Jada Kohlmeier

Leadership: Part of the Civic Mission of School?.

i\ic education once again stands C at the forefront in debates over public education. A diverse range of effort

Justice or Care? Ethical Reasoning of Preservice Social Studies Teachers.

in the past five years illustrates this renewed interest. The Pew Charitable ‘l‘ruct initiated the Youth E n g q e meiii grant program, which is part of an initiatiLe to engage about four to five million fifteen to twenty-two year olds “in at lcast one civic act.” The Carnegie Foundation published The Civic Missiori i!f Schools. The National Association of Secretaries of State and the Center for Excellence in Government conimi~sioned surveys of young people’s ertgagement in civic and political life. Organizations such as the National Alliance for Civic Education and the Center for Information and Research in Civic Ixarning and Engagement were formed. Such efforts rest on the assumption that “to sustain a society where democratic governance and civil discourse thrive . . . opportunities to engage in civil society and in the political syctem should be widely avail-

Ethical Reasoning of U.S. High School Seniors Exploring Just Versus Unjust Laws

Abstract The authors explored the ethical reasoning of 27 preservice teachers in the first course of a 4-course social studies education program. The students discussed 2 historically analogous cases that focused on 1 of 4 value problem areas: consent of the governed, general welfare, property, and morality. The authors were interested in exploring whether the students used an ethic of justice or care in their reasoning, particularly if gender was a factor in the ethic used. The results indicated that it was the nature of the case, rather than student gender, that influenced the ethic used and that students of both genders were able to use both ethics. However, the most prevalent ethic was the ethic of justice.

Scaffolded lesson study: Promoting professional teaching knowledge for problem-based historical inquiry

Abstract Because a pluralistic democracy is inherently conflictual, public deliberation of issues holds the potential to expand the thinking of participants by revealing new insights, perspectives, information, or logics into the participants’ consideration. These are ethical questions that ask citizens to decide whether policies, actions, and decisions are “right” or “wrong.” The Persistent Issues in History (PIH) Network (www.pihnet.org) is a decade-long professional development community of practice encouraging, modeling, and supporting teachers in increasing inquiry-based social studies teaching. For this qualitative study, we created a professional community of practice including 4 U.S. government teachers, a university researcher, and a political science professor. This team created lessons enabling high school seniors to dissect and apply Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail to 3 specific scenarios to explore the students’ moral reasoning on just versus unjust laws.

Examining the relationship between teachers’ discussion facilitation and their students’ reasoning

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of scaffolded lesson study on the content knowledge, conceptions of curriculum, and classroom practice of 22 elementary and secondary history teachers in four school districts. Design/methodology/approach Teachers, teacher educators, and historians collaborated to design and test research lessons grounded in a theory-based framework for problem-based historical inquiry (PBHI) practice. The authors sought to support consonance between the reform ideas of the formal, professional development, curriculum, and the curriculum as enacted in participants’ classrooms. Findings Project participation was associated with significant gains in content knowledge and the conceptualization and implementation of more challenging instruction consistent with the PBHI model and the standards of authentic intellectual work (AIW). Mean AIW instruction scores for research lessons were more than double the scores for participants’ non-lesson study lessons and indicated noteworthy progress in integrating the formal and enacted curricula. Evidence suggested that many teachers developed more nuanced understandings of historical phenomena, gained greater appreciation for the importance of authentic purpose in motivating student engagement in challenging learning, and began to reconsider what is required to facilitate complex learning and to refine their repertoire of learning strategies. Originality/value Evidence from the first year of this project offers hope for the potential of collaborative communities of practice to facilitate a shared professional knowledge base of wise practice that brings the formal, intended, and enacted curriculum into greater alignment. These results also emphasize the evolutionary process of conceptual change.

“Couldn't she just leave?”: The Relationship Between Consistently Using Class Discussions and the Development of Historical Empathy in a 9th Grade World History Course

ABSTRACT We conducted a two-year study with four teachers (two mentors and two mentees), one university researcher, and a political science professor focused on improving discussion facilitation. This article examines the facilitation of a collaboratively developed seminar/deliberation discussion by four teachers and the relationship between their facilitation and the reasoning of the students. We found that all four teachers explored the factual questions of the discussion topic, but that two of the teachers led more substantive explorations of the definitional and value questions by purposefully teaching the students norms of behavior in a quality seminar/deliberation, practicing discussion throughout the course, allowing more student-tostudent talk, and focusing students’ attention on the persistent definitional and value issues that connected the case to analogous cases.