Teaching American History

Improving History Instruction Through TAH Collaborations

Sema Sharon Brainin

In March 2007, the Organization of American historians (OAH) challenged history departments at U.S. colleges and universities to contribute to the improvement of history teaching in K-12 schools. Even before the OAH made its call, new bonds between historians and history teachers had been developing in a large part because of the federally-funded Teaching American History Grant program (TAH). The program increased the attention given to professional development opportunities for teachers and also led to a reexamination of the ultimate goals of social studies and history education. This reevaluation was a key component of the TAH Voices of America project, a professional development practicum for New York City high school teachers from 2004 to 2007. I was part of the program and, at its conclusion, took time to reflect on the key questions that unfolded as the participants strove to integrate content and pedagogy. The questions we dealt with included: What kind of teacher knowledge is essential to improve student achievement? How do teachers decide what to teach, how do they represent it, and how do they questions student about content? How do teachers manage student misunderstanding? In examining the overall impact of the TAH experience, we also wondered: What does experience in building the efficacy of teachers tell us—and them—about how they acquire knowledge and transmit it to their students?

These questions emerged from the Japan-inspired design of the Voices in America project. In doing this, we found inspiration from Japan. The overarching goal of TAH projects is collaboration between historians, history teachers, and cultural institutions to increase teachers’ historical knowledge and to translate it into more effective classroom teaching. In order to accomplish this, we brought twelve teachers from Manhattan and Bronx high schools together with historians from Baruch College, geographers from the Hunter College as special guests, and me, a history educator from Hunter College. Another collaborator was the Facing History and Ourselves program whose teachers worked with us in the second year.

Each year, teachers experienced six stimulus-packed Saturdays at museums and historical societies. These included lectures and the opportunity to interact with presenting scholars; tours of exhibitions; and workshops on pedagogic strategies. Monthly all-day sessions provided a venue for multiple purposes: building bridges from the scholarship of historians to classroom practice; sharing by the history educators of materials, such as relevant primary sources, to deepen and expand teachers’ historical understandings; pedagogic strategies; and special guests. These sessions provided time for teachers to share classroom triumphs and challenges, including display and examination of student work, often from lessons teachers had adapted from observations in their colleagues’ classrooms. A key feature of the onsite day was the observation and discussion of a classroom lesson presented by a volunteer among the twelve teachers to eleven of her/his colleagues, plus faculty/staff. Within the framework of the Voices of America project, an adapted model of the Japanese Lesson Study design became the key arena for exploring knowledge and its transformations. Saturated with engagement for the teachers, externalizing their thinking behind chosen content and pedagogy demonstrated in practice, it was identified repeatedly, by them, as the critical component of the project.

The Japanese Lesson Study Model: Influence and Variations

The original Japanese Lesson Study (jugyoukenkyuu) “is a professional development model that enables teachers to systematically examine their practice in order to become more effective instructors.” Pursuant to a chosen goal, “teachers work collaboratively on a small number of lessons by planning, teaching, observing, revising, and re-teaching them.” In essentially this format, lesson study projects began in the U.S. in 1999. By 2005, examples were to be found in 335 U.S. schools across 32 states and were topics of dozens of conferences, reports, and published articles. Although being investigated by an increasing number of scholars and practitioners, the only examples of full study-cycle reports are two from Japanese elementary schools, one in mathematics and one in science. Since 1999 in Japan and the U.S., the subject areas addressed in lesson studies have been mathematics, science, literacy, and English as a second language, but there have been none in social studies or history. Unreported thus far is a NYC TAH program targeting middle schools that employs the Japanese model. In the case of this project, as well as most of those reported, there appears to be strict adherence to the Japanese model, including a body of etiquette and ritual that communicates respect for the efforts of the teachers who create and present the lessons. The Japanese-inspired protocol includes: time allotted for prior planning by a team of teachers; strong focus on the lesson plan itself; proscribed steps in its preparation and post-lesson reflection; the honing of the lesson through observation and discussion; and repetition with proposed adjustments.

