Understanding what teachers gain from professional development at historic sites

ABSTRACT

Despite decades of formal work with teachers, little is known about what they gain from professional development at and with historic sites. This article presents the first data-set from a 3-year Institute for Museum and Library Services National Leadership Grant project designed to develop a broad-based assessment for understanding what teachers learn in historic site-based professional development. The centerpiece of this project is an assessment tool based in Q methodology. This round of study focuses on the pre-post Q sorts and interviews of 29 teachers in a history-focused institute regarding how they see their work at historic sites affecting their professional development. Contrary to advocates’ assertions, results indicate that only a small number of participants specifically set out to seek historical disciplinary expertise and analysis, while greater emphasis was placed on working with content-area peers, developing pedagogical practices, and the power of place.

KEYWORDS:

• Historical thinking
• historic sites
• pedagogical content knowledge
• peer mentoring
• Q methodology
• teacher professional development

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the contributions to this work of Thomas Jefferson Foundation Staff members Gary Sandling, Linnea Grim, Jacqueline Langholtz, Melanie Bowyer, and Lora Cooper.

Notes

1. Herein we use the terms “museum” and “historic site” interchangeably as the assignation of one or the other often has more to do with individual institutional customs than any meaningful professional or educational delineations. These institutions include, but are not limited to, history museums, historic houses, battlefields, cemeteries/burial grounds, and so forth whose primary disciplinary focus could be situated within history and the social studies (anthropology, civics, economics, geography, etc.) rather than art or science.

2. Although comparisons to research in science education must be considered within the context of the inequality in funding between these content areas, it is essential to note that the current state of the research follows a decade of significant investment of U.S. federal resources in the form of the Teaching American History grants (USDOE, 2011). Even with a billion-dollar investment requiring the use of historic sites as an essential part of the projects enacted, we know little more about teacher education at and in conjunction with historic sites than we did a decade ago.

3. The Teaching American History program (2001–2011), although offering structures that would have allowed for district-wide studies of professional development for history teachers, was plagued by a lack of clear assessment directives and data sharing expectations and ultimately was cancelled, in part, because it could not show any effect on classroom practice (Ragland & Woestman, 2009; Schrum et al., 2016; U.S. Department of Education, 2011). Similarly, funding stipulations for National Endowment for the Humanities Landmarks in American History and Culture and Summer Institutes for Teachers, the sole ongoing federal humanities-based teacher professional development program, do not include substantive funding for or a coherent plan for program evaluation. It is currently suspended for 2018 (National Endowment for the Humanities, 2017).

4. To see the full set of statements and the standards to which they are tied, refer to the project website: http://www.teacherinsites.org/2016/10/25/the-2016-concourse/.

5. As participants were not required to sort the statements into three equal piles, what they determined to be Neutral versus Most/Least Like Me depended on the individual. It was not uncommon for Neutral statements to bleed into the −2/+ 2 columns. As such, statements ranked at + 2/-2 should be seen as low positive/negative to neutral.

6. A centroid method is a factor extraction technique that is preferred by Q-methodologists. The PQ Method software provides a function to complete this factor extraction to find the best possible factor solutions. The software searches for a “shared pattern or sorting configuration in the data,” and extracts the common variance which then becomes Factor x. The factor loadings are then to the extent that “an individual Q sort can be said to exemplify” the Factor x pattern (Watts & Stenner, 2012, p. 100).

7. A review of these frequently cited articles on teacher PD (Borko, 2004; Desimone, 2009; Garet et al., 2001; Hill et al., 2013; Kennedy, 2016; Penuel et al., 2007) showed that of more than 60 studies/PD programs referenced, only two (Grossman, Wineburg, & Woolworth, 2001; Thomas, Wineburg, Grossman, Myhre, & Woolworth, 1998) focused on the social studies/social studies teachers.

Additional information

Funding

This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services through the National Leadership Grants for Museums program (www.imls.gov; Federal Award Identification Number: MG-10-15-0095-15).