Experiential Learning for Teacher Professional Development at Historic Sites

Abstract

Historic sites provide a variety of professional development (PD) programs for classroom teachers. Little is known, however, about the pedagogical approaches used by historic site professionals in educating their teacher audiences. Using data from PD websites and questionnaires completed by historic site professionals, two studies examine the types of pedagogical approaches institutions state they use for teacher PD, the alignment of historic site PD with characteristics of experiential learning, and issues relevant to researching experiential learning approaches used in these programs. Results indicate that institutions’ pedagogical approaches for PD programs largely align with experiential learning characteristics but that research is needed to determine the pedagogical benefits of experiential learning for historic site PD and related learner outcomes.