Abstract
Both the Common Core Standards for Literacy and the College, Career, and Civic Life Framework for Social Studies State Standards underscore the importance of classroom discussion for the development of high-level literacy and subject-matter knowledge. Yet, discussion remains stubbornly absent in social studies classrooms, which tend toward rote memorization and textbook work. In this article, we discuss our efforts to design practice-based methods instruction that prepares preservice teachers to facilitate text-based, whole-class discussion. We propose a framework for facilitating historical discussions and illustrate it with examples from videos of teacher candidates enacting the practice in K-12 classrooms. The framework assists not only in conceptualizing and naming the discrete components that constitute disciplinary discussion facilitation but also in highlighting where novices appear to struggle. Our analysis has implications for improving teacher education that seeks to prepare novices for ambitious instruction called for by the new literacy and social studies standards.
Keywords
Despite a long tradition of theoretical and empirical research that extols the value of student discourse, productive discussion remains stubbornly absent in K-12 classrooms (e.g., Cazden, 2001; Nystrand, Wu, Gamoran, Zeiser, & Long, 2003). Social studies instruction, in particular, has been dominated by lecture, rote memorization, and individual textbook work (e.g., Bain, 2006). Recently, policy documents have attempted to turn the tide: The Common Core State Standards highlight the value of classroom discussions in the development of advanced literacy (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010). Text-based discussions, in which students evaluate evidence and formulate arguments, also align with the inquiry-oriented instruction outlined in the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards (National Council for the Social Studies, 2013). In this article, we discuss a framework that emerged from our efforts to design methods instruction that prepares preservice social studies teachers to facilitate text-based, whole-class discussion. Our framework extends existing scholarship on discussions in social studies classrooms (e.g., Parker & Hess, 2001; Parker, 2003; Hess, 2004) by articulating the moment-to-moment interactions that comprise effective discussions. We argue that our “Framework for Facilitating Historical Discussions” has allowed us not only to conceptualize and name the components that constitute disciplinary discussion facilitation but also to identify where novices appear to struggle and where we might, therefore, improve instruction. We present our framework as a conceptual tool for teacher educators and professional developers to use as they work with novices on discussion facilitation.
Empirical research suggests that classroom discourse can support student engagement, understanding, and problem solving in many subject areas, ranging from reading and writing (e.g., Murphy, Wilkinson, Soter, Hennessey, & Alexander, 2009) to math and science (e.g., Engle & Conant, 2002; Kazemi & Stipek, 2001; O’Connor, 2001). Research in social studies classrooms has also confirmed the value of classroom discussion, though this research has focused primarily on discussions of political or controversial issues, rather than history (e.g., Hess, 2009; Hess & Posselt, 2002; Parker et al., 2011). For example, Hess and McAvoy (2015) found that students who regularly participated in discussions about controversial issues reported being more engaged and more likely to vote, follow the news, and participate in political discussions. These students also demonstrated gains in political knowledge relative to their counterparts. Although no data exist to link historical discussions to student learning gains, the practice occupies a central role in the literature on inquiry-based instruction in history (Fogo, 2014; Monte-Sano, 2008; Reisman, 2015; VanSledright, 2002).
Social studies researchers have also laid the groundwork for thinking about how we might support novice teachers in learning how to facilitate discussion. Parker and Hess (2001) articulated a typology to help novices identify the various forms and purposes that discussions can assume in a classroom. Parker (2003) discussed how he supported candidates in learning to lead discussions, using methods such as modeling discussion facilitation, helping teachers identify generative texts and questions, and debriefing features of effective discussions. Hess (2004) described her use of classroom videos to broaden novices’ conceptions of their students’ capacity for discussion. At the core of this work lies the assumption that the features of effective discussion must be made explicit to novices.
Recent scholarship that explores how preservice education might be redesigned to focus on teaching practices builds upon this core assumption. The turn to practice in teacher education is motivated by the argument that improving instruction requires shifting our focus from improving teachers (i.e., their characteristics, beliefs, and knowledge bases) to improving the practice of teaching (Hiebert & Morris, 2012). Following this logic, teacher educators who want to prepare effective discussion facilitators must do more than instill in their candidates a belief that discussion is important. Teacher educators should have a variety of scaffolds for supporting novices in their early attempts to facilitate discussion and ideally be able to identify benchmarks along a developmental trajectory in the practice.
Proponents of practice-based teacher education argue that professions are characterized by specifications, standards, and resources that offer a shared language for practitioners and researchers, making it possible to aggregate knowledge and improve instruction at scale (Ball & Forzani, 2009; Grossman, Hammerness, & McDonald, 2009). In their call for a shared language of practice, Grossman and McDonald (2008) envisioned a set of core teaching practices around which teacher education programs could be organized. Such practices would be those that (a) frequently occur in teaching, (b) can be enacted by novices, (c) allow novices to learn more about students and teaching through their enactment, (d) preserve the integrity and complexity of teaching, and (e) are research based and have the potential to improve student achievement (Grossman, Compton, et al., 2009). In 2012, Grossman and McDonald convened the Core Practice Consortium, a group of teacher educators and teacher education researchers spanning 11 institutions. The consortium aims to develop a common conception of core teaching practices and approaches to supporting candidates’ enactment of them.
We produced this article through our participation in the consortium as teacher educators and researchers focused on history education. Our first step in studying our own practice was to develop a specification of historical discussion to serve as a common point of reference and to guide our design of methods instruction. Drawing from existing scholarship on discussion (e.g., Cazden, 2001; Nystrand et al., 2003; Parker, 2010), we defined text-based, whole-class discussion in history classrooms as those activities in which the teacher and all the students negotiate historical questions or controversies using each other’s ideas and historical texts as resources. The purposes of such discussions are to build collective knowledge and allow students to practice listening, speaking, and engaging in historical interpretation. In instructionally productive discussions, the teacher and a wide range of students contribute orally, listen actively, and respond to and learn from others’ contributions.
Throughout the 2014-2015 school year, we remained in conversation about the design of our courses as well as the challenges we observed teacher candidates facing. Because a key tenet of practice-based education is that novices must see, rehearse, and receive feedback on instructional practices (McDonald, Kazemi, & Kavanagh, 2013), we worked from the assumption that if candidates struggled to enact a practice, we must not have been sufficiently clear in our instruction. In an effort to be more explicit, we reviewed videos that candidates submitted of their discussion facilitation and drew from existing literature on discussion facilitation to identify four components that constitute disciplinary discussion in history. In particular, we drew upon Kazemi and Cunard’s (2016) concept of “orienting moves” as a key feature of discussion facilitation and Kavanagh and Rainey’s (in press) examination of how teachers “orient students to the discipline.” Our “Framework for Facilitating Historical Discussions” (see Figure 1) is the result of putting this existing literature on disciplinary discussion facilitation into conversation with our data. We have found this framework useful in reconceptualizing how we work with teachers on discussion facilitation. We offer the framework to teacher educators and professional developers as a tool for organizing instruction on both the practices and purposes of discussion in the history classroom.
