Preparing Teachers to Teach Historical Thinking?

Abstract

This chapter explores the learning outcomes for 45 teachers involved in three different federally-funded Teaching American History (TAH) grant professional development programs. The programs sought to move teachers' thinking about teaching history away from traditional stand-and-deliver practices and toward teaching historical thinking and reasoning as described in much of the reform and research literature in history education. Data were drawn from a multi-scale assessment instrument administered in a sequentialized design and from classroom observations of and interviews with participating teachers. We examine in particular growth (or lack thereof) in historical knowledge and teaching practice and epistemic positioning. Results suggested that aggregate program-based growth and epistemic change were attenuated by incongruences between how American history was expected to be taught in the technocratic culture of schooling and the reform-minded, professional judgment-based ideas cultivated within the TAH programs. Common technocratic organizational routines in the internal environment tended to undermine the interventions' influences rather than support them. In the discussion, these routines and their school culture elements are contrasted with the TAH program reform efforts as a means of understanding the outcomes.