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Building a Culture of Evidence Through Professional Development
Stephen Mucher
Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, Michigan
| IT IS NO EXAGGERATION to suggest that the emergence of the Teaching American History (TAH) grant has profoundly energized the community of historians and history educators. The recent federal attention and financial support lavished on the study of our national past is unprecedented. Many of us have tapped into these new opportunities to bring rich historical content into elementary and secondary classrooms. Both the AHA and the OAH have mobilized—leveraging the history community's professional expertise to promote more robust classroom instruction. Excitement among grant participants is palpable. There is hope that a long-awaited reconciliation between our profession and K-12 teachers is underway.1 However, the most thoughtful history professionals have reminded us that our enthusiasm is insufficient and that reconnecting historians with schools is only a means to a greater end. Ultimately, we want to see more citizens thinking historically. And we know that difficult work is necessary to help our teachers (and our teacher's students) develop the knowledge and skills necessary to think about the past imaginatively and with disciplinary integrity. |
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This thread of "promoting historical thinking" runs through the most successful and thoughtfully conceived grant proposals—including the projects described in this issue. Grant participants realize the value of a closer partnership between historians and K-12 teachers, because such interaction is necessary if students in our schools are to learn to work through the mysteries of the past, consider the problems of historical interpretation, understand the purpose of evidence, develop analytical skills, critique source biases, and learn how to construct narrative interpretations of historical phenomena. We are excited about the possibility that more American youth will embrace the study of history as a way to understand the human condition and to think critically about the problems of past, present, and future. |
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Nonetheless, as this article will show, such lofty ambitions must be tempered by research on how students learn history, on the problems of professional development, and on the institutional imperatives of teachers' work. For the past three years I have had the unique opportunity to be involved in a single TAH grant: first as a social studies teacher in the awarded district and later as a pedagogical consultant, curriculum writer, university consultant, and lead historian. These experiences in Michigan's largest high school (Plymouth-Canton Educational Park) and partnered with one of the nation's largest collections of the artifacts of American history (The Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village), have expanded my knowledge and understanding of professional development and the difficult task of teaching historical thinking skills to teachers. |
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My quest for insight on teaching teachers to incorporate historical thinking skills has been influenced to a great extent by emerging research in history education as well as studies of professional development and curriculum implementation.2 This research should make us all cautious about any premature claims of success in regard to historical thinking. I am reminded, through this literature, that we are asking teachers to do something that is sophisticated, time-intensive, iterative, and, in the words of Samuel Wineburg, downright "unnatural." I found these complications particularly true in our grant's effort to encourage more classroom use of primary sources.3 |
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The purpose of my paper is two-fold. First, I want to describe generally how the TAH stakeholders in the Plymouth Canton Schools prioritized a professional development model that emphasized historical thinking. But rather than describing our specific institutes, programs, and curriculum projects, I will outline the major principles that guided this effort. Second, I will illustrate how we constructed a disciplinary tool, through our work with teachers, to scaffold professional development around historical thinking skills. Called the Historical Inquiry Protocol, our tool was designed to help both teachers and students interrogate primary sources as evidence. |
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The professional development principles described here were generated through discussion within a small group of grant stakeholders, a "foundations council," assembled to discuss the overall purposes and progress of the grant. Meeting roughly every three months and typically carrying on substantive conversations over into email, this committee consisted of two grant directors, two partnering historians, the chief curator and educational director from the Henry Ford Museum, the president of the Plymouth Historical Museum, and two participating teachers. |
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Over the course of the grant, some members of the "foundations council" began to see how difficult it was to institutionalize our interest in historical thinking. In the first year of the grant, it was easy to get sidetracked by a variety of programming activities and to focus on an abiding concern about how to best recruit a critical mass of interested teachers. Nonetheless, these early meetings created the groundwork for some emerging ideas. Beginning in the second year of the grant we became increasingly focused on one central goal. Namely, we agreed that the idea of "evidence" in history should become the core focus of the grant. More important than learning any specific area of historical knowledge or generalized teaching strategy, we wanted our teachers to grasp and promote the deceptively simple idea that written history is an interpretive act that is grounded in evidence. |
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Early assessments suggested that a number of our teachers shared an assumption that the purpose of studying history (or participating in our grant programs) was to determine "what really happened." We knew that our teachers needed engaging opportunities to consider new historical interpretations and to work productively with evidence. Our ultimate goal was to see district classrooms become laboratories for historical inquiry. And we gradually concluded that, through professional development, our grant needed to nurture a culture of evidence that resembled such laboratories. We wanted our teachers and their students to make evidence a routine and central component of classroom learning. We reminded ourselves frequently that such skills were different than simply "incorporating primary sources into the curriculum." Indeed the culture of evidence we envisioned incorporated primary sources, not as simple illustrations of historical phenomenon, but rather as the interpretive foundation of each students' developing theories about the past. |
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What emerged from our discussions of this singular focus on evidence were four principles or expectations we needed to encourage among teachers who participated in the grant. Of course, we had additional goals. But this short list reflects our belief that all professional development grant programs would benefit from an emphasis on these carefully limited and uniquely focused goals.