Framework for facilitating historical discussions.
Below, we share our framework and then use it to examine videos from two social studies methods course assignments in which teacher candidates recorded themselves facilitating whole-class discussions with K-12 students about historical sources. We discuss how each assignment framed and scaffolded the practice of facilitating whole-class discussion for novice teachers, as well as how each assignment posed particular challenges for novices. We end with a discussion of how the framework and our analyses of the videos can help us better prepare novices to facilitate discussion.
Framework for Facilitating Historical Discussions
Our framework consists of four overarching practices: (a) engaging K-12 students as sense-makers, (b) orienting K-12 students to each other, (c) orienting K-12 students to texts as sources of historical knowledge and evidentiary warrants, and (d) orienting K-12 students to the interpretive practices of the discipline. Each practice has intellectual roots that cross the core content areas (e.g., Kavanagh & Rainey, in press; Kazemi & Cunard, 2016; Lampert et al., 2013); our intent is to illustrate what such practices look like in the context of historical discussions and to highlight important features of history discussions.
For classroom discussion to occur, a teacher must engage students as sense-makers and provide them with tasks that require interpretation or creativity. Rather than treat discussions as opportunities to quiz students with narrow questions about what they already know (Cazden, 2001), teachers can use discussions as opportunities for students to formulate new ideas. Such instruction reflects the tenets of constructivist learning theory (Piaget, 1977), whereby learners construct knowledge by developing, testing, and revising hypotheses. In the context of text-based historical discussion, teachers can engage students as sense-makers by posing open-ended questions that require examination of historical texts and interpretation (e.g., “Based on what you’ve read, would you say the Puritans were selfish or selfless? Why?”), by eliciting student responses and expressing interest in their ideas (e.g., “I’m curious to hear your thoughts about Nat Turner’s state of mind”), and by prompting students to elaborate upon their reasoning (e.g., “Tell us more about why you see it that way”). By engaging students as sense-makers, teachers treat students as full participants with legitimate ideas.
The second prong of our framework focuses on orienting students to each other (Kazemi & Cunard, 2016). Sociocultural theory holds that knowledge construction occurs through social interaction, which supports the development of “higher mental functions” (Leont’ev, 1981, pp. 55-56). Learners build new knowledge through social engagement that is mediated by cultural tools (and in this case, disciplinary tools), such as language, text, and shared practices. To support this kind of collective knowledge construction, teachers must help students grapple with each other’s ideas. Instead of asking students to serially report out their ideas, teachers who orient students to each other build a community where ideas and knowledge are developed together (e.g., “Okay. Let’s see if we can work together to reconcile these conflicting accounts”). From this Vygotskian perspective, the teacher’s facilitation and orchestration of student voices scaffolds the complex mental processes that students will ultimately internalize. Such facilitation moves might range from a simple “Who can build on Alex’s idea?” to the more sophisticated, “Let’s consider Destiny’s idea. Someone restate her claim and everyone else—listen closely—because we’re going to discuss whether we agree or disagree with her interpretation and why.” Often, teachers exclusively employ facilitation moves that prompt individual responses instead of collective sense-making (e.g., “Who wants to share?” and “Anyone else?”) and stop short of actively orienting students to one another’s ideas. This type of facilitation tends to produce discourse that we describe as “reporting out” instead of true discussion. Instead, teachers who orient students to each other actively prompt them to engage in collective knowledge-construction.
Sociocultural perspectives of learning also inform the third prong of our framework—orienting students to the text. From a sociocultural perspective, tools shape social engagement and individual learning by carrying shared cultural and historical meaning across people and time (Cole & Wertsch, 1996). Texts serve as tools, or shared disciplinary artifacts, around which classroom discussions revolve. During discussion, teachers work to orient students to text at several levels. A teacher might ensure that students have a common focus (e.g., “Let’s all look at paragraph one”). Teachers also orient students to text when they check that students comprehend texts at a literal level and have a foundation upon which to develop interpretations (e.g., “Take five minutes to work out with your neighbor what you think Abraham Lincoln is trying to say in this address. Highlight parts you’re unsure about and we’ll discuss as a group”). At the most complex level, teachers orient students to text by framing texts as warrants and ensuring that claims are supported with textual evidence (e.g., “Let’s find some textual evidence for Crystal’s claim”).
The final prong of our framework highlights that students need to be oriented to the interpretive practices of the discipline (Kavanagh & Rainey, in press). Although orienting students to historical texts ensures that they grapple with historical content, disciplinary work—in history and elsewhere—entails a process of inquiry-driven knowledge construction (Schwab, 1978). In the context of a text-based historical discussion, students who engage in knowledge construction should leave the discussion with a new or more complex understanding of the past, as well as an understanding of how that knowledge was constructed.
Schwab (1978) distinguished between the syntactic structure of disciplines, which refers to methods of verifying or justifying conclusions, and the substantive structure of disciplines, the “conceptual devices which are used for defining, bounding, and analyzing” subject matter (p. 246). Teachers can orient students to the syntactic structure of the discipline by explicitly linking student contributions to the interpretive practices of the discipline. Wineburg (1991) distilled three heuristics historians draw upon when making sense of the partial and often-contradictory documentary record: sourcing, or considering a text’s provenance and purpose; contextualization, situating a document in its historical context; and corroboration, synthesizing evidence from multiple sources to arrive at a plausible claim about the past. A teacher can orient students to these disciplinary practices by highlighting the way a student engaged in a disciplinary practice (e.g., “Notice how Hannah just sourced the document by observing that it was written before the boycott”), framing a particular elicitation in the language of historical thinking (e.g., “Remember, as historians, we always try to understand historical accounts within the time and place they were created—to contextualize. Can someone help us contextualize Frick’s interview?”), or signaling that a particular part of the discussion constitutes disciplinary work (e.g., “Historians always try to look at multiple sources—so how does Nixon’s speech fit into our discussion?”).
At the substantive level, teachers can orient students to the discipline by highlighting the conceptual structures and disciplinary knowledge that shape historians’ work. A teacher who explicitly connects points in a discussion to conceptual understandings about history helps orient students to the discipline (see Lee, 2005). Seixas and Morton (2013) highlight six historical thinking concepts that shape disciplinary reasoning: historical significance, evidence, continuity and change, cause and consequence, historical perspectives, and the ethical dimension. Teachers might prompt students to evaluate multiple perspectives about a historical event, pushing them to understand that accounts are neither exact copies of the past nor equally reliable interpretations (e.g., “Wow—Kevin and Chante offered really different interpretations of this document. What other evidence or background knowledge do we have that could help us decide which interpretation is stronger?”). Or, teachers could challenge students to investigate the worldviews of people living in the time period under consideration, building their capacity for historical empathy (e.g., “So what do we know about how people viewed race at the time these documents were written?”). Whereas these conceptual understandings appear abstract, it is important to note that for concepts to hold any meaning, they must be instantiated with historical content; as Seixas and Morton (2013) stated, “historical thinking concepts make no sense at all without the material, the topics, the substance, or what is often referred to as the ‘content’ of history” (p. 4). A teacher reveals and illustrates the conceptual underpinnings of the discipline by helping students engage deeply with specific historical content. As students grapple with competing interpretations of an historic event or with unfamiliar worldviews, they enter what Reisman (2015) called the historical problem space, where they are confronted with the tension between their contemporary values and worldviews and those held by historical actors. Teachers who consistently orient students to the discipline can help students enter this problem space.
