Textbook Giants Face the Future: American Citizenship, the Study of History, and the Uncertain Years Ahead

By definition, American history textbooks have no business contemplating the years to come. A crude definition of history would limit the range of inquiry backwards in time, to the past. After all, is it not true that most history textbooks are simply a “miscellaneous collection of names, dates, and facts” about the past?1 Further, many historians hold the study of “present history” in contempt because the assemblage of present “facts” is simply too disorderly to fashion a coherent thesis. We can interpret the importance of past events because we know their effects. We have no such knowledge in the present and certainly have even less authority to “interpret” the future. Perhaps it is reassuring that high school history classes rarely get to these pages about the future anyway—after all, it is by definition impossible for a history class to finish by studying the future, and it is not a well-kept secret that most classes fail to make it up to the present, Vietnam, WorldWar II, or even the Roaring Twenties

What Made Me the Teacher I Am Today? A Reflection by Selected Leonore Annenberg-Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellows

The report offers a series of short essays from 18 teachers, each reflecting on what inspired and guided them into the teaching profession. Some of the highlights include:"I've come to realize that my learning process in the classroom actually feels a whole lot like the science I practiced at the bench: engineering experimental procedures, collecting and analyzing data, and formulating questions about next steps. It turns out that my scientific worldview can really improve learning outcomes for my students," said Kristin Milks, a biology and earth science teacher in Bloomington, IN, who enrolled in a teacher preparation program shortly after completing her Ph.D. in biochemistry."What transforms someone from being a good teacher to being a great teacher is the passion to make connections with students, to constantly evaluate and adjust their practice to do what is in the students' best interest," said Catherine Ann Haney, a Virginia Spanish teacher who has recently been teaching in Santiago, Chile."Enrolling in a teacher education program, instead of starting my career as a teacher first and then obtaining my master's degree after, meant I had a cohort of other soon-to-be teachers to learn with as we persevered through a very rigorous and demanding year," said Jeremy Cress, a math teacher in Philadelphia."I realized that being a good math teacher does not mean explaining clearly, making kids like me, or making math fun. Rather, it means giving students the opportunity to solve problems by themselves from start to finish, to struggle and persevere, and to learn from each other's particular strengths," said Brittany Leknes, a math teacher from Sunnyvale, CA."Together my students and I co-create their identities, their sense of themselves, and their understanding of their place in society. Because I believe wholly in my students' own power, I teach to disrupt school cultures that suggest that students need to be anything less than their whole selves," said Kayla Vinson, who taught social students in the Harlem Children's Zone.Created in 2007, the Leonore Annenberg-Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellowship was designed to serve as the equivalent of a national "Rhodes Scholarship" for teaching. Working with Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Virginia, and the University of Washington, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation provided $30,000 stipends for exceptionally able candidates to complete a yearlong master's degree program. In exchange, the teacher candidates agreed to teach for three years in high-need secondary schools across the country. The Leonore Annenberg Teaching Fellowship was funded through grants from the Annenberg Foundation and Carnegie Corporation of New York. It served as the basis for the Woodrow Wilson Foundation's successful Teaching Fellowship program, which now operates in five states (Georgia, Indiana, Michigan, New Jersey, and Ohio), operating in partnership with 28 universities. Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellows complete a rigorous yearlong master's degree program, coupled with a robust yearlong clinical experience. Once they earn their degrees, Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellows teach in high-need STEM classrooms, while receiving three years of coaching and mentoring

