Prospective History Teachers Research Articles

Mapping the Teacher Education Terrain for Novices

Teacher education in the U.S. suffers from a form of continental drift with deep fault lines. Most teachers learn to teach in three disconnected lands--colleges of arts and science, schools of education, and K-12 classrooms. Each of these instructional continents offers settings for preservice teachers to develop important resources. However, there is little to help preservice travelers navigate within and bridge across these spaces. Consider, for example, learning to teach secondary history or social studies. The required sequence comprises ill-organized sets of educational experiences in different spaces (e.g., history seminars, education classes, high school classrooms), for different purposes (i.e., to learn history, to learn to teach history, to observe classrooms), and led by people who don't work with one another (history professors, education professors, and cooperating teacher mentors) and may never even have met. These divisions in the preparation of history teachers are widely recognized. But, there is also disconnection within each of those spaces. For example, most preservice history teachers take more than four-fifths of their courses in arts and sciences. Yet, they often meander through a maze of history electives, using personal interests, classmates' recommendations, professors' reputations, and course availability to shape their courses of study. However strong particular courses or instructors may be, whether prospective educators acquire the content knowledge they need to be effective teachers depends on whether they took a particular course in a particular space at a particular time. Further, the absence of defined pathways or roadblocks among subject-matter courses will make it difficult and less likely that preservice teachers will assemble a coherent and suitable body of knowledge and skills. Prospective history teachers experience something similar in their education courses. Scholars have long recognized the gaps between colleges of arts and sciences and schools of education. But many teacher education programs have their own minifault lines dividing courses in psychology from those in education foundations, or literacy, or methods. Preservice learning also is a hodgepodge outside university classrooms. Prospective teachers spend time in the field observing, practicing teaching, and eventually taking responsibility for one or more classes during teaching. The practicing teachers in whose classrooms they student teach often lack detailed knowledge about the preservice teachers' training program. Their teaching practice is typically framed by their own interests and goals, the orientations of their departments, and the imperatives of the local community and policy environments. Thus, there are as many hidden fault lines within each of these settings as there are among the three continents of teacher education. These compartmentalized and loosely coupled field experiences, liberal arts classes, and professional education courses are typical (Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2005; Darling-Hammond, 2006; Labaree, 2004; Weick, 1976). Although each space con-tributes to learning, each does so in episodic ways that essentially require the preservice teacher to construct the connections. In short, the person least equipped to navigate among and across these different sites has the task of coordinating disparate experiences, concepts, and discourses into a meaningful and useful whole. Since 2005, we've been engaged in the Rounds Project, which has been driven by the recognition that, like the earth's continents, the continents of teacher education cannot be fully joined. We are trying to build a navigational system that connects these spaces for novice teachers. Reconnecting the continents The Rounds Project required restructuring our secondary program and entailed seven key reforms. The brief description that follows illustrates the various dimensions of the project. …

Student-Centered Teaching Methods in the History Classroom: Ideas, Issues, and Insights for New Teachers

Using student-centered teaching methods presents a great challenge to many new middle and high school history teachers. Having experienced mostly teacher-centered instructional approaches (such as lectures and teacher-led discussions) in secondary school and college classes, they begin student teaching with few models for how to teach using less traditional forms of instruction. This paper discusses “Ideas, Issues, and Insights,” a strategy for prospective history teachers, as they explore the use of student-centered teaching methods with middle and high school students. It analyzes written reflection papers where history teacher candidates identify their ideas for three student-centered instructional methods — small group work, primary source analysis, and historical role-plays and simulations — as well as issues that arise when these student-centered methods are implemented in the classroom. As history teacher candidates respond to their ideas and issues, they generate insights about how they can best use student-centered teaching methods in their future classrooms. The first-person perspectives of history teacher candidates are highlighted to show how college students in one university-based teacher preparation program think about their student teaching experiences and their choice of instructional methods to use with students.

Learning to teach history in culturally diverse classrooms

This paper examines prospective history teachers’ thinking about ethnic and cultural diversity and their experiences of learning to teach about history in multicultural classrooms. The paper reviews the findings of a follow‐up study of 22 Finnish student teachers during their nine‐month teacher education programme. The data consist of questionnaire data and various written assignments of this sample, plus interviews with nine selected persons. According to the results, signs of continuity and transformation are apparent in the student teachers’ thinking. The informants frequently described problems related to diversity, although most of them did not see diversity as changing their way of teaching history as such.

Setting Up Camp at the Great Instructional Divide

This article sketches out a comprehensive approach for preparing history teachers. It argues that grounding in historical content knowledge is necessary for success in the classroom, but such grounding is not enough to ensure that success. For beginning teachers, the problem is not merely acquiring content knowledge but acquiring it in ways that facilitate teaching subjects to young people of varied backgrounds and abilities. In short, teachers need to understand content in the context of teaching, meaning prospective history teachers must have a robust understanding of history’s details, ways in which historians acquire and structure those details, and how teachers can make the subject accessible and worth knowing for students. This approach demands that teachers also know how their students understand history and the assumptions they make about historical events and developments. Finally, prospective teachers need to know how to offer content-rich, engaging instruction within a standards-based, high-stakes testing context.