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

Notes

1. The new research that challenges the canon of the traditional story, which has been told without significant change in U.S. history textbooks since the late nineteenth century, has not been added easily. Two analyses of textbooks are particularly important: Francis Fitzgerald, America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979); and James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me (New York: The New Press, 1995).

2. The 1991 American Historical Association Task Force on Liberal Learning and the History Major reinforced the integrative approach as an essential part of the undergraduate curriculum.

3. A good review of the critique of traditional teaching methodologies can be found in Alfie Kohn, The Schools Our Children Deserve (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999) especially pp. 209–234.

4. Peter Stearns, Peter Seixas and Sam Wineburg, Knowing, Teaching & Learning History: National and International Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 2000).

5. Both the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and the Bradley Commission on History in Schools advocate increasing the amount of history taught in secondary schools. Review of tabulations of NAEP’s 1987 survey can be found in Diane Ravitch and Chester E. Finn Jr., What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? (New York: Harper & Row, 1987); Bradley Commission on History in Schools, Building a History Curriculum: Guidelines for Teaching History in Schools (Washington, D.C.: Educational Excellence Network, 1988). The National History Standards were revised in 1996 and can be ordered from the National Center for History in the Schools, University of California at Los Angeles, 1100 Glendon Ave., Ste. 927, Box 951588, Los Angeles, CA 90095. Fax 310-794-6740.

6. Children’s books such as America: A Patriotic Primer by Lynne V. Cheney and Robin Preiss Glasser (Simon & Schuster, 2002); the special issue of American Heritage, November/December 2001 in which historians write about what history says about “This New War” ; and the Bush initiative to collect and distribute the 100 Documents of American History illustrate this trend.

7. Some examples are E. D. Hirsch Jr., Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987); Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987; Diane Ravitch, Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000) (Chapter 11); Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree & Ross E. Dunn, History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York: Knopf, 1997).

8. Seymour B. Sarason, Kenneth S. Davidson, and Burton Blatt, The Preparation of Teachers (Cambridge, Mass.: Brookline Books, 1986), xix.

9. National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1983). The full text is available at http://www.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/title.html. Paul Williams and others, NAEP 1994 U.S. History: First Look (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, Office of Education Research and Improvement, 1995); and Alexandra S. Beatty and others, NAEP 1994 U.S. History Report Card: Findings from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, Office of Education Research and Improvement, 1996).

10. Goals 2000: Educate America Act, 1994 (administered through the U.S. Department of Education). The full text of the act is available at http://www.ed.gov/legislation/GOALS2000/TheAct.

11. Diane Ravitch, “Multiculturalism: E Pluribus Plures,” The American Scholar (summer 1990): 337-54; Eric Foner, ed., The New American History, revised and expanded edition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997).

12. The McRel web site provides a compilation standards documents from several sources. It is easily searched by discipline or topic.

13. Charlotte Crabtree and David O’Shea, “Teachers’ Academic Preparation in History,” National Center for History in the Schools Newsletter 1, no. 3 (November 1991): 4, 10. Cited in Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, 280. Crabtree and O’Shea noted that some of those surveyed did have majors in the social sciences. One in twelve history teachers had a B.A. in physical education.

14. Theodore Sizer, Horace’s School: Redesigning the American High School (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1992); and Robert Slavin, “Cooperative Learning and Student Achievement,” Educational Leadership 46, no. 2 (October 1988): 31–33, present models and research to support the use of cooperative learning, as do Roger T. Johnson, D. W. Johnson, and Edythe Johnson Holubec in The New Circles of Learning: Cooperation in the Classroom and School (Alexandria, Va.: American Society for Curriculum Development, 1994).

15. National Research Council, National Science Education Standards (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1995); and National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics (Reston, Va.: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 1989); for an explanation of Standards in Historical Thinking, see the National Standards for History, Basic Edition (National Center for History in the Schools, 1994), pages 14–24.

