Why and How Should History Departments Train Secondary Social Studies Teachers?

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Why and How Should History Departments Train Secondary Social Studies Teachers?

John Shedd
State University of New York at Cortland

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MY TITLE IMPLIES that history departments, under certain conditions, can be more effective producers of good teachers than those programs in which instruction in pedagogy is entirely in the hands of departments of education. There are several reasons why I think this is so, but I will emphasize only two, one practical and one philosophical, connected with a greater involvement in teacher training programs by historians. The first advantage has to do with the simple fact that secondary social studies teachers teach a subject. Although various factors make up a good teacher, among the most important traits outstanding teachers possess is knowledge of subject matter. In my view, the curriculum typical of American education departments stays on the generic level of teaching too long, with treatment of social studies content coming late, if ever, in the program. Some undergraduate programs for secondary social studies teachers require as few as eighteen hours of college credit in social sciences, amounting to twelve hours of survey and only two upper-division courses. To use an analogy for training a different professional, namely a surgeon, it is of course true that much can be taught to the physician-in-training about surgery in general: how to scrub up; how to use a scalpel; how to make stitches, etc. But eventually, the novice surgeon must master knowledge and skills specific to a particular kind of surgery, be it intestinal or brain, for example. I have found that progress in teaching young people to become teachers is both more rapid and more effective when instruction in classroom methods and materials is done within the context of a specific social studies topic, such as Civil War and Reconstruction, Ancient China, or Post-Colonial Africa. In short, history professors are experts in subject matter and possess skills relating to historical inquiry which make them potentially better able to inspire a similar expertise among fledgling teachers. 1
Another advantage I want to emphasize is philosophical. Too many specialists in education, it seems to me, have gotten caught up in fruitless arguments about teaching. Historians may argue among themselves no less than education faculty; but historians participating in even the most vehement of disputes should, and mostly do, acknowledge that their research is built upon the findings of others in the field. Experts on teaching, however, too often justify their conclusions by condemning teaching practices different from their own as a way of explaining why those not following their advice produce students who do not learn enough, and in doing so turn their backs on the ideal of progressively accumulating knowledge while learning from peers in the field. In my view, experts in pedagogy are often eager to mount high crusading horses and level the landscape of competitors before asserting their own viewpoint as the only valid one, thereby condemning educational methodology to a cycle of fads. More to the point, educators who deny the credibility, or at least plausibility, of other perspectives and conclusions break the tenets of sound scholarship. It should be obvious by now that I think history departments which have on staff professors who have been successful secondary teachers and who are also willing to read up on and try out various instructional methods and materials, stand a better chance of putting together effective teacher-training programs for history teachers than education departments. 2
Having made this point, I now discuss how history departments can train secondary social studies teachers, and thus I turn our attention to SUNY-Cortland's program, which was recently designated as outstanding and suggested as a model by the Teacher Education Council of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. Students entering our program are history majors with a minor in social sciences consisting of six hours each in geography, political science, and economics. They must achieve at least a B average in the major to be admitted. Except for two psychology courses, their entire secondary teacher training is provided by our history department. During the fall semester of their senior year, our history-secondary social studies dual majors enroll in the Professional Semester. The Professional Semester is an immersion program that provides both training and student teaching over the fall term for a total of eighteen semester hours of credit. The semester is divided into three parts: a Pre-Session, which meets for six hours a day, five days a week for six weeks, followed by Student Teaching, and concluded with a brief Post-Session. 3
This preparation semester for students planning to teach grades seven through twelve attempts to be as practical as possible. We make student teaching placements over the summer, so that by the time students begin the Professional Semester in the fall, they already have had contact with their soon-to-be master teachers, who have informed them of at least one unit of instruction--for example, medieval Europe, New York state government, or the Gilded Age--which they will be required to teach as part of their student teaching experience. Accordingly, students are expected to arrive on campus already having used part of their summer reading about the topic they will soon teach. We also have students visit their future student teaching placements during the Pre-Session so as to begin collecting materials and instructional ideas from their master teachers and, perhaps more importantly, to start getting to know their field placement school and its students. An idea begun three years ago, which worked even better than anticipated, was setting aside a half-day of the Pre-Session for short seminars conducted by various specialists in our department. History faculty used the time to provide our students with reading suggestions, as well as concepts to develop and materials to try out, as ways of helping prepare them to handle the topics they had been assigned for student teaching. These same department members also made themselves available as consultants for our students during student teaching. 4
