Chauncey Monte-Sano

Using Writing Tasks to Elicit Adolescents’ Historical Reasoning:

One path to improving adolescents’ literacy skills is to integrate reading and writing into the content areas in which such work occurs. Although argumentative writing has been found to help students understand historical content and transform information, scholars do not know the influence of specific task structures on students’ writing or historical reasoning. To learn more, the authors administered four document-based writing tasks on the origins of the Cold War to 101 students from 10th or 11th grade. Using multiple regression, the authors found that writing tasks explained 31% of the variance in the quality of students’ overall historical reasoning after accounting for differences in students’ background. A closer analysis of different aspects of historical reasoning using a different rubric (and as analyzed using MANOVA) indicated that students’ skill in recognizing and reconciling historical perspectives significantly improved with writing tasks that asked them to engage in sourcing, corroboration, and causal analysis. The task that asked students to imagine themselves as historical agents and write in the first person was significantly different and resulted in the lowest mean essay scores.

Learning to Open Up History for Students: Preservice Teachers’ Emerging Pedagogical Content Knowledge:

Given students’ preconceptions of history as fixed information, cultivating students’ interpretive and evidence-based thinking is foundational to advancing their disciplinary understanding. This study examines the ways in which preservice history teachers construct tasks that demand students’ interpretive and evidence-based thinking and attend to such thinking in their field placements while being taught to do so in their methods courses. Analysis of methods course assignments, student teaching observations, and assessments of candidates’ disciplinary knowledge led to the construction of three cases of novice teachers’ efforts to teach these ways of thinking to their students. The one novice who attended to her students’ interpretive and evidentiary thinking translated her disciplinary knowledge into lessons that involved analysis of text in developing interpretations and gave general prompts to provide evidence in support of students’ conclusions. This study highlights the role of preservice teachers’ disciplinary understanding and pedagogical content knowledge in developing students’ interpretive and evidentiary thinking in history classrooms.

“Famous Americans”: The Changing Pantheon of American Heroes

Meeting at the Wabash Avenue Young Men’s Christian Association on Chicago’s South Side on September 9, 1915, four African American men laid the foundation for the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (asnlh), the first scholarly society promoting black culture and history in America. The force behind that initiative was Carter G. Woodson, the only black of slave parentage to earn a history Ph.D. from Harvard University. A tireless institution builder, Woodson not only kept the asnlh afloat through years of financial uncertainty, but also established the Journal of Negro History in 1916 and served as its editor until his death in 1950. Woodson authored and edited scores of publications—scholarly monographs, textbooks, pamphlets, newsletters, circulars, and reports—all aimed at spreading knowledge about blacks’ contributions to American history. Yet, even more than his prodigious list of publications, the initiative for which Woodson is best known was inspired by a trend in the 1920s when civic organizations would devote weeks of the calendar to promote special causes, such as Boy Scout Week, Clean-Up Week, or Good Health Week. In 1926, Woodson designated the week in February that included the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln (February 12) and Frederick Douglass (February 14) as “Negro History Week.”1 Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, black America celebrated Negro History Week with speeches, parades, and educational events. But not until the 1960s did white America take much notice. During the 1940s and 1950s, mainstream textbooks virtually ignored black Americans except in their faceless guise as slaves. “Blacks were never treated as a group at all,” wrote Frances FitzGerald. “They were quite literally invisible.” Textbook

Developing Historical Reading and Writing with Adolescent Readers: Effects on Student Learning.

Abstract In this study, the effects of a disciplinary reading and writing curriculum intervention with professional development are shared. We share our instructional approach and provide writing outcomes for struggling adolescent readers who read at or below basic proficiency levels, as well as writing outcomes for proficient and advanced readers. Findings indicate significant and meaningful growth of about 0.5 of 1 standard deviation in students’ abilities to write historical arguments and in the length of their essays for all participants, including struggling readers. Our study also considers teacher implementation of the curriculum intervention. We found that teachers who were most faithful to the underlying constructs of our curriculum intervention also made successful adaptations of the lesson materials.

Implementing a Disciplinary-Literacy Curriculum for US History: Learning from Expert Middle School Teachers in Diverse Classrooms.

In recent years, educators in the USA have emphasized disciplinary literacy as an essential path forward in cultivating adolescents’ understanding of subject matter in tandem with literacy practices. Yet, this agenda poses challenges to teachers who have been tasked with its implementation. Here, we examine two expert US history teachers’ efforts to implement curriculum that integrates reading, writing and thinking in history with academically diverse eighth graders. We conduct qualitative analyses of teacher observations and interviews as well as student work. This analysis provides insight into several issues that emerge in efforts to teach disciplinary literacy in history classrooms: the nuances of teachers’ use of curriculum materials created by people other than themselves, teachers’ appropriation and adaptation of curriculum materials and teachers’ understanding of curriculum materials and disciplinary literacy goals. We find that teachers’ knowledge of the discipline and attention to students’ ideas allowed them to skillfully adapt the curriculum to better meet students’ needs and push students’ thinking. Orienting teachers toward disciplinary learning, ensuring a foundational understanding of their discipline and providing teachers with tools to teach disciplinary literacy are important steps to help students meet the demands of the disciplinary literacy agenda.

Build Skills by Doing History.

Theres a way for students to achieve the thinking, reading, writing, and history expectations laid out in the Common Core.

Facilitating Whole-Class Discussions in History: A Framework for Preparing Teacher Candidates:

Both the Common Core Standards for Literacy and the College, Career, and Civic Life Framework for Social Studies State Standards underscore the importance of classroom discussion for the development of high-level literacy and subject-matter knowledge. Yet, discussion remains stubbornly absent in social studies classrooms, which tend toward rote memorization and textbook work. In this article, we discuss our efforts to design practice-based methods instruction that prepares preservice teachers to facilitate text-based, whole-class discussion. We propose a framework for facilitating historical discussions and illustrate it with examples from videos of teacher candidates enacting the practice in K-12 classrooms. The framework assists not only in conceptualizing and naming the discrete components that constitute disciplinary discussion facilitation but also in highlighting where novices appear to struggle. Our analysis has implications for improving teacher education that seeks to prepare novices for ambitious instruction called for by the new literacy and social studies standards.