Anthony Pellegrino

Learning to Collaborate: General and Special Educators in Teacher Education

One of the foremost challenges for K–12 teachers is to provide relevant learning experiences in an environment of increasing accountability and student diversity. This balance is particularly consequential for students with disabilities who rely on special and general education teachers to ensure access to and success within the general curriculum. Teacher collaboration has been viewed as a critical part of the equation to help meet the needs of those learners. In this article, we present a case study from a course codeveloped and cotaught by secondary and special education faculty working in a teacher preparation program. Findings indicate that the teacher candidates with whom we worked showed a more complex sense of collaboration and recognition of critical elements of successful collaborative partnerships at the conclusion of the course.

Beyond the Blind Date: Collaborative Course Development and Co-Teaching by Teacher Educators.

Given the current climate of accountability, teachers must collaborate across disciplines to meet the diverse needs of students. Few, however, are prepared to collaborate in school settings upon completing teacher preparation programs. In this article, a participatory action research study undertaken by teacher educators who approached the lack of cross-disciplinary collaborations in two teacher preparation programs by developing and implementing a co-taught course on collaboration for general and special education teachers is presented. The described process was informed by interviews, observations, and analysis of course materials. Results contribute to the development of a framework for educator collaborations in higher education.

Picturing Kids and “Kids” as Researchers: Preservice Teachers and Effective Writing Instruction for Diverse Youth and English Language Learners

In this article, the authors—a team of veteran and preservice teacher educators and teachers—describe the results of a photovoice, Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) study that positioned diverse adolescents as researchers to explore these youths’, teachers’, and teacher educators’ perspectives on school and literacy pedagogies. We have examined how photo elicitation activities allow English Language Learning (ELL) youth to document their impressions of the purposes of, supports for, and impediments to school and literacy success. The findings detail lessons for teachers and teacher educators about exploring a “kids as researchers” approach to writing instruction and how to prepare traditionally racially and socioeconomically homogenous populations of future teachers for working with diverse young people.

Employing Music in the History Classroom: Four Models

Music has been a source of inspiration, of protest, of wisdom, and of emotion for millennia. In the United States, music became woven into the fabric of the culture well before it became a nation and it remains so today. Songs have expressed a range of emotions and informed listeners of historical, social, and political issues at every level of sophistication. Yet our passion for music, coupled with its significance as an artifact of history, has not found its way into classrooms in any prominent way. This article explores four models of using music in the history classroom, each of which ventures to encourage history teachers to consider music, its analysis, and even its creation as integral to history curricula. Each model uses various instructional strategies grounded in tenets of historical thinking and range from a teacher-centered Close Reading Model to inquiry and discovery-based approaches, concluding with a student-centered model of Creative Development.

To Lift as We Climb: A Textbook Analysis of the Segregated School Experience

In this paper we share findings of a textbook analysis in which we explored the treatment of segregated education in eight, widely-used secondary United States history and government textbooks. We positioned our findings within the historiography related to the African American school experience which challenges the notion that the lack of resources allocated to Black schools in many areas of the country necessarily equated to a substandard educational experience for Black children. In our analysis we found textbook coverage to be episodically robust, but generally lacking in sufficient context to promote students’ recognition of the complexity and nuance of the development and disintegration of African American education. Using the theoretical lens of critical race theory, we suggest that failure of teachers and teacher educators to include recognition of the African American education experience serves to enshrine an approach to learning about America’s segregated education history that may contribute to excessively abstract generalizations and perpetuation of historical racial stereotypes.

Historical Thinking through Classroom Simulation: 1919 Paris Peace Conference

Abstract For almost one hundred years, educators have used model deliberative bodies (e.g., Model United Nations) as a pedagogical tool to teach students about the complexities of diplomatic negotiations. We argue that this type of classroom simulation activity may also serve to illustrate specific historical realities and, more broadly, provide a model of student-centered instruction focused on investigation and decision making. Employed in social studies classrooms, this tool has the potential to foster historical thinking and empathy by calling on students to engage in the act of deliberation as experienced by contemporary actors of a particular negotiating body. The lesson activity we outline in this article charges students to wrestle with the multiplicity of complex dilemmas and conflicting claims that characterized the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Assuming the role of actual delegates, students not only discuss pertinent issues but also deliberate. That is to say, just like the representatives who convened at the meeting, the students will not have the luxury of merely reflecting on and talking about key geopolitical questions. They will have to reach concrete decisions for a world finding itself in a terrifying, yet hopeful, flux.

