Making the Best of a Great Situation
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Directing my first Teaching American History (TAH) grant in 2003, I had three years to spend nearly a million dollars providing professional development to teachers of American history. What could go wrong?
Plenty, of course. Organizational issues aside, the project faced two challenges. First, given the dollars and the time we had to spend, we simply could not get enough teachers to fill the seats. I have heard over the years TAH grant directors complain about recruitment. "We offer these fabulous programs," they sigh, "but people don’t come."
Expanding Program Horizons
Program quality could never overcome the structural issue: the teachers in our service area could not consume all the professional development we offer. We had a serious problem of oversupply.
. . . the teachers in our service area could not consume all the professional development we offer.
None of the obvious solutions made much sense. We couldn't provide less professional development than the grant proposal promised, or serve fewer teachers. We had to expand our pool of teachers, and expand it quickly.
In New England, with its many districts in a small geographical area, the solution was simple if politically tenuous: invite other districts into a consortium to expand the market for our offerings. We maintained our relationship with our primary partner by providing them with preferred service: guaranteed spots, special privileges, and direct curricular support. Our pool of available teachers tripled, and we seldom had any recruitment issues.
Districts more geographically distributed could achieve the same result through distance learning options. Most higher education partners have that capability already; why not use it?
Deciding What to Offer
The second problem had to do with the offerings themselves. The proposal I had been brought in to manage promised a smorgasbord of professional development: institutes, lectures, seminars, and graduate-level courses. We could mix and match as the talents and availability of our historians dictated.
The menu of potential professional development is limited. We asked teachers what they wanted and districts what they would support, and rounded up the usual suspects. But the offerings sometimes sputtered. We filled the seats, and people liked what we gave them, but the self-reported impact on students never satisfied us.
We hit on two solutions, one that any existing grant holder can replicate, and another that has to grow organically out of a proposal from the start.
The organic solution proposes a three-year project that intends to create a specific change in a region. Instead of planning to offer the usual types of professional development organized around a unifying theme, look at what your districts need to organically change the way they teach history.
The first TAH grant I wrote sponsored school-based teams of elementary teachers working together for a year to add flesh to the statewide standards. By the time we finished, a third of the region's elementary schools had gone through the process, and another third had heard detailed reports about the changes.
The second grant supported a research-based induction program for new teachers of American history. Few districts could afford a state-of-the-art induction program, but the TAH grant, coming just as history faculty turned over through retirement, filled that need.
[Ask,]"What do the teachers and districts need to improve history instruction?" rather than "What professional development can we provide teachers and districts?"
These proposals (and more I have written and received) started from the question, "What do the teachers and districts need to improve history instruction?" rather than "What professional development can we provide teachers and districts?" Districts gladly bought in to these organically conceived proposals. We could explain the grant in a sentence, a sentence that spoke to pressing educational needs.
Production as Professional Development
The other program came almost as an afterthought, when the first grant had an unspent balance. We brought together a group of teachers who had worked with us for years. We asked them to assemble booklets of primary sources that they thought could amplify the richness and meaning of some key documents in American history.
We ended up publishing five booklets—on the Declaration, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Gettysburg Address and "I Have a Dream"—each containing 60 or more primary sources. We distributed them for free to every history teacher in the region. The booklets attracted more money and support, and have been distributed across the state.
The teachers who created the booklets described the work as the best professional development they ever experienced, transformative personally and professionally. And the booklets are used, bringing students closer to primary sources, some obvious and some arcane, than ever before.
TAH grants can provide immense service to students and their teachers. A little creativity makes a world of difference in their success.
Working with K-3 Teachers
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Give K-3 teachers as much attention as higher elementary and secondary teachers, say Alice Reilly and Cynthia Szwajkowski. Often overlooked in TAH Grant projects, K-3 teachers must apply U.S. history knowledge differently in classrooms and need teaching strategies tailored to them.
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Working with K-3 Teachers
How was the K-3 Professional Development Structured?