Course Context and Assignments
Over the 2014-2015 academic year, two of the authors, one teaching elementary social studies methods and the other secondary methods, began collecting data on their approach to practice-based teacher education, specifically as it related to novice facilitation of whole-class discussion. Both courses were offered in master’s degree programs at high-ranking research universities: The site of the elementary program was a public university located in a small midwestern city near a large urban center, whereas the secondary program was offered at a private university in a major city on the East coast. Candidates were placed in K-5 and high school field placements, respectively, for the duration of the year, and their field placements reflected the respective university contexts. The elementary field placements ranged from majority White to racially and ethnically diverse settings, as well as schools with 10% to 30% of the students characterized as economically disadvantaged. Proficiency in English Language Arts ranged from 45% to 87% at the various placements and each school had a sizable number of English learners. Geographically, elementary placement schools were located in both urban and suburban contexts. In the secondary program, candidates were placed in racially and economically diverse urban classrooms, though these also ranged from schools where fewer than 20% of students scored proficient in English Language Arts to the city’s most competitive magnet schools. Below, we share specific school demographics below for each candidate we feature (see Table 1).
School Demographics of Field Placements.
Numbers do not add to 100% perfectly due to rounding.
Methods instruction in both courses followed a pedagogical framework proposed by Grossman et al. (2009), in which novices were introduced to instructional practices through multiple representations, these practices were decomposed into their constituent parts, and novices were given multiple opportunities to approximate the practice in the context of methods instruction. Despite starting with a shared specification for whole-class discussion and a common framework for practice-based instruction, each teacher educator drew on different technical terms and instructional activities to decompose the practice. We developed the Framework for Facilitating Historical Discussions after this year of methods instruction, to capture the patterns that we detected in novice discussion facilitation across elementary and secondary contexts. Below, after describing each instructional context, we illustrate the prongs of the framework using examples we selected from video recordings that candidates submitted for methods course assignments.
Elementary Setting
Teacher candidates took the elementary social studies methods course in the second semester of a 1-year certification and master’s degree program. The course focused on core teaching practices that provide students opportunities to engage in inquiry and related literacies. Prior to the discussion assignment, candidates learned to elicit and respond to student thinking about time and change using historical photographs (cf. Barton & Levstik, 1996) and to use strategy instruction to teach sourcing and contextualization (Wineburg, 1991). Discussion facilitation was presented as a distinct core practice essential to inquiry, but also as one that incorporates several other instructional practices.
Candidates learned about facilitating whole-class discussion through a visual inquiry lesson assignment (Johnson, 2013), an activity in which students compared two images in light of a central question. All but eight candidates (of 29) elected to use instructor-created materials for this assignment. They were supported in refining the materials and lesson plan, identifying key details in their images that would yield meaningful inferences, and sequencing questions that moved students from observation (“What do you see?”) to inference (“What do you think?”) to interpretation or evaluation (“How does this help us answer our central question?” or “What does the artist want us to think?”). Candidates needed to elicit student thinking and help students shift from noticing details to using those details to build an interpretation in response to the central question.
To teach whole-class discussion, the teacher educator first modeled and represented the practice by facilitating a discussion about two images of the Boston Massacre. Candidates then decomposed the practice both in that representation and in a video of an elementary social studies discussion using terms proposed by Beck and McKeown (2006), including marking (calling attention to certain ideas), turning back to students and to text (directing students to text or to each other to clarify and focus thinking), annotating (adding information), revoicing (restating student ideas), recapping (summarizing), and modeling (demonstrating expert thinking with text). In another session, two candidates rehearsed their full lesson while the teacher educator provided feedback. Then, candidates broke into small groups to rehearse the final part of their lessons, in which students discussed the two images in light of the central question. These groups were led by the main course instructor and graduate student assistants. While in groups, each of these teacher educators paused candidates to raise questions or offer feedback on how candidates elicited student thinking, supported students in listening and responding to one another, or provided explanations to guide the discussion during the rehearsals with their peers. After teaching their lesson to K-5 students, candidates shared a video of the lesson along with a lesson plan and brief reflection paper.
Secondary Setting
The secondary course was a two-semester sequence within a 1-year certification and master’s program. Instruction on classroom discussion occurred during the spring. The fall course introduced students to disciplinary historical literacy, in particular the skills of sourcing, contextualizing, corroborating, and close reading. In addition to developing their own curricular materials, students were encouraged to use and revise document-based lessons in the Reading Like a Historian curriculum (see http://sheg.stanford.edu/rlh).
Discussion was framed as the activity structure that occurs at the end of a document-based lesson, after students have read and answered questions about individual documents in the lesson (Reisman, 2012). Teacher candidates learned that the culminating whole-class discussion should focus on the lesson’s central historical question (CHQ), offering students an opportunity to bring often-contradictory documentary evidence to bear on the question. Teacher candidates witnessed multiple representations of text-based whole-class discussion around a CHQ—through videos, classroom transcripts, and modeling by the teacher educator. In each instance, the practice was decomposed on two levels: First, teacher candidates examined how the documents aligned with the CHQ and created a historical problem space; and second, teacher candidates analyzed the specific facilitation moves the teacher used to orchestrate classroom discourse. These moves included (a) textual press—asking students to substantiate claims with textual evidence, (b) uptake—following up on a student’s textual reference with a question, (c) modeling—demonstrating how to use text to support a historical claim, (d) marking text—directing students’ attention to a document and asking an interpretive question about it, (e) revoicing—reformulating a student’s text-based claim to highlight the relationship between the claim and warrant, and (f) stabilizing historical content—reviewing critical and relevant background knowledge or conceptual understandings (Beck & McKeown, 2006; Nystrand, Gamoran, Kachur, & Prendergast, 1997; O’Connor & Michaels, 1993; Reisman, 2015).
Teacher candidates rehearsed discussion facilitation with their peers, first using materials from a lesson plan in the Reading Like a Historian curriculum, and then with materials that they developed for an assignment. To prepare for these rehearsals, candidates used a planning scaffold that asked them to consider how each document related to the CHQ, what issues of reliability were raised by each document, and what historical understanding they intended students to take away from the discussion. During rehearsals, the teacher educator occasionally paused the facilitation to offer feedback or redirection. The teacher candidate then continued facilitating and attempted to incorporate the feedback.