Ideally, the lesson becomes part of a repertoire of exemplary lessons, available to a community of educators. However, key researchers of Japanese Lesson Study place the repertory of lessons as secondary, summarizing the importance of Lesson Study as “a process for creating deep and grounded reflection about the complex activities of teaching that can then be shared and discussed with other members of the profession.” They state, “We do not believe that there can be a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach for integrating lesson study into the U.S. educational landscape. Instead, we encourage creative experimentation with lesson study that allows teachers to engage in high-quality learning experiences.”

The Voices of America Lesson Study Model

The observation and reflection about teachers’ lessons in Voices of America were shaped within the constraints of the possible. As a pedagogical consultant/history educator in the partnership, my own approach to creating effective teachers is reflected in the model’s construction and execution. While guides to the Japanese Lesson Study model suggest an occasional “outside advisor” who “can inject key information or fresh perspectives,” my role was a constant in our work, conforming to the role of “coach,” not to a school evaluator with administrative power.

Certain key differences from the Japanese model are worthy of note. Because the project’s funding did not provide for team planning, the lessons were planned primarily by individual teachers, with collegial consultation wherever possible. Teachers often consulted with one another and/or e-mailed their lesson plans to the history educators prior to presentation. Funding and scheduling issues made it a challenge for schools to release teachers for five days during the year to visit colleagues, and impossible, in this context, for teachers to collect data, write reflections, and revisit/redo each lesson after it was honed. Yet even within these constraints, our findings suggest that Voices of America successfully achieved the essential purposes of the Japanese Lesson Study model.

The Voices of America lesson study sequence design occupied three or more periods of the school day. In the first period, the presenting teacher orients the group to the school and students; presents the lesson’s content, unit context, and processing materials to be used; describes the specific goals of the lesson; and requests feedback concerning specific areas of instruction. These are recorded on a chart for later use. In the second period, a teacher conducts the lesson with the entire group observing; the ground rules for visits to classrooms are set by the presenting teacher. Visiting teachers and others focus on student responses to the lesson, examples of historical thinking, degrees of understanding of content and learning objectives, and the areas identified by the teacher. The third period begins with a moment when all participants engage in quiet reflection and recording of thoughts. The presenting teacher opens the discussion with her own reflection on the lesson, and teachers and project staff ask questions and offer constructive comments related to the aspects of instruction identified by the teacher before the lesson, as well as other elements. This is followed by a re-visitation (often restatement) of the initial goals based on the observation.

The Success of The Lesson Study

In its variation from the classic Japanese model, the lesson study model that evolved from Voices of America offers great possibility for professional development contexts that seek to promote scholarship and collegiality. Its impact on the teachers is best stated in their own words, representing eighty percent of group evaluations. One teacher noted, “The observation of colleagues is the quintessential component of . . . Voices. The amount a teacher learns from observing other teachers is extraordinary.” Another remarked that “Teachers walk away from observing another teacher inspired to improve their own practice . . . . I have grown most from professional development activities that involve collaborating with or observing other teachers.” From an observer perspective, another teacher stated, “When we offer feedback we also benefit enormously.”

As the process evolved, a dynamic in the presenting teacher’s initial requests for commentary appeared. While initially, teachers tended to request feedback concerning issues of effective grouping, student participation and interaction, the focus began to change as teachers addressed the structure of the lesson and what was done to make it engaging, rich, and capable of promoting a high level of thinking. Questioning strategies and clarity of thought, accuracy of historical knowledge, and effective use of learning tools became the more usual requests. These changes were aided by project staff as they encouraged the transparency of reflective practitioners, and posed explicit questions that merged content and pedagogy. Were your objectives met? How could you tell the students “got it?” Was this an effective way to advance your students’ knowledge of content? A key factor that allowed the feedback process to flow was the decision made at the start for the presenting teacher to set the parameters for feedback after the lesson. This greatly reduced anxiety and fear of criticism. In addition, the presenter, leading the reflections, had an opportunity to share regrets, express concerns, and set the tone for the comments of others. Initial comments revealed a reflection-in-action process in which the teacher experiences an awareness and a change of direction or behavior actually occurring during the teaching of the lesson. Another key to a fruitful learning experience for the group was the careful facilitation of collegial feedback to the presenter, resulting in comments marked by sincere involvement surrounded by a generosity of spirit. One teacher commented on the evaluator’s survey that “the history educator . . . set a tone that I believe set the stage for the professionalism and respect we showed each other.”

