How Now? Historical Thinking,
Reflective Teaching, and the Next
Generation of History Teachers
Elizabeth Belanger
In 2006 the Journal of American History (JAH) published its first essays on the scholarship
of teaching and learning (SoTL). Only a few months later, historians held a national
conference focused on training students to teach history, and the American Historical
Association (aha) subsequently published “The Next Generation of History Teachers: A
Challenge to Departments of History at American Colleges and Universities.”1 The concerns outlined in the JAH and in the aha publication are closely related. The scholarship
of teaching and learning prompts us, as academic historians, to think more carefully and
critically about what good history teachers do at every level and how best to foster those
skills in future history teachers. Beginning a dialogue about the relationship between
SoTL and teacher training brings to the forefront a series of questions central to both
endeavors: How do curricular materials evidence historical ways of thinking? What models of assessment and pedagogical practices best foster reflective teachers? And lastly, what
can a student’s teaching tell us about how students learn history?
Despite the seemingly obvious connections between SoTL and teacher training,
research in history has yet to address how we train our students of history to become history teachers. As much as we historians are willing to accept our own SoTL research as a
rigorous, scholarly endeavor, we have yet to acknowledge or promote SoTL as a legitimate
field of research for our students. Many historians look at our future history teachers in
much the same way we once viewed our graduate students who sought jobs at teaching
institutions. As the historian Michael Sherry describes it: “the truth is that many of us . . .
still regard it [teaching] as not only less rewarded but also less sophisticated and demanding
than scholarship—simply, the easier thing to do, or otherwise less worthy of note.”2 At
Elizabeth Belanger is assistant professor of history and director of American studies at Stonehill College. She would
like to thank Greg Galer, Stacy Grooters, and Michael Smith for their valuable comments on this article.
Readers may contact Belanger at ebelanger@stonehill.edu.
1
Gary J. Kornblith and Carol Lasser, eds., “Beyond Best Practices: Taking Seriously the Scholarship of Teaching
and Learning,” Journal of American History, 92 (March 2006), 1356–402; University of Virginia/Carnegie
Corporation Conference, Charlottesville, Va., June 2006; American Historical Association, “The Next Generation
of History Teachers: A Challenge to Departments of History at American Colleges and Universities,” American
Historical Association, http://www.historians.org/pubs/Free/historyteaching/index.htm.
2
Much of the work on teacher training has focused on the Teaching American History grants developed to
train existing teachers. See Wilson J. Warren, “Closing the Distance between Authentic History Pedagogy and
Everyday Classroom Practice,” History Teacher, 40 (Feb. 2007), 249–55; Rachel G. Ragland, “Changing Secondary
Teachers’ Views of Teaching American History,” ibid., 219–46; and Rachel Ragland and Kelly A. Woestman, eds.,
The Teaching American History Project: Lessons for History Educators and Historians (New York, 2009). In contrast,
there has been little work done on undergraduate teacher training. Exceptions include Donald Schwartz, “Using
History Departments to Train Secondary Social Studies Teachers: A Challenge for the Profession in the 21st
Century,” History Teacher, 34 (Nov. 2000), 35–40; and John Shedd, “Why and How Should History Departments
Train Secondary Social Studies Teachers?,” ibid., 29–34. Michael S. Sherry, “We Value Teaching Despite—and
Because of—Its Low Status,” Journal of American History, 81 (Dec. 1994), 1051–54.
doi: 10.1093/jahist/jaq033
© The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
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The Journal of American History
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my institution, that viewpoint is manifested in the belief that the best way to train our
future history teachers is to make them good historians. That belief is exemplified by our
senior capstone course, which requires students to undertake original research and present that research in written form.
By not providing sufficient opportunities for our students to produce nontraditional
historical scholarship, we run the risk of conveying to our future teachers the idea that
historians do not truly value teaching and do not see it as an intellectually rigorous activity, one that requires the same level of discipline and understanding as original scholarship. Developing lesson plans and other curriculum materials becomes something “less”:
tasks future history teachers should undertake in their education classes, in their student
teaching placements or in graduate school, as a demonstration of pedagogical technique
rather than as a way to show understanding of historical thinking skills. It also relegates
the training of future teachers of history to those outside the profession. Even while we
emphasize getting our students to “do history” and “think like historians,” we typically
offer students no idea of how they might go about teaching history. In my department,
anecdotes from our faculty members who act as content supervisors for our student teachers support that conclusion. After observing student teachers at local schools, department
members have expressed frustration that some of their best students, who completed
strong senior theses, nevertheless struggled to incorporate primary sources and historical
thinking into their lesson plans.