- Primary Sources. Teachers, as a routine and core element in their pedagogy, should expect students to use primary sources. Moreover, primary sources should be used as evidence and not merely objects of illustration.
- Scaffolding. Teachers should recognize that their students need significant guidance and special support on how to use primary sources as evidence. Historical thinking is unnatural. But teachers can use disciplinary tools to prompt and sustain a robust inquiry.
- Problem Framing. Teachers should understand the need to frame the past creatively by proposing engaging, contested, and contextualized problems. Indeed, it is this problematic character of interpreting the past that points students toward the importance of evidence and analysis.
- Historical Content Knowledge. Introducing teachers to new historical research is important because it provides clear examples of the interpretive nature of the discipline and offers new tools for organizing their understanding. New content knowledge helps teachers frame problems for pedagogical purposes, identify relevant primary sources, and fill gaps in narrative accounts of the past.
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Our effort to sustain a culture of evidence in our schools as well fostering the four principles described above reflected our ambition. But not all stakeholders shared these ideals or viewed them as the most important strategic focus for the grant. Some wanted more focus on raw historical content, or conversely, specific pedagogical strategies. Some suggested that we include more workshops that encouraged "relevance" in history by tying together past and present. But throughout these discussions, the institutional emphasis on creating a culture of evidence remained a powerful guiding ideal. We developed our plan under the assumption that, through our programming, our teachers would learn more about American history, develop historical thinking skills, and begin to rethink how they taught the subject to students. We expected that teachers, emboldened with new historical thinking skills, would teach differently in the classroom. We expected that our teachers would adopt, share, and incorporate the culture of evidence in their own teaching. |
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Having described how the TAH "foundation council" worked to develop four principles needed to create a culture of evidence, I will turn to the second purpose of this article and describe our creation of am Historical Inquiry Protocol. It is a part of the structure we created to scaffold a specific thinking skill for both teachers and students. We knew grant events had to go beyond disciplinary cheerleading. Our teachers needed support in order to change the culture of their classroom. Research on teaching and learning history suggests that the implementation and practice of historical thinking in the classroom has been rare. Using and teaching historical thinking places significant demands on teachers and requires ongoing support for students. It demands that teachers engage in practices that go against the grain of conventional schooling. Historical thinking demands risk and patience, and this being true, we must ask how we can support teachers who are inspired to take these risks. Compared with our efforts to define grant principles, answering this question proved to be especially difficult. We knew we wanted our teachers to bring a unique set of domain-specific and source-specific questions into their own classrooms when interrogating primary sources. But such forms of questioning were illusive in the first year of the grant. In year two, however, we produced at least one tool, the Historical Inquiry Protocol ("the HIP"), to help teachers emulate some of the questioning strategies employed by grant historians. |
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Developing questions for the HIP proved to be far less interesting and engaging for grant stakeholders. Why? This phenomenon may be the product of our own expertise. The council was made up of historical professionals, most of whom earn a living interpreting the past from evidence. Through our training and practice we have developed a routine, an internalized system of cognitive practices that we use to make sense out of this past. Among members of the "foundations council," such practices were often second nature and hidden. Yet we faced the task of organizing professional development for a K-12 classroom culture where the narrative ends of historical inquiry, not its construction, typically drives instructional decisions. Indeed, we quickly discovered that most teachers have been socialized to view their work, not as acts of evidentiary accumulation and interpretation, but as acquirers of content knowledge and as conveyors of historical drama. The culture of evidence that characterizes university history departments, AHA meetings, and this publication, may not be particularly common in K-12 classrooms. |
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Consequently, we found we needed to create the HIP as a tool designed to bridge this gulf between the historian and the teacher. Distributed as an organized set of questions on a laminated sheet, the HIP is designed to support teachers and students engaged in a specific interrogation of primary sources. The questions encourage novice inquirers to probe the purposes, contradictions, alternative meanings, or overall significance of various types of primary sources. This tool makes visible for students the very types of questions that history professionals ask of primary sources. And it is written specifically in a manner that should be accessible to non-professionals. The HIP proved to be particularly useful because it could be referenced in a wide variety of grant activities. Lead historians were encouraged to use it in their presentations of historical content. Film seminars and book circles referenced questions from the tool. Curriculum projects pointed teachers and students toward the HIP. |