Besides teaching methods and lesson planning, other topics treated during the Pre-Session include, in part: the state curriculum; computer instruction; multicultural issues; classroom management and discipline; students with special needs; educational journals; the assessment movement; learning styles; and teaching materials, from charts and graphs to literature. Recently, we have had to give more attention to the new standards handed down by the New York State Board of Regents as reflected in changing Regents' Exams, the successful completion of which will soon be required of all students before they can receive a high school diploma. (One important change in the Regents' history exam, for example, is more document analysis.) We have found motivation among our students in the Pre-Session not to be a problem, since they have visited the school and met the students they are about to teach. They realize that in order to be effective, they must use the six weeks of preparation during the Pre-Session as wisely as possible so as to hit the ground running once student teaching begins. Also, having our students together working alongside each other all day quickly leads to a healthy camaraderie, which goes a long way in building confidence and dispelling the anxieties a young person naturally and justifiably feels prior to student teaching. Students in the Pre-Session most often work in groups, discussing topics and issues related to schooling before turning in individual and group responses, and also providing peer critiques for the lesson objectives, lesson plans, and unit plans they are each constructing. 5
Having the methods instruction occur just prior to student teaching and identifying actual topics our prospective teachers will soon teach at a middle school or high school are two of the many strengths of the program. The Professional Semester instructors both hold Ph.D. degrees in history and have had secondary teaching experience. We supervise our seniors during their student teaching, but since we average approximately forty-five students per fall semester, we hire adjunct supervisors (usually excellent secondary teachers in retirement) who frequently visit the Pre-Session to establish a rapport with students they will soon supervise in the field, and to help them prepare lesson plans for their student-teaching unit. Student teachers are never told when their teaching will be observed by college faculty and are required to keep a binder containing all of their past lesson plans, written out in full, as well as supporting teaching materials, to share with supervisors during visits. Instruction on teaching philosophy is saved for the Post-Session, after our students have spent time in front of their own classrooms and can, therefore, think more concretely about themselves as teachers. 6
Our teacher preparation program is vigorously supported by our history department faculty. All have been willing to provide instruction both to our history-secondary education trainees, as described above, and to area teachers. For example, our Africa specialist, Donald Wright, almost yearly gives talks to various organizations. He did a program with me a while back for the New York State Council for the Social Studies on teaching world history. The participants were secondary educators from both New York and Connecticut. Three years ago, Girish Bhat, our Russian historian, and I taught a summer seminar for teachers on using literature to teach history. Recently, the state department of education changed the ninth-tenth grade sequence from global studies to global history. Our Asian specialist, Luo Xu, responded by giving presentations on how to make course adjustments at the Central New York Council for the Social Studies conference in Syracuse. I also did a talk for the same organization on using documents in history classes in answer to concerns among teachers regarding increased emphasis on document analysis needed to prepare students for the Regents' Exams. This spring, we plan to hold another conference for global history teachers on campus in conjunction with our continuing education office. Most of our graduate students are secondary teachers seeking their master's degrees. Some of our staff have responded to their particular needs by offering evening courses such as Africa for Teachers, Middle Ages for Teachers, and Europe since 1500 for Teachers. In short, area secondary educators can count on our department to help them cope with curriculum adjustments handed down from the state department. 7
In conclusion, the theme of our teacher training program, which amounts to a list indicating the classroom traits that, at a minimum, our new teachers are expected to exhibit, is: clarity, variability, enthusiasm, and task-oriented behavior. I have noticed, as a high school teacher of ten years in Oak Ridge, Tennessee and since, that secondary teachers who love both students and the subject that they teach do a good job and seldom burn out. We, therefore, try to assist our students in becoming thoughtful, patient, and reflective teachers who enjoy helping their students as individuals and in groups, while concurrently upholding academic achievement as the first priority in their classrooms.

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