My inquiries into teacher training and what it can tell us about how our students learn
developed during two years of teaching American History for Educators (History 105), a
core course in the history department at Stonehill College. History 105 and the college’s
general education history course were the only two courses in history our elementary
education majors would take before becoming certified elementary school teachers in
Massachusetts.
My first directive for the design and content of the course came from the Massachusetts Department of Education’s regulations for educator licensure and preparation program approval. According to the Commonwealth, American History for Educators
needed to cover “major developments and figures in Massachusetts and U.S. history from
colonial times to the present” and “U.S. political principles, ideals, founding documents,
institutions, and processes, their history and development.”3 My second directive emerged
from the aha’s 2007 challenge to history departments to recommit themselves to training
the next generation of K–12 history teachers. Taken together, those two documents
mapped out my task. In one semester I had to (1) teach United States history from beginning to end, while simultaneously (2) teaching education majors how to think like historians and (3) teaching them how to teach historical thinking to their students.
My teaching “problem” emerged from these seemingly overwhelming tasks. History
105 provided the opportunity to investigate teaching practices and to document evidence
of student learning. As Randy Bass has articulated, the scholarship of teaching and learning pushes us to view teaching not as a problem defined by a failure in the classroom but
as “a set of problems worth pursing as an ongoing intellectual focus.” The course directives of History 105 thus created a “problem” faced by many teachers of history: how to
3
“Regulations for Educator Licensure and Preparation Program Approval,” Massachusetts Department of
Elementary and Secondary Education, http://www.doe.mass.edu/lawsregs/603cmr7.html?section=06.
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find the right balance between teaching the course content and teaching historical thinking skills.4
Historical Thinking in the College Classroom
The initial plan for the course focused on demonstrating the importance of historical
thinking, while also showing how teaching historical thinking could inspire and excite
non-history majors, many of whom were skeptical or dismissive of history’s value in an
elementary school classroom. Thus, the first syllabus for History 105 focused on making
my practices as an “expert teacher” visible. Following the work of Randy Bass’s Visible
Knowledge Project and Sam Wineburg’s research on how students learn history, the syllabus emphasized my classroom learning goal—to teach historical thinking and make
visible the structures and “intermediate processes” used to achieve that goal.5 The structure of the course reflected the assumption that modeling good teaching would help my
students become good teachers.
The first challenge lay in balancing the historical thinking skills students needed to
learn against the course content required by the state board of education. The state’s
requirements for its teachers (that they know “major developments and figures in Massachusetts and U.S. history from colonial times to the present”) overwhelmed me. Having
taught the first half of the department’s U.S. history survey course, I knew I could not
cover all of U.S. history in one semester. Furthermore, it was not at all clear what constituted all the “major events” in the eyes of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. What
would newly minted B.A.’s with only two history courses behind them feel when faced
with the state’s requirements? A study by the educator Bruce VanSeldright, which concluded that “Being able to think historically and practice doing history is more crucial to
making sense of the past than having memorized a grocery list of historical details,” provided reassurance that balancing course content and historical thinking skills would help
students achieve the course goals.6
The syllabus approached the course goals through a case study model, with each of the
six course units focusing on a particular moment in U.S. history. The particular moments
fit the Massachusetts history standards, favoring historical developments before the Civil
War because few of the K–5 state standards addressed post–Civil War events and figures.
The immediate benefit of the case study model was to narrow the content of the course.
4
Randy Bass, “The Scholarship of Teaching: What’s the Problem?,” Inventio, 1 (Feb. 1999), http://doit.gmu
.edu/Archives/feb98/randybass.htm. While historians have been asserting the importance of historical knowledge to
teacher training for most of the life of the profession, the emphasis on historical thinking skills is a comparatively
recent development. It was not until 2006 that the National Council for History Education advocated for K–12
teachers to receive “An exposure to history’s habits of mind and an exposure to the skills required for historical
thinking, including an understanding of how to read and utilize primary sources, experience in historical writing
and experience in historical research.” “Statement on Teacher Qualifications,” National Council for History Education,
http://www.nche.net/what_we_do/position_statements.html/title/statement-on-teacher-qualifications.
