

From the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum website:

"How did the Apollo program intersect with the whirling social and political climate of the 1960s and early 1970s? Three presidential administrations oversaw the Apollo space program, and each reacted in a different way. Senior curator Roger Launius will focus on the myth of presidential leadership during this time period and will provide context to the political challenges NASA faced with the failure of Apollo I. Curators Allan Needell and Margaret Weitekamp will discuss the fascinating intersections of Ralph Abernathy, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Moon landing and will analyze several political cartoons from the period."

The Clio Project: Thinking Like an Historian

Abstract

The project's high-need southeast Wyoming districts serve a largely rural and growing migrant population in a geographic area of more than 16,000 square miles, so one goal is to define a professional development model that meets the needs of rural schools. Activities will include two 4-week instructional modules and two document-based question workshops during the school year; in the summer, teachers will be involved in a 10-day field excursion and a 1-week curriculum workshop, during which they will develop lesson plans. Teachers can participate in a single year of the program, then choose to continue for an additional year or two; the cadre will include approximately 40 teachers each year, some new and some continuing. As they learn to think like historians, teachers will study decisions and actions of specific people—government and military leaders, soldiers, tribal leaders, businessmen and everyday citizens—whose choices changed the outcome of history. Strategies will include historical inquiry skills, with a significant focus on document-based questioning, and strategies to help students develop critical reading, thinking and writing skills. The Center for History and New Media will lead training on teaching history in the digital age, introducing digital research libraries and multimedia technologies. Graduate credits will be available for completion of certain activities. Teams of teachers will collaborate to produce and implement classroom curricula; these and other materials (e.g., hands-on simulations, games, how-to seminars, distance learning materials) will be available to other teachers through a Web site and participant-led peer workshops.

Teaching as Historians

Abstract

Two of these southern Washington state districts collaborated on a previous Teaching American History grant; it was so successful that teachers on a waiting list made it clear that extending the project—and involving another district—would have value. Each year, teachers will attend seven full-day symposia of scholarly lectures and lesson modeling. In monthly study groups, teachers from all three districts will work as a learning community to solve problems, reflect on practice and conduct lesson study. During a 5-day summer field study, teachers will work directly with historians, archivists and curators at local and regional sites. Five 1-year cohorts of 25 teachers will participate; teachers will be those who need to reach highly qualified status or who come from the lowest performing schools. The project theme of "Towards a More Perfect Union" will guide the exploration of civil rights throughout U.S. history. The Concerns-Based Adoption Model will be the overarching framework for more than 100 hours of annual professional development. Led by expert historians and master history educators, teachers will learn History Habits of Mind and study traditional American history by addressing essential questions about the ideals of democracy, liberty and equality. To promote a culture of instructional excellence and collegiality, project staff will introduce professional learning communities, lesson study and one-on-one mentoring/coaching by teachers who participated in the previous grant. All state teachers will have access to project-created products, including standards-based lesson plans and assessments, activities based on historical texts, in-service units for future use, and classroom kits that incorporate history and archeology for hands-on experiences.

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