For the assignment examined here, teacher candidates shared with the methods class a 5- to 10-min video of themselves facilitating a discussion of historical texts with secondary school students, along with any contextual information or relevant materials. Candidates also posted comments on three of their classmates’ videos and submitted a brief reflection on their own facilitation.
In the section that follows, we illustrate the constructs of our framework using transcripts of classroom discussions captured in the videos candidates produced for these course assignments, and we identify aspects of discussion that are particularly difficult for novices. We then discuss the implications of our framework for teacher education and for scholarship on classroom discussion.
Applying the Framework to Novice Discussion Facilitation
Engaging Students as Sense-Makers
The practice of engaging students in sense-making often appeared at the outset of discussions. For example, at Elementary School A (see Table 1 for school demographics), one elementary candidate elicited fourth graders’ observations about two maps of Michigan after they discussed the maps with their neighbors: “Okay boys and girls, I hear some great ideas. Let’s talk about your ideas as a class.” As students shared, the teacher pointed to the parts of the map they referenced and followed up on comments that were particularly generative given the learning goals. This teacher also positioned herself as a sense-maker alongside the students: “Boys and girls, when I looked at this map I had a really hard time figuring out where the water was. Who has an idea where the water is?” This not only drew students’ attention to a feature of the map that was indeed puzzling, but also invited students to engage in similar acts of sense-making. Together, these moves—the immediate invitation to generate and share hypotheses, receptiveness to student reasoning, and open-ended questions with multiple plausible responses—constitute the practice of engaging students as sense-makers.
We also observed a secondary teacher candidate in Secondary School D engage students as sense-makers in a discussion around the question of whether Nat Turner was a “hero or madman.” The candidate repeatedly stated that she was “curious” about students’ ideas and checked to see whether those ideas shifted during the discussion:
So take a moment and read over this document, and I’m interested in knowing, from reading this document, what you guys think: is [Nat Turner] a hero or a madman?
[Students read independently]
So I’m curious—after reading this, do you think that this is trustworthy? Daniel, 1 what do you think?
I think no document is ever trustworthy, but especially not this one.
Especially not this one. Why not?
[skip 8 turns]
I’m just curious, based on this document, like what’s your reaction right now? [T raises hand] Hero? Ok. Um, madman? Who thinks that he’s both? Interesting. Who is, like, really unsure at this point? Is like, “I need much more information?” Awesome. Okay.
In this example, we see how engaging students as sense-makers extends beyond simply posing the CHQ. The practice not only requires establishing open questions for student engagement but also entails expressing genuine curiosity about students’ evolving ideas.
Challenges to engaging students as sense-makers
Perhaps the clearest indication that engaging students as sense-makers extends beyond posing a legitimate question for student engagement is that all the candidates had access to materials that posed legitimate problems, but many still struggled to engage students as sense-makers. We saw examples in both elementary and secondary classrooms where candidates missed opportunities to probe students’ thinking and, instead, transformed the activity into a series of questions whose answers could be easily evaluated as right or wrong. In the following example, an elementary teacher candidate at Elementary School B facilitated a discussion among fifth graders comparing two images of colonial protest:
Which [image] looked more dramatic?
The second one.
Which one do they look more calm and civilized?
The first one.
[skip 4 turns]
Does who the artist is affect what we see?
Yeah.
How so?
Well the artist has different ways of painting.
That’s true. So [for] one—we don’t know who the artist is. The second one is made by a British person so maybe they’re trying to persuade people [to] fight against the American colonies. All right, nice job.
The discussion was intended to help students consider how different artists expressed divergent views of colonial protest. Presumably, the sense-making work would entail hypothesizing about a particular artist’s perspective on colonial protest, given the depiction in the image. Instead, after asking a series of leading questions, the candidate concluded the discussion by providing the analysis herself.
In a comparable moment in an 11th-grade classroom in Secondary School E, a teacher candidate facilitated a discussion about the Homestead Strike of 1892, which culminated in a violent struggle between steelworkers and private agents hired by the Carnegie Steel Company. Despite having materials that clearly pit labor activist Emma Goldman’s account against that of Henry Frick, Carnegie’s antiunion plant manager, the candidate struggled to engage students as sense-makers.
Who wrote Document A?
Emma Goldman.
What do we know about her?
[Read source note out loud]
When was this written?
1931.
And whose side did we say she supported?
The workers.
What about Document B? Who wrote that?
Henry Frick.
Who was this guy?
The guy Carnegie hired to be the boss of the factory.
And also we know that he fired the workers. He closed the plant down.
He decreased the wages.
He locked them out . . . And this is the hard one: whose side is he on?
The company’s side. Carnegie’s side.
The candidate went on to ask students to find quotes that proved Frick was trying to make “his side sound better,” but students were asked to share these quotes without offering their reasoning. Engaging students as sense-makers is achievable for novice teachers, but challenges remain, particularly around how to support candidates in probing students’ reasoning processes.
Orienting Students to Each Other
By orienting students to each other, the teacher signals that multiple legitimate interpretations can coexist and that complex interpretations require collective construction. Researchers of classroom discussion have used different terms to capture this practice. Wolf, Crosson, and Resnick (2005) used the term linking to describe when a teacher explicitly links different students’ ideas to foster accountability to the learning community. Nystrand et al.’s (1997) term, uptake, refers to when a teacher incorporates a student’s prior comment into a subsequent question. In the context of text-based historical discussion, Reisman (2015) considered teacher linking (e.g., What do people think of Suzanne’s interpretation of Lincoln’s speech?), as well as teachers’ bids for counterargument (e.g., Does anyone disagree with Devon’s claim that the New Deal was a success?) as uptake moves.
We observed teacher candidates orienting students to one another’s ideas in both the elementary and secondary contexts, as in this discussion of two maps of Michigan in a fourth-grade classroom at Elementary School A:
Would anyone like to respond to Elias’s response to Landen—great listening to each other—that maybe it wasn’t formed yet?
I agree with him that they might have had to walk around Michigan to make the map. But maybe there were some parts they couldn’t walk through, like maybe some swampy area.
Okay, that’s a great response, what do you think Alexi?
I sort of agree with Elias too, but I believe there could be a swamp somewhere that was blocking their path. Because if I remember correctly I remember that Michigan was really swampy, they thought.
Great, great drawing on your background knowledge. So who agrees with what Elias, Marco, and Alexi are discussing, that the reason the shape may look different is because they didn’t have as good of technology. Thumbs up if you agree that maybe it’s different because of different technology.
In this example, the teacher candidate facilitated a discussion where students responded to each other’s ideas and engaged in shared knowledge construction.