5
See Randy Bass and Bret Eynon, “Capturing the Visible Evidence of Invisible Learning” in The Difference That
Inquiry Makes: A Collaborative Case Study of Technology and Learning, from the Visible Knowledge Project, ed. Randy
Bass and Bret Eynon (Washington, 2009), http://www.academiccommons.org/files/BassEynonCapturing.pdf; and
Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Philadelphia,
2001). I was also inspired by Todd Estes, “Constructing the Syllabus: Devising a Framework for Helping Students
Learn to Think like Historians,” History Teacher, 40 (Feb. 2007), 183–202.
6
“Regulations for Educator Licensure and Preparation Program Approval.” Bruce VanSledright, In Search of
America’s Past: Learning to Read History in Elementary School (New York, 2002), 19.
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Assessment for the units took the form of traditional history assignments: papers analyzing primary sources, an oral presentation on a secondary-source reading, and a paper in
which students would compare and contrast two different textbook entries.
At the conclusion of the first semester of History 105, it was clear that narrowing the
content of the course and giving students opportunities to work with primary sources had
made them more aware of what historians do. In their reflections about what they had
learned, students often noted the differences between their high school history classes
and History 105. One student described her high school history experience as a “drill and
kill of names, dates and events” in preparation for the advanced placement test.7 Another
student noted that “this class was the first time I had to write history papers that were not
reports, but rather analytical arguments about the past.” Many of the reflections demonstrated an awareness that my course required students to approach primary sources differently: as one student noted, “Before this class I would read historical articles [primary
sources] and believe everything they said. Not once did I wonder who had created the
source, what their position was in society or what historical event was taking place at the
time.” Students also compared their work in the course to what professional historians do.
As one student noted, “This course allow[ed] me to analytically shred apart a source—
showing its bias, the intent and its audience—like good historians do.” Asking my students to use historical thinking skills also helped them reveal the wizard behind the
curtain. No longer was history the “truth” written in third person by textbook authors. As
one student noted, “I struggled with what could be considered ‘real’ information, what
information was biased, and what perspective each source was coming from.”
The real test for my course, however, lay in the ability of the students to create compelling original curricula designed to foster historical thinking skills in elementary school
students. If, as Robert B. Bain suggests, “the problem for history teachers begins with trying to understand what defines meaning making in history,” then getting students to
think carefully and critically about what it means to be a historian should help them teach
history.8 The final class project, a collaboration with the Stonehill Industrial History Collections, required students, working in groups, to undertake original archival research on
a subject of their choosing and then use that research to create curriculum materials.
Stonehill College has held the Industrial History Collections since 1973, when Arnold
B. Tofias, who purchased the Ames Shovel Company complex in North Easton, gave the
college a large collection of artifacts and early company records. Stonehill subsequently
acquired a number of other collections, including additional materials relating to industrial history and to the Ames family. Many of the collections of the Ames family include
personal diaries, material artifacts from their many homes, local histories, and family correspondence. Through the relationships forged by the curator of the collection and the
town’s public schools, the Industrial History Collections hosts every third grade class as
part of Easton’s local history curriculum. Those relationships gave my students the opportunity to develop material that could potentially be used in third grade classrooms.
The curator and I devised a program of study for the History 105 students. Before the
start of the unit, the students would observe a visit by a third grade class to the collections.
7
Student responses were collected from reflection papers, coursework, and informal course evaluations.
Students agreed to participate in the study under the condition of anonymity.
8
Robert B. Bain, “Into the Breach: Using Research and Theory to Shape History Instruction,” in Knowing,
Teaching, and Learning History, ed. Peter N. Stearns, Peter Seixas, and Sam Wineburg (New York, 2000), 332.
Textbooks and Teaching
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They would then meet with the curator and me to discuss strengths and weaknesses of the
current program. We would revisit those observations when we officially began the unit.
During the final two weeks of class, students would survey the collections’ scope and
content and the diverse historical topics associated with the Ames family, and then work
in groups to develop curriculum materials that drew from the collection’s primary sources.
