History Lessons: Teaching, Learning, and Testing in U.S. High School Classrooms

In this analysis, extended case studies of two veteran teachers and their students are combined with the extant research literature to explore issues of teaching, learning and testing US history. It examines these issues together and in interaction. While the two teachers share several similarities, the teaching practices they construct could not be more different. To explore these differences, the author asks what their teaching practices look like, how their instruction influences their students’ understandings of history, and what role statewide exams play in their classroom decisions. The work is a contribution to the emerging body of empirical research in the field of social studies education, chiefly in the subject area of history, which asks how US students make sense of history and how teachers construct their classroom practices. Three case study chapters are paired with three essay review chapters intended to help readers analyse the cases by looking at them in the context of research literature. Two concluding chapters extend the cases and analyses: the first looks at how and why the teachers profiled in this book construct their individual teaching practices, in terms of three distinct but interacting sets of influences - personal, organizational and policy factors; the second explores the prospects for promoting what the author defines as ambitious teaching and learning. Many policymakers assume that standards-based reforms support the efforts of ambitious teachers, but until we better understand how they and the students in their classes think and act, that assumption is hollow at best.