We also observed uptake and linking moves in a 10th-grade discussion in Secondary School F about the Cold War. In this example, the teacher responded to one student’s idea by connecting it to other students’ contributions:
So how does [Orwell’s argument] square with what Juan was saying? Because Juan was saying it’s about this Soviet fight for power? But Orwell is saying it’s about this bomb . . .
I said that the Cold War started because people were afraid that the Soviets were getting too powerful.
So that’s like what Juan and Allie were talking about.
By orienting students to one another’s ideas, the teacher candidate signaled the importance of listening to one another and building on one another’s interpretations.
Challenges to orienting students to each other
We also observed, as others have (e.g., Kazemi & Cunard, 2016; Wolf, Crosson, & Resnick, 2005), that many teacher candidates struggled to orient students to one another’s ideas. Instead, they relied on the initiation–response–evaluation (IRE) discourse pattern widely documented in K-12 classrooms (Cazden, 2001), treating student ideas as self-contained responses rather than hypotheses that might be developed by subsequent contributions. In the following example, a teacher candidate at Elementary School C prompted fourth graders to report their observations about a map but did not link their ideas:
Let’s hear first from Table 3. Table 3, what’s one thing you noticed about this map?
Canada looks like it’s under Michigan and it looks like Canada is part of the U.S.
Jimmy is saying it looks like Canada is below the U.S. because it’s part of Michigan. Okay let’s hear from Table 6. What are your thoughts?
In this instance, the teacher candidate repeated the student’s observation, but did not signal to the next group that they should build upon—either by agreeing, refuting, or developing—the first group’s observation. By prompting students to report their observations serially, as discrete, individual contributions, this teacher candidate missed an opportunity to help her students build increasingly complex interpretations of the map.
We found similar examples in the secondary context. In a 10th-grade lesson that focused on the question of whether Abraham Lincoln was racist, one secondary teacher candidate in Secondary School E asked students to report their reasoning for one side or the other:
Any other points you want to add to why he’s not racist? I haven’t heard from your group—what did you say?
When he said “It’s true that God rendered the worst of human conditions intolerable.”
So what does that prove?
(inaudible) slavery is not a happy thing.
Okay. Chris?
[Lincoln] says, “There is no reason in the world why the Negro is not entitled to all the natural rights in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Therefore he is not racist. Okay. Last point on the not-racist side.
He says they should have citizenship.
Where does he say that?
[skip 3 turns]
End of the he-is-not-racist [side]. So, everyone who is on the side that Lincoln is racist: Go!
Like the teacher candidate in the elementary example, this secondary teacher candidate elicited students’ claims. Moreover, she consistently pressed students to support their claims with evidence (e.g., “Where does he say that?”) and to explicitly tie textual evidence to their larger claim (e.g., “So what does that prove?”). However, this teacher candidate neither prompted students to build upon each other’s claims, nor did she encourage them to reconcile competing claims. As a result, the discussion never progressed beyond listing one-sided arguments serially.
Orienting Students to the Text
To succeed in facilitating student discourse about historical texts, teacher candidates had to ensure that students understood the texts and used them to ground their claims about the past. The candidates appeared to orient students to the text with some facility. In the following discussion, fourth graders at Elementary School C compared two images of assembly lines and the teacher candidate pressed the students to back their claims with evidence from the images:
Evelyn, what’s something that you noticed?
Workers.
Workers. What makes you think there are workers in this picture?
Because I can see people working on the car.
Okay, Evelyn said she thinks these people are workers because they’re working on the car here. Who has another idea of why you would think this is a worker?
Because you know they’re fixing up the car because not all the parts are on there.
And why would that make you think they were working on the car?
Also because I see them all in the same uniform and stuff.
Here, the teacher candidate encouraged the first student to support her claim with specific evidence from the image, and then pressed the second student to elaborate on his inference that the people in the image were workers.
We identified similar examples of orienting students to text in the secondary classrooms. In the same lesson about Abraham Lincoln discussed above, the teacher candidate in Secondary School E consistently pressed students to ground their claims in textual evidence:
Who thinks Lincoln is not a racist? Why is he not a racist? Group 1?
He believed that African Americans were born with equal rights and stuff.
That they were born with equal rights? Or that they should have equal rights?
They should.
Okay, and where does it say that in the document?
Document A, last sentence, it says “Mr. Lincoln thinks that . . . (inaudible)”
Okay. So that’s Douglas saying that, right?
Oh yeah.
In this instance, the teacher candidate not only insisted that students cite textual evidence but also pushed students to correctly identify the authors of the texts they were citing. Such facilitation practices ensure that the discussion remains centered on the shared texts.
Challenges to orienting students to the text
In the most effective instances of teacher candidates orienting students to the text, teachers both ensured that students understood the literal meaning of the text and pushed them to move beyond these surface observations. However, some candidates struggled to achieve this level of facilitation. For example, we observed an elementary teacher candidate at Elementary School A redirect a third grader who made a higher level inference about an image of lumberjacks from the late 19th century:
What do you see, how do you see it?
I see houses.
But point for us, where are those houses?
(Points to them). Well, they kind of look like cabins back here, so they have to build them. [The European settlers] couldn’t just be there for one day.
Oh, okay, you’re getting into the thinking part of it, I like it, but right now let’s keep talking about what we see. What else?
I see snow.
Where?
Everywhere else.
In this instance, the teacher candidate indicated that Duane jumped ahead to the “thinking part” of the discussion instead of limiting his comments to what he noticed in the image. We can understand how such a structure might scaffold student reasoning, making explicit how “noticing” and “thinking” reflect different processes. Indeed, the candidates were encouraged to scaffold the discussion in precisely this way in their methods instruction. But by deferring “thinking” processes, the candidate may also miss an opportunity to encourage and develop meaningful inferences in relation to the document under study. In this instance, Duane inferred important information about the group of lumberjacks and their settlement—namely, that the cabins suggested they were not there temporarily. The teacher candidate did eventually transition students from the “noticing” segment to the “thinking” segment, but Duane’s observation never resurfaced. Indeed, the “thinking” section of the discussion was far shorter than the “noticing” section, and the students ultimately concluded little more than that the group of people were lumberjacks.
Teacher candidates facilitating document-based discussions also face challenges orienting students to texts in meaningful ways. For example, a teacher candidate might ask students to summarize a given document without asking students to relate it to the CHQ or to make inferences about the author or the historical context. That is what we observed in the following example of a teacher candidate in an 11th-grade classroom in Secondary School G facilitating a discussion of competing historical interpretations of the legacy of the New Deal and Social Security:
So we read two historical interpretations of the New Deal, specifically Social Security. So I want someone to summarize for me number 1: so what is Carl Degler saying, about the New Deal? About Social Security?
Basically he’s saying that, uh, the New Deal made it so Americans could trust the government with the economy.
Ok. So where in the text do you see that idea of trust? What specifically tells you that that’s what the goal . . .