Outcomes
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Alice: One of the reasons why we chose K-3 is because we feel that they are a very underserved group. While we live in the suburbs of Washington and have access to lots of institutions that offer professional development, most of these programs are geared towards secondary teachers. And so the K-3 people are required to teach history in their classrooms because of our state standards and requirements, yet they are generalists, they do not have the background knowledge, and they really don't have access to targeted professional development.
This is a group that had extraordinary enthusiasm for what we were doing because they sense that need in their classrooms.
Cynthia: They were very easily recruited, and then turned around and quickly recruited other teachers. So, this is a group that had extraordinary enthusiasm for what we were doing because they sense that need in their classrooms.
Alice: We did have elementary teachers in our previous grants, and while it was, again, the focus was content, we felt that some of our elementary teachers were intimidated by the content knowledge base of our secondary teachers, who could at times be very intense and passionate about history. And so we decided that as an underserved group, it would be easier to really address their background needs and get them comfortable with the history content, to give them the confidence to be able to do some interesting, engaging, creative ways of instruction.
Cynthia: They read three books during our one-year TAH program, but over the course of the years, they've come back to me with volumes and volumes that they've read.
Alice: And then that enthusiasm that was developed comes across in their instruction, runs over into the kids.
And another unintended consequence of this also was the kids going home and telling their parents. Because at the primary level, parents are always asking, "What did you do in school today? What did you learn?"
And another unintended consequence of this also was the kids going home and telling their parents. Because at the primary level, parents are always asking, "What did you do in school today? What did you learn?" And the kids were just bubbling about what had happened in school and what they had done in history class and learned about it. And with our large ELL population, these are parents that do not have a background in American history, and so the parents are also learning from the kids. And of course, that motivates the kids more because their parents are interested. So, it was a very nice unintended consequence.
Cynthia: A lot of our K-3 classrooms are covered with little stickies because wherever, you know, Eleanor Roosevelt is up in the classroom, kids come back with little stickies of what they've Googled about Eleanor Roosevelt and stuck up on the wall. So, there's evidence everywhere of the enthusiasm and the sort of taking root of history that's happening outside of the classroom. And they are pulling their parents along with it, too, according—at least anecdotally—to our teachers.
Cynthia: We have a one-week Summer Institute, and it has to do a lot with our emphasis on working with teachers to emphasize object learning, to emphasize the use of primary documents or photographs or, you know, anything that small children can really get their hands on. Using time and place, location, and—
Alice: Biographies.
Cynthia: And biographies.
We spend one day at Gunston Hall learning about the Constitution, learning about a lot of American historical figures, and as heroes and what their heroic attributes are along with their humanity. And then we spend a day at various Smithsonian Museums. We've had a wonderful experience at the Postal Museum, at the National Museum of American History, at the Portrait Gallery, at American Art.
And then the last day we have spent at Mount Vernon, primarily focused on George Washington. And that has turned into a really special day because there's obviously a large number of wonderful historical scholars on the subject of Washington. But so many now have become very comfortable in using place, you know, using the mansion and the grounds to talk about Washington as a farmer and as a recorder and as a hero during the war, a leader that walked away from power.
Scholarship in one massive lesson can be brought to bear on math, on language arts, on social studies . . .
So we've got scholarly discussions going on after tours. And then, finally, we've brought in some experts in primary education that take those George Washington lessons and bring teachers down around the floor creating maps on, you know, a shower curtain, and doing mathematical exercises coming out of the lessons of where Washington's armies were, etc., etc. So, really, cross-curricular work in showing how that scholarship in one massive lesson can be brought to bear on math, on language arts, on social studies, and so on and so forth. And then we follow that up during the school year with two full-day academic experiences like that. One of them we do at the National Museum of American Indian because they study the various Native cultures.
