Can Studying Adolescents’ Thinking Amplify High-Leverage Social Studies Teaching Practice? Challenges of Synthesizing Pedagogies of Investigation and Enactment in School–Institutional Contexts

Abstract

The notion that teacher education should emphasize high-leverage practice, which is research based, represents the complexity of the subject matter, bolsters teachers’ understanding of student learning, is adaptable to different curricular circumstances, and can be mastered with regular use, has traction in scholarship. Nevertheless, how teacher educators might support high-leverage practice concurrently within programs and school institutions remains an open question. We suggest that investigating adolescents’ thinking about complex historical concepts and conflicting evidence can amplify high-leverage social studies teaching practice by defining its criteria and strengthening some key representations, like eliciting students’ ideas about the subject matter and scaffolding analytical reading. Yet school–institutional factors that devalue systematic investigation of students’ thinking as a way to impact instruction may impede this amplification. Using activity theory, we discuss the implications of our findings for promoting ambitious pedagogy through social studies teacher education amidst constraining school climates.

Keywords:

• activity theory
• high-leverage practice
• school contexts
• social studies
• student thinking
• teacher education

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors would like to recognize the support of Hilary Conklin and Keith Barton, who provided helpful feedback on an earlier version of this paper, and Chauncey Monte-Sano and Bruce VanSledright, whose work with the first author at the University of Maryland led to the evolution of several tasks utilized in the scaffolded inquiry project.

Notes

1. ¹All personal and geographic identifiers in this paper are pseudonymous.

2. ²In this article, we use the terms beginning teachers and teaching candidates synonymously. Our intent is to represent people, like the participants in this study, who are working toward teaching credentials and have little or no classroom instructional experience.

3. ³Despite movement in the field toward the language of core practices, we chose to use high-leverage practices in this article for two reasons: first, because it more overtly implicates the relationship between teaching (i.e., practice) and student learning (i.e., that which is leveraged); and second, because of the political load and potential reductionism associated with the “core” vocabulary.

4. ⁴One candidate, Rachel, was a provisionally certified first-year teacher seeking her master’s degree for professional state certification. Instead of being placed in a field internship, she taught full-time at a private, urban Catholic school for young women. No demographic data were readily available for her school, though she indicated that the poverty level among students was very low. She was the only in-service master’s degree and professional certification candidate in this study. All of the other participants sought master’s degrees with initial certification.

5. ⁵Two of these four worked with the same cooperating teacher, Joaquin in 2011 and Mike in 2012.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kevin W. Meuwissen

KEVIN W. MEUWISSEN is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Teaching and Curriculum and Director of the Social Studies Teacher Education Program at the Warner Graduate School of Education at the University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627. He can be contacted at [email protected].

Andrew L. Thomas

ANDREW L. THOMAS is a Doctoral Student in the Department of Teaching and Curriculum at the Warner Graduate School of Education at the University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627. He can be contacted at [email protected].