Uh. [Pause.] Oh—“Americans began to expect the government to act in times of economic troubles, and intervene to help make things better . . .”
Good. So, maybe not just trust, but, like, an expectation. It was the role of government to provide this assistance. Ok. So that’s a good point . . . What about this idea of, revolutionary, what does he mean by that?
Change.
Change. Exactly . . . It’s a drastic change in how Americans viewed the government. And in the last paragraph he talks about, in addition to change, he uses the word shift. What kind of shift does he say happens as a result of the New Deal?
A permanent shift.
To answer the CHQ in this lesson (i.e., Which account of Social Security is more accurate?), students must comprehend two complex historical arguments. The teacher candidate engaged students in the preliminary work of parsing the first historian’s argument. What is revealing about this clip, however, is that the candidate submitted it for the assignment as an example of text-based discussion, which suggests that she did not view student engagement with the CHQ as essential to the discussion. Indeed, after prompting students to summarize both texts and clarify certain terms and concepts for nearly 8 min, the candidate posed the CHQ as if it were an afterthought: “Okay, so, to wrap up the discussion, who do you think here is more valid? Whose argument is stronger?” In the remaining 90 seconds of class, three students offered arguments defending one or the other historical interpretation of the New Deal.
Orienting Students to Disciplinary Learning
Orienting students to the discipline partly entails prompting students to employ reasoning processes that are representative of those that historians practice when they engage in disciplinary inquiry. We observed examples in both the elementary and secondary contexts where candidates implicitly signaled the importance of disciplinary practices, even if they did not explicitly name them. For example, candidates encouraged students to consider a document’s source (e.g., “Who wrote that? Was that Lincoln or Douglas? You always have to double check that!”), to contextualize (e.g., “What do you think John Locke and people in the Enlightenment would have thought about the feudal system?”), and to corroborate sources (e.g., “How does this map compare with the first one you looked at?”).
We also conceptualize the practice of orienting students to the discipline as highlighting the conceptual structures and disciplinary knowledge that shape the work of historians. The following examples illustrate what novice facilitation of this practice might look like in elementary and secondary classrooms. In both cases, orienting students to the discipline involves more than a discrete utterance but rather a shepherding of students toward deeper understanding.
In the context of the visual inquiry lesson, a teacher might orient students to the discipline by highlighting student observations more likely to yield meaningful historical inferences. This is challenging in a lesson where the teacher wants to simultaneously encourage student sense-making and participation. To illustrate, we return to the fourth-grade discussion of two maps of Michigan at Elementary School A. After eliciting observations, the teacher candidate revisited a student’s comment about the language of the map several times over the course of the discussion, ultimately eliciting and then highlighting a connection to another student’s background knowledge about French occupation of Michigan. We italicize the moments when she oriented students to key disciplinary questions and understandings about the map:
Our first question is what do you see?
Well, it looks like it’s in some sort of other language, but it doesn’t look like it could be Spanish or French, but it looks like it could be in another language.
Thumbs up if it’s you think this is in another language? Thumbs up if you have an idea of what language this might be?
I think it might be French. Also, I notice that on the bottom of the map it says 1718, so maybe Michigan wasn’t formed all the way, or maybe Canada owned part of it.
And what do we know about Canada?
[skip two turns]
First it was controlled by the British.
First the British. But who controlled it a little later?
I think that either it is in French or the person who made this map, since it was so long ago, not many people had a good education, so they probably spelled a lot of things wrong, like instead of L-A-K-E it says L-A-C.
Interesting. What else do you notice?
[Skip several turns as students notice other features of the map].
So we talked a little about what was significant with the other map. On this map, we talked about the year: 1718. Someone mentioned that the language looked different—maybe some words are spelled wrong or maybe it’s even another language. What do you think Cameron?
I would like to add on to Tim, because Tim said it was French and I think it’s French, too, because the map was made around the time, when I read the book it was 1715.
Thumbs up if you remember Cameron’s book talk? Me too! Cameron gave a book talk and he talked about how Michigan used to be controlled by the French, so I hear that Cameron [is saying] that maybe it’s in French because France used to control the area that is now Michigan.
In this sequence, the teacher candidate achieved an impressive balance between two disciplinary goals: She signaled to students that all their hypotheses about the language of the map were valid (e.g., maybe some words are spelled wrong), and at the same time, she underscored the value of attending to the source of a document and using background knowledge to contextualize it. Although students contributed many hypotheses throughout this discussion, the candidate skillfully highlighted and built on the observations that demonstrated the historical reasoning she wanted to advance. In this way, she used the discussion to help her students see—and better understand—sourcing and contextualizing in practice.
With additional practice orienting students to the discipline, the candidate might have prompted students to further consider and evaluate the competing hypotheses on the table. For example, she might have asked students to assess whether Cameron’s contextual information sufficed to conclude that the map was in French. If they remained skeptical in the face of Cameron’s knowledge, she might have asked them what additional information they would have wanted to know. The candidate might have further oriented students to the discipline by highlighting the conceptual takeaways that emerge from this conclusion: For example, that a mapmaker’s purpose shapes what is featured in a map, or that this particular 1718 map of Michigan illustrates historical change and continuity. Still, this example illustrates the delicate balancing act involved in orienting students to the discipline in open-ended discussions.
The challenges of orienting students to the discipline look a bit different in the context of a document-based lesson in a secondary classroom. The primary challenge for the facilitator is to help students understand how the documents in the lesson offer conflicting interpretations of the CHQ, so that students might be prompted to reconcile them. In the following example, the teacher candidate in Secondary School F wanted his 10th graders to understand that two documents (written by Churchill and Orwell) offer competing interpretations for who started the Cold War, but students struggled to understand Orwell’s argument, and therefore focused instead, and exclusively, on Churchill’s claim that the Soviets started the Cold War because they were power hungry. In the excerpt below, the candidate clarified Orwell’s argument and then tried to help students see that Orwell’s interpretation differed from Churchill’s. We italicize moments where he worked to orient students to the discipline by scaffolding their entry into the historical problem space.
[According to Orwell] who is trying to get the bomb?
Russians
So who already has it then?
Americans
So Orwell is saying that the atomic bomb is key to the start of the Cold War because only the powerful nations can use it [the U.S. has it and the Soviets want it] so does he think the blame [for the Cold War] lies elsewhere, other than Soviet expansion?
I think with the atomic bomb, if America has it and Russia doesn’t then that makes America seem more powerful and (inaudible).
Ok, so [Orwell] makes America seem more at fault . . . America has the bomb and then Russia’s scared—
[Bell rings].
In this section of the discussion, the candidate attempted to help students understand Orwell’s argument about who was more responsible for the start of the Cold War. In doing so, he suggested to students that they grapple with a different interpretation than many of them had offered earlier in the discussion. Having established the conflicting interpretations offered by the two documents, the students were poised to enter the historical problem space—to discuss the competing interpretations and develop a more complex and contextualized understanding of the tensions leading to the Cold War. Unfortunately, before they could delve into these disparate interpretations, the bell rang.