16. For further information on the Essential Schools Movement, see Theodore Sizer, Horace’s School.

17. A goal added to the National Goals in the Educate America Act addresses teacher training, as does the 1996 report of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, What Matters Most: Teaching for America’s Future (New York: National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future). Copies are available from the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, P.O. Box 5239, Woodbridge, VA 22194-5239. Both place emphasis on the need to address teacher training, both pre- and in-service, to improve schools in all academic areas.

18. For more on the “seamless education” project, see Bill Weber and others, “Seamless Education in Long Beach: University/College/School Collaboration,” Perspectives 35, no. 6 (September 1997): 21.

19. The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) has statistics on downsizing in education departments and the shift from undergraduate teacher preparation to graduate schools of education. The National Commission on Teaching also recommends the fifth-year structure for teacher preparation.

20. Information on the history-social science certification is available from the NBPTS at 1-800-22-TEACH.

21. Discussion of this collaboration can be found in What Matters Most: Teaching for America’s Future (New York: National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, 1996), 71–75.

22. John W. Larner, “Departments of History and Secondary Teacher Education,” Perspectives 34, no. 4 (April 1996): 38.

23. The American Historical Association's web site contains an area in which it highlights collaborative projects between schools and universities.

24. Examples are provided in Edwin Fenton, Teaching the New Social Studies in Secondary Schools: An Inductive Approach (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1966); Jerome Bruner, The Process of Education (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962); James Banks, Teaching Strategies for the Social Studies: Inquiry, Valuing, and Decision-Making (New York: Longman, 1990); and Geneva Gay, “Culturally Diverse Students and the Social Studies,” in James P. Shaver, ed., Handbook of Research on Social Studies, Teaching, and Learning (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1991), 144-56; Tom Holt, Thinking Historically: Narrative, Imagination, and Understanding (New York: The College Board, 1990).

25. Robert Blackey, Allison Blakely, Peter Frederick, Robert Gutierrez, Don and Nadine Hata, Linda Kaufman, Gordon Mork, Carol Pixton, Eric Rothschild, Peter Stearns, and David Trask, “Thinking Historically in the Classroom,” (Teaching Innovations Forum) Perspectives 33, no. 7 (October 1995): 1, 4, 23–25, 37.

26. National Assessment Governing Board, U.S. History Framework for the 1994 National Assessment of Educational Progress: NAEP U.S. History Consensus Project (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, 1994). For further information, contact the National Assessment Governing Board at 800 North Capitol St., NW, Ste. 825, Washington, DC 20002. Tel. 202-357-6938.

27. Lorraine Valdez Pierce, Effective Schools for National Origin Language Minority Students (Washington, D.C.: Mid-Atlantic Equity Center, 1991).

28. A. U. Chamot and J. M. O’Malley, The CALLA Handbook: How to Implement the Cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach (Reading, Mass.: Addison Wesley, 1994). See also Peter H. Martorella, “Knowledge and Concept Development in Social Studies,” in Shaver, ed., Handbook of Research on Social Studies; and Matthew T. Downey and Linda S. Levstik, “Teaching and Learning History” in Shaver, ed., Handbook of Research on Social Studies.

29. An overview of the projects that first reported to the AHA web site was originally published in Perspectives in 1999.

30. The Center for History and the New Media at George Mson University provides information about web resources available to historians, as well as suggestions for ways to effectively evaluate web sites.

31. See Mary Crystal Cage, “Learning to Teach,” Chronicle of Higher Education (Feb. 9, 1996): 19-20.

32. For more information about the outcomes of this collaboration, refer to the web site: www.cal-impac.org.

33. Ernest Boyer, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate (Princeton, N.J.: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1990), xii.; Arnita Jones, in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (June 8, 2001, B20), echoes Boyer’s ideas about the scholarship of teaching and encourages universities to consider this approach.

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Last Updated: April 30, 2007