The first class of History 105 students concluded their Easton unit by choosing to
develop an A–Z book and corresponding lesson plans as their curriculum project, a decision inspired by their familiarity with the format (most had taken an education course
that asked them to develop A–Z books) and their sense of a need for books on local history that were appropriate for third graders. Throughout the semester, the students and I
had discussed the relationship between text and context: how to choose primary sources
that speak to a particular argument and how to integrate those sources into curriculum
materials using my classroom examples as models. Given those discussions, the curator
and I were surprised and frustrated by the initial drafts of the A–Z book and accompanying lesson plans. The primary sources chosen seemed irrelevant, confusing, or just plain
inappropriate. Despite our work during the semester with primary sources in traditional
assignments, the students were still obviously struggling with how to use primary sources
in the classroom. For example, on the “I” page that discussed Irish immigration to the
town of Easton, the students wanted to use the logo of the Boston Celtics basketball team
as a primary source on the Irish American experience. When asked to incorporate primary
sources into lesson plans, students treated their primary sources like their high school
textbooks—as sources of historical “truth.” When students did choose appropriate primary sources, such as a map showing the housing units owned by the Ames Company
and a list of boarding house rules for residents, the accompanying lesson plans used those
sources to teach content, not historical thinking. For example, in their lesson plan “Company Lives: Labor and Community in Working Class Easton,” students asked the third
graders to restate the rules contained in their primary sources rather than to explore what
these rules revealed about corporate culture, management practices, and life in company
towns. The students almost uniformly used primary sources as sources of “information,”
not as tools with which to teach discipline-specific reading skills.
What had gone wrong? Clearly, teaching students how to think historically did not
necessarily teach them how to teach historical thinking. Despite my efforts to make pedagogical practices visible, something was getting lost in translation. Indeed, if the real test
of students’ understanding was not learning the skills but teaching them to others, the
course had failed miserably. Thus my journey, which had begun by questioning the benefit of teaching historical thinking—asking students to think like historians—ultimately
led me to consider the benefits of incorporating overt pedagogical content into the class,
that is, asking students to think like scholars of teaching.
Reflective Teaching in the College Classroom
Over the next year and a half, I redesigned the course. The new course sought to balance
skills, content, and pedagogy to foster student understanding about the many small
choices that go into making academically rigorous and discipline-specific curriculum
materials. Three exercises proved particularly helpful in getting students to think about
their teaching: pedagogy readings; teaching observations with peer feedback; and reflective
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March 2011
essays. In those three elements, I hoped to address three related activities central to SoTL:
engaging with scholarship on teaching and learning; sharing ideas within a community of
scholars; and self-reflecting on teaching.9
To engage my students in reflective teaching practices, the second semester syllabus for
History 105 contained readings chosen for both their historical content and as models of
SoTL inquiry. To emphasize the centrality of historical thinking, the syllabus shifted away
from highlighting the subject matter and chronology; it instead focused each unit on a
“historical thinking benchmark.”10 Each of the units paired secondary- and primary-source
readings on a particular subject with pedagogical readings, including studies done in history classrooms. For example, the “Historical Debate and Controversy” unit explored
secondary and primary research on early encounters between European explorers and
Native Americans, with the expressed goal of examining historiography. Over the five
days spent examining Christopher Columbus’s “discovery,” students interpreted primary
sources, analyzed secondary sources, and discussed how to teach students to see history as
an interpretive act that changes over time. When paired with primary and secondary
sources, readings on teaching methodology gave my students a sense of how K–12 teachers chose to teach historical thinking skills and provided them with additional materials
they could use to critique the lesson thoughtfully.
Such deliberate foregrounding of these skills, I hoped, would help students both use
these skills in their own work and also understand how to create activities that fostered
historical thinking in a classroom. Course comments and evaluations demonstrated the
benefits to future teachers of engaging with scholarship, with two-thirds of the students
listing the methodology readings as a useful element of the course. In addition to reading
studies about historical thinking in elementary school classrooms, students presented a
group lesson plan to the class and answered questions about their teaching from their
classmates, an activity that I hoped would give the students an appreciation of their teaching from a community of peers.