Discussion
The framework for disciplinary discussion in history has allowed us to define and illustrate characteristics of effective discussion facilitation, as well as to highlight aspects of each practice that may be challenging to novices. Ultimately, our purpose has been to use the tool to reflect and improve upon our own methods instruction. Applying the framework to teacher candidates’ videos has revealed ways that both courses could better design instruction around the component practices of disciplinary discussion facilitation.
Engaging Students as Sense-Makers
Both the elementary and secondary video assignments scaffolded the practice of engaging students as sense-makers by specifying the lesson structure and materials candidates should use. Although candidates in both courses were permitted to design their own materials, nearly all the candidates completed the assignment using existing or instructor-designed materials, and those who did use their own materials had them vetted by the instructor. This instructional support in preparing the discussion materials ensured that, at the very least, the materials presented a legitimate historical problem space for students to explore.
That we observed candidates struggling to engage students as sense-makers despite the presence of these materials suggests that the teacher educators might need to be more explicit about how one goes about enacting this practice. In an article about practice-based teacher education in math, Ghousseini, Beasley, and Lord (2015) discussed the value of providing teacher candidates a well-specified question sequence for eliciting student thinking (e.g., What did you get/see? Did anyone see/get anything different? How did you see it/figure it out? Did anyone see it/figure it out in a different way?). By providing teacher candidates with multiple opportunities to rehearse the sequence, teacher educators in the Ghousseini et al. study were able to illustrate how the sequence might be modified to address particular classroom scenarios and how to connect these modifications to ambitious teaching practices such as engaging students as sense-makers.
Neither the elementary nor secondary course offered candidates such a question sequence. The elementary course did provide candidates with a suggested sequence for the visual inquiry lesson discussion to move students from observation to inference to analysis, but this sequence did not explicitly orient candidates to students’ reasoning processes, which could be captured by asking “How did you figure that out?” The secondary course offered candidates no explicit scaffold for eliciting student reasoning beyond the initial prompt of the CHQ. It is worth considering the affordances of a sequence for supporting candidates to engage students as sense-makers in the context of a history discussion.
Orienting Students to One Another
We see similar implications for how we might better support candidates in orienting students to each other. Candidates in both the courses were introduced to specific facilitation moves for this practice. Having viewed the candidate videos, however, we have greater appreciation for how difficult it is for novices to enact. Done well, the move requires the candidate to quickly grasp the essence of a student’s comment, relate it to the question under discussion, and decide whether it would be more useful to elicit a competing interpretation (e.g., “Does anyone have a different idea of what language this is?”), to note links between the comment and a previous statement (e.g., “If I’m understanding you, you seem to be agreeing with Andrea?”), or to elicit additional comments before highlighting the alignments in the class (e.g., “Who would like to add to or respond to Carlo’s argument?”).
Despite the complexity of this particular decision space, or perhaps because of it, we believe it is worth investing more instructional time on both the moves involved in orienting students to one another and the reasons for doing so. Practice-based research in other subject areas (e.g., Kavanagh & Rainey, in press) suggests that candidates are fully capable of orienting students to one another when the practice is made explicit and rehearsed.
Orienting Students to Text
Our review of the candidates’ videos suggests that, by and large, they were capable of orienting students to text. In both contexts, candidates encouraged students to substantiate their claims with specific examples drawn from the images or documents. This stands to reason: At the surface level, orienting students to the text simply requires pressing students to substantiate their claims with textual evidence.
At the same time, we observed that the instructional contexts in which candidates oriented students to the text reflected varying degrees of intellectual rigor. In some elementary classrooms, candidates encouraged students to specify how the image supported their inferences; in others, student discourse about the images largely involved surface observations. Likewise, in the secondary context, we found that teacher candidates did not always orient students to the text with the goal of supporting or advancing student argumentation. These differences suggest that the practice of orienting students to text is complex, and that teacher educators might consider framing the practice not simply as a discrete facilitation move but rather as a move tied to the larger purpose of historical inference and argumentation.
Ultimately, both inference and argumentation depend on comprehension. Although we want candidates to move beyond literal comprehension in the context of a historical discussion, we do them a disservice by not adequately addressing how to gauge and support student comprehension. In the elementary visual inquiry lesson, because “noticing” is part of the question sequence, the issue might simply be a matter of helping candidates appreciate that the stages are flexible and that if a student makes a meaningful inference in the “noticing” segment, the teacher need not wait to address it. In the context of a document-based discussion, the issue of comprehension becomes more complex. Students must have a general understanding of the text to participate in discussion, and yet, textual misunderstandings will invariably surface in the context of any discussion. A teacher educator might assist novices in navigating this tricky terrain by first helping them distinguish between eliciting student comprehension and eliciting student historical argumentation. The former, although essential for disciplinary discussion, does not, on its own, constitute discussion. At the same time, the teacher educator might prepare candidates to anticipate the inevitability of comprehension issues, and to rehearse alternative methods for addressing such moments. In some cases, the candidate might want to pause the discussion and stabilize the content (Reisman, 2015), by engaging in teacher-led recitation about the document to clarify misunderstanding. Alternatively, the candidate might choose to orient students to each other and enlist the class in collectively parsing a particular passage. Either way, the candidate must understand the multiple purposes for orienting students to text in order to navigate comprehension issues in the context of text-based discussion.
Orienting Students to the Discipline
We had difficulty identifying moments in both the elementary and secondary videos where candidates explicitly oriented students to the discipline. This experience mirrors the findings of Kavanagh and Rainey (in press) in a review of novice facilitation of disciplinary discussions in ELA classrooms. They concluded that although candidates were introduced to the nature and substance of disciplinary discussions in ELA, they did not explicitly rehearse and receive feedback on specific facilitation moves that would assist them in orienting students to the discipline. The same could be said of methods instruction discussed here. For example, although methods instructors devoted considerable attention to understanding the strategies of working with historical evidence (e.g., sourcing, contextualization, corroboration), candidates were not explicitly guided in how to highlight these strategies in the context of disciplinary discussion. It is not surprising, then, that although we observed candidates prompting students to use precisely those strategies that constitute the syntactic structure of the discipline, we did not find instances of candidates explicitly framing these strategies as tools of disciplinary inquiry.
Also, we did not identify robust examples of candidates orienting students to the substantive structure of the discipline by explicitly highlighting historical concepts or effectively bringing students into the historical problem space. Again, in neither methods course was the practice explicitly modeled and rehearsed. In both courses, orienting students to the discipline was framed as a challenge of planning rather than enactment. Candidates were supported in preparing generative materials that opened a historical problem space; they received feedback on how to select and assemble documents that afforded rich opportunities for exploring historical questions, learning historical concepts, and developing historical thinking skills. But candidates were not guided in facilitating students’ engagement with the materials in the context of whole-class discussion.
