Building Successful Collaborations to Enhance History Teaching in Secondary Schools
By Kathleen Anderson Steeves

3. Reframing History Teaching in Secondary Schools:
Some Key Trends

It is still too soon perhaps to accurately assess the burgeoning collaborations around the country. But the items below will give an outline of what seem to be some of the principal trends related to partnerships between historians at schools and colleges.

The History Standards Movement

April 30, 2007, the general public began to become more concerned about what was being learned in schools. Nationwide tests in the late 1980s indicated that U.S. students were far behind their counterparts in almost every other industrialized country in the world.9 The resulting political fallout led to the Educate America Act of 1994, which set national goals for student learning. The "goal" that had a special impact upon the K–12 curriculums stipulated that students should "leave grades 4, 8, [and] 12 having demonstrated competency over challenging subjects including English, mathematics, science, foreign languages, civics and government, economics, arts, history, and geography."10

In the process of developing state and local history standards, many of the issues that had emerged within the history profession over the past several decades resurfaced. The "new" social history applied well to the changing needs of increasingly diverse schools and students, but it also brought to the forefront the debate over what historical "truth" is and what our young people should know to meet the standards of the National Goals. Multiculturalism raised a debate between particularists and pluralists, and between "traditional" and "new" historians.11 The proposal to include new kinds of historical research within history texts and curricula had its critics, since it meant that other "important" material had to be left out. This debate continues to engage educators (and the public) as curriculum teams, often using funds from the Educate America Act, develop state history standards and assessments.

State and Local Curriculum Goals

Standards have been available for U.S. and world history since 1994, and states have used them to develop their own state or local standards.12 At the secondary level, the history curriculums in many schools closely follow the state created standards and benchmarks or "essential learnings" in order to address tests mandated by the state. The recently passed No Child Left Behind Act (Public Law 107-110, 2001) mandates testing of students in all grades for competency in reading and mathematics. Most states also have high-stakes tests at the secondary level in history. Each state is responsible for its own measure, but, given the high stakes nature of the test, more and more teachers experience pressure to "teach to the test." Students who do not pass the test may not graduate; schools that do not have a certain average passing score for their students may be labeled as "failing," with funding consequences. The emphasis on reading and mathematics has also led to concerns that teachers may focus less on history/social studies, believing that they need to concentrate on what is tested.

State standards have been evaluated by various organizations and are ranked publicly, most notably by the Fordham Foundation in The State of State Standards. Each state is given a grade based on criteria defined by the foundation. Most states (Oregon, Kentucky, or Virginia, for example) publish their standards on their state's Department of Education web sites. A recently completed comprehensive survey, History Education in the United States: A Survey of Teacher Certification and State-based Standards and Assessments for Teachers and Students by Sarah Drake Brown and John J. Patrick (to be published in print by the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians), provides an analytical overview of some aspects of the current situation. It is worth noting that state standards bodies—which often include neither teachers nor historians—are increasingly focusing on the high-stakes tests and their results. This trend has made history courses more formal, confining teaching to a set curriculum or "essential content." While the history profession has in general expanded its areas of study, current trends in secondary education are leading to a narrowing of the content and are inhibiting teacher creativity.

Teacher Involvement in Standards

A study found that "nearly one-fourth (23 percent) of all secondary teachers do not have even a college minor in their main teaching field." Many history teachers also were trained outside the field of history. A 1990 survey of 257 history teachers found that 13 percent had never taken a college history course, and only 40 percent had a B.A. or M.A. in history.13 This lack of disciplinary training has limited their involvement in the definition of standards. Without the information or training base with which to decide about what to teach, reliance on published texts remains a primary source for course development and delivery, leaving decisions about broader issues of standards to others. Moreover, with fewer teachers now available to fill classrooms in urban and rural schools, teachers are more often teaching "out of content." In social studies departments, which frequently include the many varied courses required by the shifting needs of schools, teachers may be as far from their field of training as to be teaching peer counseling rather than world history.
Alarming as this situation is, it also points to the increasing need for university historians to collaborate with the more than 40 percent of secondary-school history teachers who did receive training in history and thus have good knowledge of content and are eager to strengthen history education in secondary schools. They need to be supported not only by contributing to the development of standards but also by encouraging them to be mentors of others who lack current history knowledge.