Finally, students explored their teaching choices through the development of lesson
plans and accompanying reflective essays. The lesson plans and essays required my students to make their thinking visible to better document and understand how they learned,
and those assignments also forced the students to reflect on and explore their choices. In
five of the six units, lesson plans with reflective essays became the primary unit assessment
tool (for the remaining unit, I retained the primary source analysis paper). The emphasis
on lesson plans encouraged students to “treat their teaching . . . as serious and important
intellectual and creative work, as an endeavor that benefits from careful observation and
close analysis, from revision and refinement, and from dialogues with colleagues and the
critiques of peers.”11 In the reflective essays accompanying the lesson plans, the students
were instructed to explore, justify, and support, with evidence from the course readings,
their lesson plan choices: Why did they choose these specific primary sources? Why did
they choose to focus on this specific historical moment? How does their chosen classroom
activity reinforce the lesson’s goal of teaching historical thinking skills?
9
E. Martin et al., “Scholarship of Teaching: A Study of the Approaches of Academic Staff,” in Improving Student
Learning: Improving Student Learning Outcomes, ed. C. Rust (Oxford, 1999), 326–31.
10
The six benchmarks of historical thinking are articulated in American Historical Association, “Benchmarks
for Professional Development in Teaching of History as a Discipline,” American Historical Association, http://www
.historians.org/teaching/policy/benchmarks.htm.
11
Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), 21.
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While these lesson plans with essays were one of the most challenging elements of the
course, students’ evaluations suggested overwhelming support for this requirement. Every
one of the students described the lesson plans with reflective essays as one of the most useful
parts of the course. Students found the lesson plans “a good way to bring what we talked
about in the beginning of the semester into practice” and “helpful in making me think
about how to write original history lessons.” They also gave the students valuable “practice
incorporating primary sources into a lesson plan.” As one student summarized, lesson plans
“helped me to become more comfortable with searching for and using primary documents.
I will be more likely to do so in my own classroom because of this experience.”
Students certainly felt they learned something in the redesigned course, but what did
they learn and how can one use lesson plans to assess historical understanding? I adapted
the structure and grading rubric for the lesson plans and accompanying essays from the
rubrics I had designed for my traditional papers, with the expressed goal of examining
whether the historical thinking elements I expected my students to demonstrate in their
papers could also be evidenced in their lesson plans. Could students outline their arguments, place them within the field, and then support their claims with evidence? The
rubric examined the lesson plan’s central question—Was the question discipline-specific?
Could it be supported by primary-source evidence? Did it ask students to whom the lesson plan was addressed to engage in historical thinking skills? The rubric also evaluated
their primary sources—Were the number and types of sources appropriate to the learning
outcomes? Did the primary-source worksheets ask students to interpret the sources historically? Finally, the rubric addressed the reflective essays—Did students address how
their lesson plan fit into existing scholarship on teaching and learning history? Did they
use evidence from their lesson plan to support their claims? In the lesson plans that the
students produced, three markers suggested improved outcomes: students’ approach to
primary-source texts; their ability to apply discipline-specific theory and methods to
describe, analyze, and evaluate their lessons; and their efforts to connect their teaching
choices to broader questions about the value of history.
In the previous year, students had learned to analyze primary sources in class but had
still struggled to incorporate primary sources into a lesson plan. Having to justify their
choice of primary sources in reflective essays made the second and third cohorts more
aware of the challenges and pitfalls of primary sources. For example, one group of students constructed a lesson plan for “Massachusetts Learning Standard 3.12: Explain how
objects or artifacts of everyday life in the past tell us how ordinary people lived and how
everyday life has changed.”12 They chose the diaries of Oliver Ames and Evelina Gilmore
Ames because (as they noted in their essay) “we can contrast the differences between
upper-class men’s and women’s everyday lives in the mid-nineteenth century. We chose
excerpts that are representative of daily activities as well as activities that would be typical
for each gender.” In their justification, they not only acknowledged the class and gender
dynamics of such documents but also demonstrated an awareness of limitations of these
documents to speak to a generalized experience: “Our discussion questions (Who wrote
this diary? Why do you think they wrote it? How do you think they chose what to include
and what to leave out? What types of daily activities did they write about? What didn’t
12
“Massachusetts History and Social Science Curriculum Framework,” Massachusetts Department of Elementary
and Secondary Education, www.doe.mass.edu/frameworks/hss/final.doc, p. 20.
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they write about? Did men and women write about different events? Why?) are designed
to get students to critically read a primary source and think about what these documents
tell them (and don’t tell them) about life in the 1900s.” The types of questions students
asked of their primary sources also reflected a marked change in the way they had
approached the sources.
