Building Historical Thinking Skills: A Report from the
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American history content as the core component of building historical thinking skills was a common theme throughout the Fourth Annual TAH Symposium, which took place March 25-26, 2009, and was co-sponsored by H-Net and OAH. Over seventy-five participants ventured to Seattle prior to the start of the OAH annual meeting to continue exploring the long-term impact of the U.S. Department of Education’s Teaching American History grant program. Different from the federal project directors conference, the symposium seeks to more closely examine what we are learning about history and history education from TAH grants and how we can continue our collaboration after funding ends. During his keynote address, “An Antidote for an Ailing Profession or an $836,000 Boondoggle: The Future of the TAH Program,” Stanford professor Sam Wineburg discussed the federal evaluation requirements for TAH programs and explained his conclusions from analyzing the available data. Building on his twenty-year research career as a cognitive psychologist, Wineburg emphasized that content could not be separated from pedagogy, and that we need to develop better methods than the widely-used multiple-choice questions to evaluate historical thinking skills in both teachers and students. Reflecting some of the same sentiments expressed at individual discussion tables throughout the symposium, Wineburg recommended several potential solutions for addressing the weaknesses he cited in current TAH evaluation practices. He called for allocating “twenty percent of TAH fiscal year funds for competitive grants to independent researchers to assess and evaluate projects” as well as setting aside one million dollars out of every twenty million in awards for “research in the development and testing of new measures to assess historical understanding and knowledge.” Furthermore, Wineburg asserted, “deep content measures (DBQ) and measures that assess pedagogical content knowledge” should be more widely developed and utilized among TAH programs and “one quarter of all grants should go to new initiatives for initial teacher training.” He also called on historians to become much more engaged in “working on the ‘scholarship of teaching and learning’ (SoTL) to achieve articulation between middle, secondary, and college levels.” The audience responded to these calls for radical changes in the existing TAH evaluation structure at the federal level with diverse viewpoints that reflected their common concerns for validating and sustaining effective TAH programs. Wineburg’s recommendations echoed the call to action at the federal level proposed by Maris Vinovskis at the first TAH symposium, along with Bob Bain’s discussion of the central role of evaluation during the 2007 TAH symposium. Prior to the keynote, panelists and participants from Alaska to Vermont to Alabama engaged in table-centered discussions that more closely examined the short-term and long-term impacts of TAH grants. H-TAH (<http://www.h-net.org/~tah>) coeditors Charles Chamberlain and Kurt Leichtle moderated the panel-audience discussion about the incorporation of evaluation as a core component of TAH grants. Larry Cebula of Eastern Washington University discussed his experiences as a historian who never intended to get involved in evaluation, but believed it was important that he do so to ensure the centrality of American history content to grant programming. Colorado State University-Pueblo historian Matt Harris asserted that assessment had always been a huge part of the TAH programs in which he has been involved and described how his department’s involvement has also made an impact on teaching history at the university level. Tom Christian of the Thorp (WA) School District asserted that the marriage between American history content and historical thinking skills was at the core of successful TAH grants and also explained how much he had learned about the nuts and bolts of evaluating TAH grants since his involvement began in 2003. During the next panel, “Historians and History Educators: The Better Angels of Our Nature?,” Daniel J. McInerney of Utah State University, Linda Sargent Wood of Arizona State University, and Don Schwarz of California State University-Long Beach shared their optimistic views of how TAH programs had an impact on their departments and their teaching, and asserted that prospects for continuing this engagement with the precollegiate history community were bright. Schwarz described his background as a New York City high school teacher before becoming a history professor and provided a brief overview of the history of history education. McInerney proclaimed that “one of the reasons I kept getting up in the morning was TAH programs” and then explained how his institution’s TAH partnerships are viewed positively by the university and also reflect well on the tenure and promotion prospects of professors participating in TAH projects. Before the audience-centered discussion began, the final panelist, Sargent Wood, described the collaborative process required by any TAH project and how distinct that is from the more solitary life most historians expect to lead as they pursue their traditional research and scholarship. Approximately twenty-five participants then visited area Seattle restaurants to continue the conversations that evening during the dine around. On Thursday morning, the third panel reflected the views of teacher participants in TAH grants. Chaired by H-TAH coeditor Thomas Thurston, this panel explored both what teachers receive and, more importantly, the expertise that they can provide to successful TAH grants. Pam Gothart of the Madison (AL) County Schools and Mike Marchildon of Del Norte (CO) High School shared their experiences involving active implementation and writing of TAH grants. Both underscored the continuing theme that teachers must be involved in TAH grants as colleagues and fellow professionals alongside historians, and that teachers have unique expertise to share if TAH grants are to actually impact the teaching of American history in the nation’s classrooms. Marchildon cited visiting historic places as one way of transforming his teaching and Gothart discussed the concept of professional learning communities centered on American history to ensure sustainability of the impact of TAH grants. Planning is now underway for the Fifth Annual TAH Symposium in Washington, D.C., to be held in conjunction with the April 2010 OAH Annual Meeting. We would like to thank The History Channel and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History for their generous support of the symposium. Throughout the year, membership in the H-TAH community is open to anyone interested in TAH grants. More information is available at <http://www.h-net.org/~tah>. H-TAH <www.h-net.org/~tah> coeditor Kelly A. Woestman is professor of history and history education director at Pittsburg (KS) State University. She has participated in writing and implementing TAH grants throughout the country and is currently serving as H-Net President. She is coauthor of the forthcoming book, The Teaching American History Project (Routledge, 2009). |