And another one where we work with them full-day in one of our high schools in their theater department with their theater coaches and sometimes their kids, to teach the teachers how to become those, to become Martha Washington instead of talking about Martha Washington, so that every day is kind of an exciting theatrical production in a first-grade classroom. And then there are two book talks, which happen after school, a three-hour period, where they sit down with a scholar and discuss the books that they've read.
Alice: So, the content and the teaching of historical thinking is done through really four different strands. Biographies, because so many of them are emphasized in our state-required curriculum. Object-based learning, because many of these primary kids we recognize can't read, but yet visually are able to think historically. Teaching history through time and place, and we recognize that that whole idea of time and sequencing and chronological order is probably the hardest thing to teach primary kids, but using it in a way that makes it engaging and motivating. And then the fourth one is to teach history through art, music, and drama. And that's the content that we base this whole module for the K-3 folks on.
Cynthia: We've been really happy with the fact that people who start this program finish it. We have very little absenteeism, and so, in other words, the load is not too heavy, but certainly they walk away with a lot of materials and a lot of ideas and a lot of scholarship.
Alice: And the expectation is for teachers to attend, obviously, all of these sessions and participate, participate in our rigorous evaluation program, which we have, as well as to produce a lesson plan using some of the content that they have learned and a primary source. These lesson plans are then posted on our local Blackboard site for our teachers to share, and so they can then see the implementation of it.
Cynthia: And I think it's important to note that on our pre- and post-evaluations of teachers and kids in this program, we saw by far the greatest gain amongst our K-3 teachers because, admittedly, they didn't have that background, so they tend to learn very quickly.
It's that pedagogy and the historical thinking, "Well, if they can do that in second grade, I can do that in third grade," or "I can do that in fourth grade."
Alice: Within a school, it's, even though other teachers may be—other grade levels may be teaching different content, it's that pedagogy and the historical thinking, "Well, if they can do that in second grade, I can do that in third grade," or "I can do that in fourth grade." And the kids are starting to demand it too because the kids are starting to say, "Well, last year we did such and such," and so we're starting to see that ripple effect as well, which is really neat to see. And the confidence level of the teachers, because they can go beyond what our state document requires, which is pretty detailed in terms of content.
And really, to me, putting the story back in history, and we all know that given the story and the relevance of those stories, it can be much more motivating and engaging for kids.
Cynthia: And I have to say to be straight up, they desperately need the resources in those classrooms. There are very few of them. Every time I was out with teachers, they were spending every dime they'd ever earned buying things for their classroom. So, if we were able to give them some of the tools, the objects, recreate colonial games and those kinds of things, teach the letters with a colonial doll in the way that they used to teach them in colonial times. That's something that's deeply appreciated by them, and I think it's a little bit of a give-back to them to give them those tools that they really need.
Alice: So, we gave, as part of the grant, each of these primary teachers received an artifact box with a lot of these objects in it that they would then take back to their classroom.
Frankly kids prefer non-fiction. They want to know it's a true story. They want to know history.
Cynthia: Primary teachers really appreciate the information to go back to their schools to say, "I'm not taking time away from 'No Child Left Behind,' a subject. I am in fact using history to teach literacy. I am teaching reading through non-fiction." And frankly kids prefer non-fiction. They want to know it's a true story. They want to know history.
I didn't have to recruit at all K-3. They recruited each other. They had set up after school specials to pull people in and say, "This is what I got. This is what I did. This is why I loved it." And they were always full, those groups.
Cynthia: One of the most amazing lessons was one that absolutely defies description. A young teacher in the program who was an English as a Second Language teacher, but she was working within a large classroom. So, it was close to 30 second graders, and there was maybe a third of those where English was not their first language. And she was working with small children, young children, and she was working with four important documents. So, she had a relatively large version of the Constitution, next to the Declaration of Independence, next to the Gettysburg Address, next to Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. And the kids together found language that was consistent across all four documents and highlighted and colored and circled and whatnot, and talked about what those concepts were, and did those concepts mean the same thing at the founding of the nation as they did in the time of Martin Luther King? She then put a couple of those at least, on audio, so an actor was reading the Gettysburg address, and the kids hands would shoot up when they'd hear that familiar vocabulary. And then she did the Martin Luther King speech similarly, although in his words this time.