Another student group used a map of worker housing and a corresponding list of family
names to explore the social geography of immigration. Their questions included: “Where
did Easton’s Irish population live? Where did the Swedish population live? Why might
the Ames Company want to record where workers lived? What types of jobs did Irish and
Swedish workers have in the Ames Company? What does the secondary source tell us
about Oliver Ames’s view of his Irish and Swedish workers? Why might Irish and Swedish
families have chosen to live in neighborhoods with other Irish and Swedish families?”
Their line of questioning was designed to push their students to interpret geographical
data. The elementary school students would begin by gathering information from the
primary sources and then use that information to make observations about community
formation, discrimination, and class difference. In the process, the locus of authority was
intended to shift from the document to the students as they used the information to draw
conclusions about the past. The foundation of these lines of questioning is the fundamental understanding of history as an interpretive act and of the agency of the historian in
creating history. Each of the lessons designed by my students not only promoted knowledge about the past but also trained their students in the series of cognitive processes that
historians undertake.
While the lesson plans asked my students to think like historians (develop questions,
gather information on historical context, develop protocols of relevance and reliability,
and closely analyze primary-source texts), the reflective essays challenged them to place
their choices within a disciplinary framework. Requiring my students to use theory to
support their lesson plan choices facilitated their understanding of the links between
doing history and teaching history. One student group noted: “Our questions allow [students] to interpret history, asking them to examine the past on its own terms and challenging them to ‘think contextually’ and to understand, in the words of Sam Wineburg,
that ‘words are not disembodied symbols transcending time and space.’” Another group
of my students used an assortment of primary sources, including shipping receipts and
letters, to explore how changes in transportation influenced the growth of the Ames
Company and similar businesses. The group noted: “We want our students to develop
their own interpretations about why the railroads replaced ships. A critical aspect of
‘doing history’ is to understand that history is a matter of evaluating evidence and then
designing an interpretation that is labeled as ‘history.’ VanSledright supports this notion
‘that knowing the past is a fundamentally interpretive enterprise, often replete with difficulties and unresolved and competing viewpoints.’” A third group wanted to “provide
[their] students with firsthand narratives from people who lived during this time period
because as Wineburg notes, historians see the goal of historical understanding to be able
to see through the eyes of the people who were there.”13 Articulating the links between
their curriculum choices and their conceptions of history helped students see how the
choices history teachers make are not arbitrary, but rather are the product of deeply held
13
Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, 90. VanSledright, In Search of America’s Past, 47.
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beliefs and understandings about the discipline itself. Requiring students to be more conscious and deliberate in constructing lesson plans helped bridge the gap, so obviously
overlooked with my first cohort of students, between doing history and teaching history.
Finally, incorporating both subject matter and pedagogical content into History 105
challenged students to reconsider the value and purpose of history in the elementary
school classroom. As others have noted, at the heart of an inquiry into how to teach history is the question of why we teach history at all. In two years of teaching History 105,
I have watched students struggle to make a case for history in the elementary school classroom. Many of the students initially dismissed the value of history in elementary school.
Those who had undertaken their student teaching often remarked on how little time was
allotted for the study of history in area elementary schools, while others commented on
the endless dioramas, short plays, and crossword puzzles that passed for “history” in their
early education. While my class focused on teaching history at the K–5 level, it is increasingly clear that courses designed to train future teachers should not take for granted that
history should be taught in elementary, middle, and high school classrooms. The recent
debates over state history standards in Texas (debates that focused on the historical content of the standards while ignoring historical thinking skills) and the Obama administration’s 2011 budget request that would fold the existing Teaching American History grants
into a new program where grants on improving teaching and learning in history would
compete with grants focusing on the arts, foreign languages, civics, government, geography, economics, and fiscal literacy, suggest that historical thinking skills are under fire at
all levels of K–12 education.14 Our future teachers will need to think about the role history education can play in liberal learning. Writing lesson plan narratives allowed my
students to articulate not only the how of teaching history but also the why.