Practicing Collaboration in Teacher Preparation Effects of Learning by Doing Together

Collaboration among professionals is a vital component for successful inclusion of students with disabilities. In many cases, teacher preparation programs assume that teacher candidates know how to collaborate without explicit instruction or authentic practice and, therefore, omit coursework on collaboration. Alternatively, some programs may require coursework in collaboration but that coursework may exclude candidates from any other programs. In this article, we describe candidate outcomes from a course about collaboration that was taught in two ways: (a) as a co-taught course with faculty and candidates from social studies and special education and (b) as a course in the special education program that included only faculty and candidates in special education. Candidates in both groups constructed pre- and post-course concept maps about collaboration. We conducted both quantitative and qualitative analyses to determine depth, breadth, and complexity of understanding of collaboration as well as growth in these areas. Findings and implications are discussed.

Examining Collaboration in Teacher Preparation and Clinical Practice.

ABSTRACT Collaboration among educators is a vital component for teachers’ success working with diverse students. Teacher preparation programs, however, have not sufficiently included experiences in which teacher candidates can learn about professional collaboration in preparation for clinical and professional experiences. In this article, the authors describe the experiences from two pairs of teacher candidates—one pair who completed a cotaught teacher preparation course focused on collaboration, and the other pair who did not. The authors used interviews, observations, and content analysis of candidate artifacts to examine these experiences within the framework of symbolic interactionism. Findings suggest differences between these pairs of teacher candidates related to how they understood and managed collaborative situations. Implications for teacher preparation and clinical practice are included.

Collaboration in Social Studies Teacher Education: Crossing the (Disciplinary) Line

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a rich description of the development, implementation, and evaluation of a course, co-taught by the authors who are Secondary Social Studies and Special Education faculty, focused on the development of effective collaborative skills in teacher candidates. Until this course was developed, Secondary Social Studies teacher candidates in our program did not have any systematic experiences collaborating with other education professionals until student teaching or thereafter. Together, we report our journey from initial concept to implementation, revision, and student outcomes from the course implementation, including: (1) a case study of the development of the relationship between faculty, (2) a study of the first implementation of the course, and (3) a study of the revision and second implementation of the course, as well as student outcomes for each. Finally, we discuss implications and future directions.

Digital Resources for Social Studies

In recent decades, scholarship in social studies education has advocated a shift in focus from memorization of facts, such as names and dates, to a broader emphasis on the ways knowledge is constructed through students’ skill development and disciplinary habits of mind. In studying history specifically, this process includes reading a variety of primary and secondary sources to address compelling and consequential historical questions that require incorporating multiple perspectives and interpreting historical evidence to reach and communicate informed conclusions (National Council for the Social Studies, 2013). Such historical thinking practices extend further to include using literacy skills to better discern meaning behind historical evidence and artifacts as a way to empathize with people of the past and recognize the context and purpose behind people’s choices and actions (Barton, 2012; Wineburg, 2001). This orientation provides an important opportunity for teachers to increase student engagement in social studies by helping them find relevance in the resources with which they grapple, and agency in themselves through active and collaborative involvement in learning. Maximizing the utility of primary and secondary sources means that teachers embrace a broad notion of text and acknowledge that reading primary sources extends beyond conventional means of decoding words and practicing fluency. Important resources in social studies can include photographs, visual arts, political cartoons, graphic data, and deeply personal resources such as poetry and oral histories, so a range of literacy skills and practices are needed to cultivate meaningful learning. Thankfully, the proliferation of digital means to access resources provides teachers with myriad opportunities to enliven curriculum and engage students to see social studies as relevant to their own lives (Hammond & Manfra, 2009). In this column, we share two digitally accessible resources that allow teachers to be part of this type of practice. In the first example, we explore National Jukebox, a digital resource that helps teachers harness the power of music to foster historical thinking. In the second example, we examine Clio, an educational website and mobile application designed to guide the public to thousands of historical and cultural sites across the United States.