It was utterly inspiring. I think many people would think it was too much to do in an 11th-grade classroom.
She had visual pieces where she had portraiture from the Portrait Gallery that she had cut up into pieces so that the kids had to put those back together as a puzzle. And then they came back together again and discussed what those documents meant, what that language meant, and critical thinking exercises ensued about change over time and what this nation really stands for and has tried to stand for over time. So, it was utterly inspiring. I think many people would think it was too much to do in an 11th-grade classroom. Never true, but really well accomplished in a second-grade classroom.
Making Sense of American Popular Songs
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Tunes, lyrics, recordings, sheet music—all are components of popular songs, and all can serve as evidence of peoples, places, and attitudes of the past. Written by Ronald J. Walters and John Spitzer, the guide "Making Sense of American Popular Song" provides a place for students and teachers to begin working with songs as a way of understanding the past.
Teaching the Homebound or Hospitalized
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Question
Any good advice for a certified history educator who will possibly become a homebound/hospitalized teacher for children who are too ill to go to school? Thanks.
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It can be a challenge to provide homebound and hospitalized students with the sort of interaction that other students receive each day in the classroom. Fortunately, the web puts numerous highly interactive activities within reach.
You'll find links to online resources throughout the Clearinghouse website, but here are a few that we think would work well for homebound students:
A number of museums have built excellent interactive history activities. The British Museum maintains a set of sites on ancient civilizations, and the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History has a collection of activities for kids to do at home. The Center for History and New Media recently partnered with the Smithsonian to create The Object of History, a site where visitors can manipulate artifacts, listen to curators talk about their role in history, submit questions, and curate a virtual exhibit of their own.
Many smaller museums offer more focused tools. For example, try the Plimouth Plantation's investigation into the first Thanksgiving.
The Monterey Institute has created a comprehensive online course in U.S. History that combines text and multimedia content delivery with interactive activities. You'll find it online at the HippoCampus website where you can set up a space for your own students, hide topics you don't want to cover, and bookmark ones you do.
You can also use the internet to give homebound students opportunities for social interaction. If you have multiple students covering the same material, try giving assignments that let them collaborate virtually. You could provide discussion prompts or projects that they would complete using email, instant messaging, or a discussion board.
Ask a school technology coordinator to help you install Course Management Software, or use one of the many collaborative web tools that have been developed in the last few years. Google Documents is good for collaborative writing, or you can register for a private wiki at WikiSpaces.com. They're flexible, easy to use, and free for teachers.
If you're really feeling adventurous (and if your students have access to fast Internet connections), think about using Skype voice chat or videoconferencing.
Tennessee's Social Studies Curriculum
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When did Tennessee adopt a Social Studies curriculum? Have there been changes made over the years?
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Tennessee, as far as we can tell, adopted its first curriculum framework during the 1982-83 school year. Previous to that effort, frameworks with standards were not formally articulated as they are today. James Akenson of Tennessee Tech (who was helpful in putting together this response), pointed out that the curriculum framework emerged at the same time as the "A Nation at Risk" report, which many scholars see as the birth of the standards movement. Those standards were in place until 1996, when they were revised for the first time. In 2001, a major revision effort took place under the direction of a committee of K-12 teachers, state department of education personnel, and representatives from higher education.
In crafting the Tennessee Social Studies Curriculum Standards, the group used the previous standards, the National Council for the Social Studies standards, current educational research, and curriculum frameworks from other states as guides. Finally, according to a representative in the state department of education, Tennessee will begin the revision process again prior to the next textbook adoption four years from the current (2009-2010) school year.
Constructivism: Actively Building Knowledge
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Is the theory of constructivism applied in today's history classroom and curriculum?