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Grant participants were encouraged to use the HIP as a way to analyze primary sources in light of an identified historical problem. Indeed, this emphasis on historical problem formation, supported in the HIP, was a key scaffold to be used to enhance historical thinking. Moreover, during the past three years, master teachers working in concert with historians, have created lesson plans and curricula around such historical problems as: "Was Plymouth in 1890 an agricultural outpost or industrialized city?" "Did Ford's $5 Day improve employee lives?" "Did the rise of advertising in the 1920s encourage woman's liberation or reinforce 'tradition?'" "What made the Flint Sit-Down Strike effective?" "When did the Sixties Counterculture arrive at Plymouth High School?"(a question requiring students to use the school newspapers and yearbooks). "What were the primary causes of the 1967 Detroit Riot?" |
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The HIP also can help scaffold historical thinking by supporting the interrogation of carefully chosen and edited primary sources that bear on the problem at hand. These sources, which in our case could be identified with the aid of partner museums and libraries, should be chosen specifically to include conflicting sources—forcing students to make difficult decisions about context, significance, and authorial bias. The tensions produced through well-framed problems and conflicting sources place special demands on teachers and students. The HIP addresses these varied needs by layering questions that move from the general to the specific or from student questions to teacher prompts. |
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Our work in Plymouth Canton Schools in creating a culture of evidence was far from perfect. Many of our teachers remained skeptical—viewing the TAH grant as yet another in a long line of teaching reforms. Others embraced the TAH grant mainly as an opportunity to learn more historical content or explore topics that already interested them. But at least one quarter of our teachers have become more curious and informed about the epistemology of history. These teachers have become more interested in how to frame the past as a problem, how to incorporate primary sources as evidence, and how to use the HIP as a prompter and question generator for the effective interrogation of these sources. |
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Despite these occasionally positive outcomes that our grant achieved, we all should be troubled (but not surprised) by the fact that so many of our teachers do not profoundly change their instructional approach as a result of the Teaching American History grant. This concern should spur us to think more specifically about what we want our teachers to do as a result of grant activities. It should encourage us to think about how we structure professional development, sustain teacher commitment, support risk-taking in the classroom, and measure how well we have encouraged the development of specific historical thinking skills. |
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Nonetheless, we can acknowledge one positive outcome from TAH. The grant program has helped improve dialogue between historians and K-12 educators. As a result, both groups have been forced to ask hard questions? What kind of learning do we want to see in the schools? Why is it so important that our students study history? What do our teachers know about history? What is possible when historians work with teachers? What do historians not know about school contexts? What do K-12 educators not know about the purpose and epistemology of history? Why do both groups need each other? Perhaps most importantly, what does good history teaching look like and how can we help more individuals learn how to teach as such? On these and many other questions the TAH provides a laboratory to help us frame the possible. |
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Notes
1. The OAH conference session where a version of this article was presented, dedicated to questions about the TAH grant, is a case in point. See Mucher, "Equipping Secondary Students and their Teachers for Critical Source Analysis: The Historical Inquiry Protocol." This paper was given as part of a session called, "Designs for Developing Historical Understanding: Preparing K-12 Teachers in Evidence-based Instruction through the Teaching American History Grant Program," Organization of American Historians Regional Conference, Lincoln, Nebraska (July 7, 2006). The TAH was also the focus of an all-day symposium earlier in the year, "What Has TAH Wrought? The Impact of Teaching American History Projects on Historians and the Historical Community," Organization of American Historians Annual Conference, Washington, DC (April 19, 2006).
2. In particular, I have gained considerable insight on the practice-based difficulties in helping teachers teach historical thinking from Robert B. Bain. See "Into the Breach: Using Research and Theory to Shape History Instruction," in Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History. National and International Perspectives, ed. Peter Stearns, Peter Seixas, and Sam Wineburg (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 331–352; Robert B. Bain, Stephen S. Mucher, and Mimi H. Lee, "Historical Inquiry, Technological Tools, and Museum Objects," American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, LA, 2002. On the importance of domain-specific professional education, see Deborah Loewenberg Ball, "Bridging Practices: Intertwining Content and Pedagogy in Teaching and Learning to Teach," Journal of Teacher Education 51 (May/June 2000): 245; Suzanne Wilson and Jennifer Berne, "Teacher Learning and the Acquisition of Professional Knowledge: An Examination of Research on Contemporary Professional Development," in Review of Research in Education, ed. A. Iran-Nejad, and P. D. Person (Washington, D.C.: American Educational Research Association, 1999), 173–210.
3. Samuel Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001). For a compelling critique of the failure of the history profession to define and measure successful outcomes of TAH grant activities, see Maris Vinovskis, "Where Do We Go From Here?" in the closing session in "What Has TAH Wrought?"
Appendix:
Historical Inquiry Protocol (HIP)
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