A continuing goal for the group and its leaders was finding effective materials—in all the arts, fiction, short articles and readings, films, and a myriad of other literacy—boosting experiences that make history come alive. Lee Shulman’s words resound in the project’s emphasis on the thoughtful selection of engaging learning experiences: “Within the category of pedagogical content knowledge I include, for the regularly taught topics in one’s content area, the most useful forms of representation of those ideas, the most powerful analogies, illustrations, examples, explanations, and demonstrations—in a word, the ways of representing and formulating the subject that make it comprehensible to others. Since there are no single most powerful forms of representation, the teacher must have at hand a veritable armamentarium of alternative forms of representation, some of which derive from research whereas others originate in the wisdom of practice.”

Participants in the practicum were able to absorb knowledge and transform it to engage their students and promote learning more effectively. For instance, one roundtable lecture and discussion by a historian addressed the Spanish-American War of 1898. A lesson taught following this lecture involved the students working in groups, structured by the various nations that saw a changed relationship with the U.S. following this event. The students’ task was to create a visual metaphor that illustrated the new relationships and to collectively compose an explanation of its individual features in substantiated prose. The in-class assignment directly connected the lecture and student work, and the same project was transformed effectively by another teacher in a unit on the Chinese Boxer Rebellion.

Teachers also experimented with new and exciting primary sources. The American writer, E. L. Doctorow, led a conversation about his new novel The March concerning General William Tecumseh Sherman’s march from Atlanta to the sea during the U.S. Civil War. Teaching a unit on the Civil War and Reconstruction, a presenter demonstrated a lesson based on two sources: one, a selection from The March that dramatically evoked the terror of newly freed slaves as they were abandoned by the march in its scourge of the Southland. The other was a document by Sherman that, essentially, granted the promised “forty acres and a mule” to freed slaves at the end of the war. One of the students’ tasks was to create an encyclopedia entry, describing, and commenting on, the role of Sherman as an important historic figure.

An onsite presentation I made aimed to amplify a previous historian’s lecture that discussed the New Deal. My goal was to introduce students to the public artistic contributions of the Works Project Administration (WPA). Following an opening discussion and examples of music and songs that typified the period, each of three groups was given a collection of items that addressed: a) the work of WPA poets and writers; b) WPA-sponsored art and architecture; and c) the Federal Theatre Project (FTP). The teachers’ processing of their materials culminated in the presentation of a chosen highlight to the entire group. Two weeks later, another participant chose as her lesson topic the Tennessee Valley Authority. Having become fascinated by Hallie Flanagan, director of the FTP, she used Flanagan’s “living newspaper” format to have students tell the story of the TVA. They then augmented this task with a role play and an original song on the topic.

Outcomes

In the end, the Voices of America project generated a number of positive outcomes. As evidenced by testing, teachers enhanced their content knowledge, students received high test scores, teachers increased their use of primary source material, they increased their ability to reflect on their own and their peers’ practices, and they were able to adopt various practices, strategies, and materials that they shared in many hours of collegial work. The outcomes of the program offer insights into how teachers value scholarship, strive to master their craft, and become leaders within a group that fosters collegiality. At the final dinner and reflection on the three years of the project, one of the teachers expressed his love for his colleagues and mentors and for the totality of the experience. Seeking the reasons for its success, he declared to a hushed group, “There was Eros in the room.”

Unique in its design, Voices represents a part of the body of learning about the teaching of history that has accrued over TAH’s six years. Hopefully, it will contribute to the continuing study of the process of teachers’ knowledge acquisition and the variety of modes for processing historical scholarship. This is especially important in the context of TAH’s successful mobilization of history scholars as partners with schools on all levels. The assumption was that teachers would absorb knowledge from historians’ lectures and proceed to develop lesson plans that demonstrated their newly acquired expertise. Reality proved otherwise, however, provoking serious questions about the very nature of learning. Our experience demonstrated that learning is an active process, stimulated by dialogue, observation, and a social setting that provides feedback and reflection and that fosters the social production of meaning. In summary, and in anticipation of future projects inspired by TAH Voices of America, we ask: What are the many ways of “knowing” that are discovered when scholarship and collegiality merge to create deeper understanding of complex ideas about the world?