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Constructivism is a broad theory with a variety of perspectives. However the basic tenet of constructivism is that learning is an active process where the learner constructs knowledge rather than acquiring it. The emergence of an inquiry-based approach to history education along with the new opportunities made possible by advances in technology have made constructivist approaches quite applicable in today’s history classroom.
There is a growing emphasis in history education on students being able to construct and analyze historical arguments. Many state standards, such as California’s History and Social Science Standards, call for students to be able to "construct and test hypotheses." Increasingly, both state standards and scholarship in history education are calling for students to analyze primary documents and assess various interpretations of the past.
Constructivism’s focus on the learner constructing knowledge might lead one to ask: what then is the role of the teacher? While students learn from experience from the constructivist view, a main function of the teacher is to shape those experiences. In many cases it is necessary for the teacher to provide scaffolds for students to construct knowledge. For example, sending students to an archive for an hour might not be the most productive way for them to learn how to construct an historical argument. Rather, providing them with a set of modified primary sources can create the conditions where students can begin to develop their own interpretations of the past.
While students learn from experience from the constructivist view, a main function of the teacher is to shape those experiences.
Modeling how to construct an historical argument is also an important role of the history teacher. While an inquiry approach to history education is on the upswing, many students have been taught to simply recall facts. Modeling the complexity of constructing an historical interpretation based on evidence helps students develop their own historical interpretations.
Critics of constructivism fear that such an approach leads to completely subjective understandings of the past and fails to provide the common understandings of the past. Constructivists respond by saying that they are not proposing that students should discover just any ideas about the past, but rather that students develop the skills and dispositions to discern what to believe based on the available evidence.
Many constructivists also believe that students need to apply their understanding to concrete examples and point out that content standards can be mined for deeper concepts that in turn are exemplified by the several facts that are typically included in the content standards.
. . . students need to apply their understanding to concrete examples and point out that content standards can be mined for deeper concepts. . .
Technology facilitates constructivist’s approaches in the history classroom. Technology now offers unprecedented access to historical records and has made the goals of constructivism more attainable. Doolittle and Hicks (2003) outline six strategies for using technology to advance the basic tenets of constructivism in the social studies classroom. Theses strategies include using technology as a tool for inquiry, accessing authentic materials, and fostering local and global social interaction. Each strategy is accompanied by several websites that serve as exemplars.
Finally we should note that no single theory or approach should define a teacher’s practice. Students should inquire about the past, but history teachers still need to provide background materials for students. The theory of constructivism is not a prescription for how to teach, but rather provides a useful way for a teachers to think about their practice.
For more information
Here are some additional readings on constructivism and the history classroom:
Doolittle, Peter E. and David Hicks. "Constructivism as a Theoretical Foundation for the Use of Technology in Social Studies." Theory and Research in Social Education 31, no 1 (2003): 33.
Duffy, Thomas M. and Donald J. Cunningham. "Constructivism: Implications for the Design and Delivery of Instruction." In Handbook of Research for Educational Communications and Technology, edited by David H. Jonassen, 170-198. New York: Macmillan Library Reference, 1996.
Jadallah, Edward. "Constructivist Learning Experiences for Social Studies Education." Social Studies 91, no 5 (2000): 221–225.
Contingency
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Can you please tell me a little bit more about the concept of contingency, and how it fits in with historical thinking skills? How can this concept be used with K-12 students? Any user-friendly references would be helpful too. I work in the field of teacher education and professional development.
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Thanks for your question. Contingency is an important concept in understanding and investigating history and helping students develop historical thinking skills. Crudely defined, it is the opposite of inevitability. When students think that World War II or women's suffrage had to happen, that these events were destined to occur, they are ignoring the contingent nature of historical events. Contingency gets at how people in the past made history and how historic events and trends result from a variety of factors coming together—they are not preordained or unavoidable.