We see three ways that we might improve methods instruction to help candidates orient students to the discipline and deepen students’ subject-matter understanding. The first two remain in the sphere of planning, rather than enactment. First, we must support candidates in specifying the historical concepts and understandings they want students to grapple with in particular discussions. These include both conceptual understandings that undergird the discipline (e.g., cause/effect) and understandings about particular historical topics (e.g., competing interpretations of the New Deal). Second, we can support candidates in anticipating ways students might interpret different texts, where they might struggle to notice salient points, and how they are likely to respond to particular historical accounts. Elements of such support were evident in both courses. In the elementary course, candidates were prompted to identify specific details in the images that they deemed most salient; in the secondary course, candidates rehearsed with a planning sheet that encouraged them to identify tensions within and between documents as well as to highlight key parts of each document they wished to discuss. However, in both cases, candidates could have received more feedback on connecting their planned discussion questions with their ultimate learning goal.
Finally, we might support candidates in orienting students to the discipline by generating a body of facilitation moves that are tied to disciplinary questions, concepts, and skills. Such moves might prompt students to corroborate evidence in two texts, to consider what a particular account suggests about the broader historical context, or to note the ways in which our contemporary worldviews differ from those held by historical actors. Such moves might also assist teachers in creating a discussion space that simultaneously welcomes all hypotheses and guides students to evaluate their relative historical validity. Exposure to and practice with such facilitation moves would allow candidates to navigate the unpredictable decision-making space of classroom discussion more effectively. Our hope is that as we improve our methods instruction, we will encounter more robust instantiations of what it looks like to orient students to the discipline in a text-based historical discussion.
A Word About Context
In developing a framework to conceptualize discussion facilitation for teacher candidates, we are cognizant of existing concerns about the turn toward practice-based teacher education—namely, that isolating practice risks decontextualizing teaching moves from the context that gives them meaning. Both Kennedy (2016) and Zeichner (2012) underscore the dangers of presenting instructional moves as prescribed and procedural. They argue that teacher educators should help novices reason and think strategically about how and when to enact a particular practice, and that instructional practices should remain tethered to instructional purposes (Kennedy, 2016) and to the development of novices’ “broad professional vision” (Zeichner, 2012, p. 379). Zeichner (2012) further urges practice-based teacher educators to attend to the development of teachers’ cultural competence and their ability to teach in culturally responsive ways.
We agree with these concerns and believe that our proposed framework addresses context in three important ways. Rather than highlight discrete teaching behaviors (e.g., questioning, modeling, feedback), the prongs of the framework highlight salient contextual features of teachers’ practice: student understanding and subject-matter learning. Two prongs of the framework—engaging students as sense-makers and orienting student to each other—require teacher candidates to attend to the ideas and understandings of their particular students. The other two prongs of the framework—orienting to text and orienting to the discipline—require teacher candidates not only to attend to how their particular students comprehend and make sense of content but also to be familiar with the curricular resources and disciplinary questions that open the subject to interpretation and discussion. In this sense, the framework presents successful discussion facilitation as a fundamentally student-centered pedagogy that necessitates careful attention to the particular demands of the subject matter and the instructional context. Moreover, each of the framework’s prongs is explicitly worded as an instructional purpose (e.g., orienting students to each other), organizing and giving meaning to the range of discrete discursive moves that might fall under each.
Finally, we see the project of practice-based teacher education as embedded in broader, layered, contexts that shape the extent to which candidates envision themselves as capable of engaging in ambitious instructional reform. Teachers’ willingness to learn and implement instructional practices that focus on student success and conceptual understanding has everything to do with the culture of their professional communities both locally and more broadly (McLaughlin & Talbert, 1993). To the extent that our methods instruction featured assignments that allowed candidates to view and comment upon each other’s classroom instruction using a shared language, we believe it challenges long-standing assumptions about both the disconnect between teacher education coursework and the field and the general isolation of classroom teaching. In this sense, we see our work as contributing to a reshaping of the broader context of teaching and professional development.
Implications for Practice-Based Teacher Education
Our framework for disciplinary whole-class discussion in history has implications for practice-based teacher education more generally. First, it sits squarely in the call for practice-based teacher educators to specify and decompose the work of teaching (e.g., Grossman, Compton, et al., 2009; Grossman, Hammerness, et al., 2009), and to offer candidates multiple opportunities to approximate core instructional practices. From this angle, the framework might become a tool for candidates to use in analyzing representations of whole-class discussion in transcripts or videos. Likewise, teacher educators might use the framework to reflect on their instruction and adapt assignments to better support candidates’ needs. We are buoyed by what we see as the framework’s applicability across our varied contexts. That we found comparable examples across both elementary and secondary settings suggests that the challenges novices experience in facilitating discussions might be similar across the K-12 continuum. At the same time, given the obvious social, behavioral, and cognitive differences between fourth graders and 11th graders, such a conclusion is difficult to accept. Further analysis might reveal ways that orienting elementary students to the text, in fact, constitutes a qualitatively different practice than doing so with high school students. Regardless, we see great potential in the cross-site knowledge aggregation represented by this project, a key goal of practice-based teacher education.
Second, the framework addresses concerns that practice-based teacher education has paid insufficient attention to subject-matter learning. By conceptualizing the particular demands of orienting students to the discipline of history, we hope to support candidates in identifying and pursuing specific learning goals in the context of whole-class historical discussion. At the same time, we appreciate that by focusing exclusively on history education, we have not addressed the range of social science disciplines and instructional goals encompassed by the social studies (Evans, 2004). We suspect that much of the framework—engaging students as sense-makers, orienting students to the text, and orienting students to each other—applies to text-based discussions in civics, geography, and economics. However, we hesitate to assume the framework applies broadly across the social studies and recommend research to further specify (a) what constitutes a legitimate “problem space” in each of these disciplines, (b) what sorts of materials work both to surface core conceptual understandings and create generative problem spaces, and (c) what reasoning processes students should practice as they wrestle with these materials and formulate their interpretations in the context of whole-class discussion. We are eager to continue our work along these lines of inquiry, in an ongoing effort to support candidates in developing ambitious teaching practices that engage their students in meaningful and intellectually stimulating instruction.
Footnotes
Authors’ Note
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funders. In the time since this research was completed, author Sarah Schneider Kavanagh has changed affiliation. She is now with the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study has been conducted as part of the work of the Core Practices Consortium (
) and builds on the contributions of its members. This collective work has been supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation under Grant OPP1089179 and the Spencer Foundation under Grant 201600110. A portion of this work was supported by the Investigating Student Learning (ISL) Program, which was funded by the University of Michigan Office of the Provost, the College of Engineering, and the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching.
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References
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