Two overarching themes emerged from the students’ written reflections. First, they
sought to move narratives at the margins of history education into the mainstream. For
example, one group of students chose to examine working-class family life in Easton:
“Throughout our lesson, a particular emphasis has been placed on seemingly ‘ordinary’
people of the past. . . . We feel that history in the elementary schools idealizes and glories
our nation’s past. Yet we wonder—Why should events or individuals that remain well
known take precedent over common folk and daily events? What are we conveying to our
students when we focus solely on fame and national recognition as a determinate of significance and importance?” Another chose to address issues of gender: “Traditionally, fifth
grade students only learn about women’s history when they study the women’s suffrage
movement. We want our students to examine the ways in which gender shaped women’s
experience long before they gained the right to vote. . . . This lesson is designed to require
14
Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, 8. James C. McKinley Jr., “Texas Conservatives
Win Curriculum Change,” New York Times, March 13, 2010, p. A10; Michael Birnbaum, “Texas Board Approves
Social Studies Standards That Perceived Liberal Bias,” Washington Post, May 22, 2010, http://www
.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/21/AR2010052104365.html; American Historical Association, “aha’s Statement on Texas State Amendments to teks for Social Studies,” Sept. 2010, Perspectives on History,
http://www.historians.org/Perspectives/issues/2010/1009/1009new4.cfm. Bruce Craig, “Teaching American
History Grants: A Call for Action,” Aug. 24, 2010, American Historical Association: AHA Today, http://blog
.historians.org/advocacy/1117/teaching-american-history-grants-a-call-for-action; National Coalition for History,
“Teaching American History Grants Face Uncertain Future,” Feb. 2, 2010, National Coalition for History, http://
historycoalition.org/2010/02/02/teaching-american-history-grants-fy-11-proposed-budget/; Linda K. Salvucci,
“Teaching History May Become a Thing of Past,” Houston Chronicle, July 31, 2010, http://www.chron.com/disp/
story.mpl/editorial/outlook/7133858.html.
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students to analyze and investigate what these primary sources say about the different
experiences of girls and boys at the school and the assumptions about gender imbedded
in these documents. . . . We want to probe the students to think about the importance of
gender roles in society, both in the 1800s and today.” Thus, their lesson plans responded
to a perceived need for a new type of history in the elementary schools.
Second, they hoped to explore the connections between historical literacy and citizenship. As one group noted: “History allows students to ask questions, understand a variety
of viewpoints and consider how contemporary bias influences their understanding. It asks
students to be critical readers and thinkers and helps them to be better citizens in our
information laden world.” While not all of the students were able to articulate such a
thoughtful rationale, requiring them to consider why one teaches history helped them
place their work within larger conversations about the value of history and gain the confidence to view themselves as historians and teachers.
Conclusion
In their introduction to the Journal of American History’s 2006 Textbooks and Teaching
section, “Beyond Best Practices: Taking Seriously the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning,” Gary J. Kornblith and Carol Lasser argue that bringing SoTL into our research
agenda means that “teaching history may yet be reconnected with doing history.”15 If we
are to bridge the divide between the history we teach at colleges and universities and the
history in our elementary and secondary schools, we need to make the connections
between teaching history and doing history clear to our future teachers. My ongoing
study of teacher training at the college level suggests promising ways this divide might be
breached. Training our future teachers to be historians is not enough. We need to approach
these students as fellow teachers and help foster their membership in a community of
scholars that values reflective teaching practices.
Moreover, asking students to think like scholars of teaching and learning may help us better
understand the extent to which our students are successfully learning the historian’s skills,
including research, writing, and historical thinking. Traditional assignments, such as primarysource analysis papers, undoubtedly helped my students develop these skills. However, without conscious reflection on how and why they were interpreting primary sources, the skills
students gained in traditional assignments fell by the wayside as they reverted to traditional
ways of knowing in the face of a challenge, that of creating original curriculum materials. Asking novice learners to articulate their thinking in reflective essays promoted a more sophisticated understanding of the work done by historians and demonstrated the extent to which
they were able to “think historically” rather than simply to mimic skillful readings of historic
texts without truly understanding the principles that underlay their readings.
Frustrated colleagues have spilled much ink in recent years lamenting the current state
of history education in the K–12 classroom. For those of us in college-level history departments, committing to training the next generation of history teachers can sometimes
seem outside our job description. However, we need to look more carefully at training our
future history teachers not only out of civic or professional obligations but also because a
student’s teaching can give us valuable insights into how our students understand history.
15
Kornblith and Lasser, eds., “Beyond Best Practices,” 1356–57.