Contingency is key to historical thinking and helping students understand that while in hindsight, the past seems to unroll in logical storylines, this was not necessarily the case for those who lived through it. If suffragettes hadn't taken to the streets in the 1910s or focused on changing state laws, would they have won the vote in 1920? If the Treaty of Versailles contained different stipulations, would Germany have taken the path it did and would WWII have happened? Historical events are dependent (or contingent) on multiple causes that shape when, how, and why an event happened the way it did.
. . . while in hindsight, the past seems to unroll in logical storylines, this was not necessarily the case for those who lived through it.
So contingency is deeply intertwined with understanding change over time—a framework many state standards and K-12 teachers use to focus and cohere their history courses.
Resources Focusing on Historical Contingency
Resources for explicitly teaching K-12 students this concept can be relatively sparse. But some do exist and they run the gamut, from instructional frameworks to particular activities. Historians Thomas Andrews and Flannery Burke suggest using the "5 Cs" to frame history instruction in this article. While their work was developed at the college-level, it can transfer (with modifications) to the K-12 classrooms. Their fourth "C" is contingency and they suggest it may be the most difficult to teach, but their description can help clarify the concept.
UCLA's National Center for History in the Schools also includes contingency in the historical thinking skills that students should be learning. Their standards assert that students should "Challenge arguments of historical inevitability by formulating examples of historical contingency, of how different choices could have led to different consequences." (see standard 3.G) These standards also remind us that discrete historical thinking skills are "interactive and mutually supportive" and cannot be taught in the absence of particular historical content.
See this lesson for an example consistent with these recommendations. Located at the Canadian Benchmarks of Historical Thinking site created by the University of British Columbia’s Centre for the Study of Historical Consciousness, it is a fine example of how to teach this concept. Focused on historical contingency, the lesson integrates this concept with the core historical concepts of causation and change over time to investigate the Chinese experience in Canada.
You will want to pay attention to instructional steps 1-7 and don’t miss the "outcomes" section at the end of the lesson. Not only does the lesson provide a coherent example of how you can take this concept into the classroom, it also succinctly describes how historic change is contingent on individual and group actions that are influenced and constrained by larger forces. It also uses two of our favorite ways to address contingency pedagogically:
- counterfactual questioning, or "what if" questions; and
- using cause and effect in a student's daily life to illustrate the concept before applying it to historic events.
For another example of a "What if" question, see this one about U.S. involvement in World War II or check out the series of "What if" books edited by Robert Cowley.
Difficult, Yet Crucial
Contingency may be one of the harder historical thinking concepts to teach. To really grapple with it, students need to understand multiple causation and be able to think through change over time. But it's difficulty shouldn’t scare you away from teaching it as it is a critical link between history and civic preparation. As the National Center for History in the Schools says:
"A. . . trap is that of thinking that events have unfolded inevitably;that the way things are is the way they had to be, and thus that humankind lacks free will and the capacity for making choices. Unless students can conceive that history could have turned out differently, they may unconsciously accept the notion that the future is also inevitable or predetermined, and that human agency and individual action count for nothing. No attitude is more likely to feed civic apathy, cynicism, and resignation—precisely what we hope the study of history will fend off."
Head Start Expectations
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What are kindergartners expected to know coming out of Head Start?
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For a child in preschool, their classroom surroundings encompass the meaning of Social Studies. When a preschooler enters the classroom they will be required to share, communicate, take turns, and identify their role as a member of a community. Essentially, the outcomes for a preschool student are to learn how people relate to one another, their environment and to the world they live in.
In addition, preschool Social Studies outcomes include (but are not limited to):
- learning how to form friendships and trusting relationships with their peers and teachers
- learning how to make decisions independently, solve problems, and take turns
- learning how to identify feelings and express them in an appropriate way
- develop a sense of belonging to a classroom community
- develop an understanding of differences between people (we are all individuals, we are all special)
- develop a sense of personal responsibility (safe choices, healthy choices)
Additionally, if we acknowledge literacy as central to the K-12 history/Social Studies curriculum, you would also want to encourage preschoolers’ love of story through reading and talking about engaging picture books together.