The Middle School Model Changes Teaching Strategies

An increasing number of schools have moved to change the basic way they deliver schooling. This has been done to accommodate the changing requirements placed on schools by a society that wants schools to address such social problems as violent youth, dropouts, or illiterate graduates Following the lead of such educators as Theodore Sizer, Robert Slavin, D. W. Johnson, and Roger T. Johnson, and Edyth Johnson Holubec, schools are restructuring curriculums and the way they are organized.14 Much of this change has focused on middle schools because they provide the transition between the more flexible world of elementary schools and the very structured, subject-centered world of high schools. In the middle school model a group of 80–120 students, grades 6-8 generally, are placed with a team of teachers who are responsible for all of their academic subjects. In this model, history teachers may work with English, math or science teachers to create themes around which several subjects may be taught. Themes might be selected based on the content standards in history or geography.

Middle school teacher teams are encouraged to think in interdisciplinary terms, as classes may be combined into nontraditional 90- or 100-minute time blocks. In the best cases, this scheduling format has encouraged history teachers to engage in cooperative planning and to use cooperative learning for students. The model also may facilitate placing history in a context that is logically integrated with other academic subjects.

Also at the middle school level many experiments have been conducted on authentic learning and assessment. Teaching methods such as inquiry (long a staple of science labs) and concept formation and concept attainment (which focus on hands-on learning strategies) are more readily tried. These methods have also been encouraged by some of the national standards documents, notably in mathematics and science and by the Historical Thinking Standards of the National History Standards.15 A significant result of experimentation at the middle-school level is that some of the leadership for professional development of faculty has come from middle school teachers.

The renaming of the "junior high school" as the "middle school" has not been simply a matter of changing the inclusive grades, from 7–9 to 6–8. It has often amounted to a wholesale restructuring of the goals and orientation of schools, which has made it much easier to plan workshops or seminars that address new learning theories in general. Because teachers work in teams, each teacher is expected to be responsible for the content of his or her own teaching fields. The professional training they receive then, has typically focused on how students learn, what keeps students in school, or how students can better work together, not on what students are learning. Rather, content learning will more likely occur at the high school level, where the emphasis has been most focused on academic content.

High School History Teaching

Although some high schools incorporate some of the new structure and methods of the middle school model (Sizer's "essential schools" are an example), most have found the ideas of cooperative learning and alternative assessments to be too difficult to implement in a system that has as its measure of success high scores on the state mandated tests or SATs and college admissions.16 Many university faculty have been linked with high school teachers in the development of advanced-placement courses and preparation for gifted and talented programs, where it is recognized that the teacher's content knowledge is essential.

Teachers—especially those who have been required by the nature of their assignments to teach out of their field of study—willing to think in different ways, to provide students with the newest research in content as well as in methodology, require additional information and training. Many school systems, some state education departments, and the Department of Education at the federal level recognize the need for in-service training or professional development for teachers.17 The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for many years has supported summer institutes for teachers in content specialties. These efforts, where they have been funded, have provided a valuable service to teachers and students. Additional education for teachers in secondary schools remains a significant concern, however. We discuss below a new movement within this area, collaboratives between colleges and school districts.

Frequently, it is a systemwide decision or a state mandate that governs professional development content for teachers. Even in a system in which the decisions about what is presented in the classroom are made at the school (usually department) level, suggestions or guidelines are provided from school systems, state organizations or professional organizations. In history, the AHA, in collaboration with OAH and NCSS, has just released its "Benchmarks for Professional Development in Teaching of History as a Discipline." More teacher input into the subject and direction of their own pre-service and in-service training would logically lead to more teacher commitment to new knowledge.


Last Updated: April 30, 2007