Evaluation of the i3 Scale-Up of Reading Recovery | Year Two Report, 2012-13

Reading Recovery is a short-term early intervention designed to help the lowest-achieving readers in first grade reach average levels of classroom performance in literacy. Students identified to receive Reading Recovery meet individually with a specially trained Reading Recovery teacher every school day for 30-minute lessons over a period of 12 to 20 weeks. The purpose of these lessons is to support rapid acceleration of each child’s literacy learning. In 2010, The Ohio State University received a Scaling Up What Works grant from the U.S. Department of Education Investing in Innovation (i3) Fund to expand the use of Reading Recovery across the country. The award was intended to fund the training of 3,675 new Reading Recovery teachers in U.S. schools, thereby expanding service to an additional 88,200 students. The Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) was contracted to conduct an independent evaluation of the i3 scale-up of Reading Recovery over the course of five years. The evaluation includes parallel rigorous experimental and quasi-experimental designs for estimating program impacts, coupled with a large-scale mixed-methods study of program implementation. This report presents the findings of the second year of the evaluation. The primary goals of this evaluation are: a) to provide experimental evidence of the impacts of Reading Recovery on student learning under this scale-up effort ; b) to assess the success of the scale-up in meeting the i3 grant’s expansion goals; and c) to document the implementation of the scale-up and fidelity to program standards. This document is the second in a series of three reports based on our external evaluation of the Reading Recovery i3 Scale-Up. This report presents results from the impact and implementation studies conducted over the 2012-2013 school year—the third year of the scale-up effort and the second full year of the evaluation. In order to estimate the impacts of the program, a sample of first graders who had been selected to receive Reading Recovery were randomly assigned to a treatment group that received Reading Recovery immediately, or to a control group that did not receive Reading Recovery until the treatment group had exited the intervention. The reading achievement of students in this sample was assessed using a standardized assessment of reading achievement—the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS). The data for the implementation study include extensive interviews and surveys with Reading Recovery teachers, teacher leaders, site coordinators, University Training Center directors, members of the i3 project leadership team at The Ohio State University, and principals and first-grade teachers in schools involved in the scale-up. Case studies were also conducted in nine i3 scale-up schools to observe how Reading Recovery operates in different contexts

Justice and Practice: Tensions in the Development of Social Justice (Teacher) Educators

This dissertation explores how pre-service teachers conceptualize the relationship between justice and practice, and then navigate the tensions of their student teaching context to enact their beliefs in their teaching practice. Starting from the assumption that all teachers must understand how their practice challenges rather than reproduces inequities, this proposal’s theoretical framework explicates four elements of a social justice educator: an orientation towards justice, a critical frame for understanding the relationship between macro-level structures and micro-level interactions, and conceptual and practical tools to live this in one’s practice/praxis. A literature review of Social Justice Teacher Education (SJTE) and Practice-based Teacher Education (PBTE) along these four dimensions suggests complementary possibilities for facilitating the preparation of social justice educators. The qualitative study, leveraging practitioner research methodologies, how pre-service teachers developed the conceptual and practical tools of social justice educators. Findings pre-service teachers suggest that pre-service teachers varied in their conceptualizations of how teachers acted towards more just outcomes, and in their relation of their teaching aims to the real world. Additionally, pre-service teachers responded to tensions they countered in their particular school context by planning and enacting units of instruction that fulfilled their teaching aims, responded to the contextualized tensions, reflected their conceptualizations of justice, and met their students’ needs

Justice and Practice: Tensions in the Development of Social Justice (Teacher) Educators

This dissertation explores how pre-service teachers conceptualize the relationship between justice and practice, and then navigate the tensions of their student teaching context to enact their beliefs in their teaching practice. Starting from the assumption that all teachers must understand how their practice challenges rather than reproduces inequities, this proposal’s theoretical framework explicates four elements of a social justice educator: an orientation towards justice, a critical frame for understanding the relationship between macro-level structures and micro-level interactions, and conceptual and practical tools to live this in one’s practice/praxis. A literature review of Social Justice Teacher Education (SJTE) and Practice-based Teacher Education (PBTE) along these four dimensions suggests complementary possibilities for facilitating the preparation of social justice educators. The qualitative study, leveraging practitioner research methodologies, how pre-service teachers developed the conceptual and practical tools of social justice educators. Findings pre-service teachers suggest that pre-service teachers varied in their conceptualizations of how teachers acted towards more just outcomes, and in their relation of their teaching aims to the real world. Additionally, pre-service teachers responded to tensions they countered in their particular school context by planning and enacting units of instruction that fulfilled their teaching aims, responded to the contextualized tensions, reflected their conceptualizations of justice, and met their students’ needs