Stances in 'Introduction': Education -Introduction 3 - Full text

(1) Select an 'Introduction'

(2) Select a move in that 'Introduction' (What is this?)

Title: "They Thought the World Was Flat?" Applying the Principles of How People Learn in Teaching High School History
Author: Robert B. Bain
Book: How Students Learn: History, Mathematics, and Science in the Classroom (2005)

Move	Introduction 3: Full text
Move 1: Establish A Territory	For at least a century, educational critics and school reformers have pointed to high school history teaching as the model for poor and ineffective pedagogy. History education, Hall observed, involved generally unprepared teachers who used ineffective methods to turn history into the driest of school subjects. ¡§The high educational value of history is too great,¡¨ Hall explained, ¡§to be left to teachers who merely hear recitations, keeping the finger on the place in the text-book, and only asking the questions conveniently printed for them in the margin or the back of the book.¡¨ In a call to instructional arms, Hall and other late-nineteenth-century reformers urged teachers to move beyond lecture, recitation, and textbooks, asking them to ¡§saturate¡¨ history teaching with more active historical pedagogy.
Move 2: Establish A Niche	Most subsequent educational critics have shared Hall¡¦s concerns about the quality of history instruction and (Most) embraced the recommendation that teachers reform history teaching to make it more effective and engaging.However, critics have disagreed vigorously about the goals of an improved pedagogy. The language of reform reflects these disagreements, often urging history teachers to choose either student-centered or teacher centered pedagogies. History teachers know that the choices are neither so dichotomous nor so simple. Framing the instructional situation as a set of either-or choices, such as substituting student inquiry projects for teachers¡¦ lectures, ignores the challenges that history students and teachers face. History is a vast and constantly expanding storehouse of information about people and events in the past. For students, learning history leads to encounters with thousands of unfamiliar and distant names, dates, people, places, events, and stories. Working with such content is a complex enterprise not easily reduced to choices between learning facts and mastering historical thinking processes. Indeed, attention to one is necessary to foster the other. As How People Learn suggests, storing information in memory in a way that allows it to be retrieved effectively depends on the thoughtful organization of content, while core historical concepts ¡§such as stability and change¡¨ require familiarity with the sequence of events to give them meaning. Moreover, learning history entails teaching students to think quite differently than their ¡§natural¡¨ inclinations. As Wineburg suggests, historical thinking may often be an ¡§unnatural¡¨ act, requiring us to think outside familiar and comfortable assumptions and world views. Such work, then, requires both substantial knowledge and skill on the part of the teacher to help students learn historical content.
Move 3: Present the Present Work	This chapter addresses the challenges high school history teachers confront every day when, facing large classes, and the required use of textbooks, they try to engage students in the intellectual work of learning and ¡§doing¡¨ history. Given the demands on history teachers and the intellectual challenges students face while learning history, how might high school history teachers use the ideas found in How People Learn to construct history-specific instructional environments? As a veteran high school history teacher with over 25 years of experience, I begin by showing how I cast traditional history topics and curricular objectives as historical problems for my students to study. Reformers have long argued that historical inquiry ought to be part of history teaching, but often teachers see it as something either on the margins of instruction or as a replacement for traditional teaching. This chapter takes a different approach to place inquiry at the heart of instruction. Using a case study developed around my students¡¦ studies, I focus on ways teachers can restructure familiar curricular objectives that engage students in historical thinking. Formulating such historical problems is a critical first step in history teaching. But it is not sufficient simply to add problem formulation to the extant history curriculum and pedagogy. This chapter goes beyond problem formulation to suggest ways teachers might design history-specific ¡§tools¡¨ to help students do history throughout the curriculum. These modest cognitive tools¡X¡§mindtools¡¨ as David Jonassen calls them¡Xprovide useful ways to help students grapple with sophisticated historical content. Again drawing on my experiences with my students, this chapter makes a case for transforming lectures and textbooks from mere accounts of events into supports that help students grapple with historical problems as they learn historical content and construct historical meaning.