There is a Crucial Need for Professional
Development for Social Studies Teachers

Scores for teachers with no history background are amazingly higher than those with history minors. Regrettably, even pretests scores for teachers who majored in history are dreadfully inadequate. Fortunately, with quality, content-rich professional development provided by AIHE, teachers in all three categories scored much higher on posttests and later evaluations.

The weak, initial results demonstrate that most history teachers are not receiving adequate content preparation in college, nor have they had any substantive exposure to the actual history content they are teaching. Even teachers who majored in history did not normally take classes aligned with the state curriculum, so there is no real guarantee that even a history major will adequately prepare teachers for teaching the specific topics their state statues require. In many colleges there is little or no coordination between the education department and the history department. In one example, a teacher had a concentration in the field of “The History of Radical Pacifism,” yet she had no exposure to a simple survey course in American history. Another teacher had three American history courses — U.S. History to 1865 survey, U.S. Cultural History, and Women in American History — to prepare him to teach the state-required U.S. II (1865 to the present) course at the high school level. How can university education and history departments ignore what new teachers need to teach in their states’ middle school or high school classes? Fortunately, there are some teachers with vast amounts of knowledge in their content area. Nonetheless, evidence clearly shows these teachers are a distinct minority. Most teachers have not been adequately prepared. This is patently unfair to both the teachers and their prospective students.

Some educators often argue that teachers do not need to master content in college in order to teach elementary or secondary classes. They say teachers need only to master the skills and they can then handle any content. Ironically, one never hears this argument from a teacher who has mastered the historical content. Obviously, skills are necessary to teach and to research a topic; nevertheless, without solid background knowledge the teacher may present misinformation to students. Furthermore, the students know that the teacher has little background knowledge; and the teacher immediately losses classroom credibility. Telling the students “We are going to learn this together” immediately signals that the teacher cannot be trusted to present solid information and educational direction.

Of course, effective teaching methods are necessary. The American Institute for History Education uses 26 “Signature Strategies” for teachers to use in their classrooms. Common sense and research, nonetheless, show that lack of teacher content knowledge has an adverse effect on student performance and student interest in the topic. Teaching skills alone cannot raise student achievement. Students need something to think about. They need a posteriori knowledge to weigh new information or evidence. Solid content knowledge allows students to evaluate events with the experience of thousands of investigators and inquisitors who preceded them. Once they have done this, students then can discover or create new solutions, but not until then. 

State standards are calling for students to gain 21st century skills in their studies. Teachers must never confuse what they call 21st century skills with what they used in the 20th century (or the 19th century for that matter). If there is no difference, then teachers are not using 21st century skills. Ironically, students already have 21st century skills, as do many of the younger teachers. Students use computers, mobile devices, I-Pods, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. They also participate in gaming, blogging, and texting.

In school, students need teachers to guide them through the voluminous amount of data that they can retrieve within seconds. Teachers with solid content knowledge can help students to research in appropriate areas. They will help students to establish goals and theses and to sift through the data to produce cogent results. Students will be able to create papers, videos, audios, interactive PowerPoints, etc. They will be able to collaborate and to review one another’s work published in forums for review. Teachers will be able to assess where their students are, along with where students who review and collaborate on work are. Without a solid mastery of the content, teachers will not know whether the students have created anything of high quality or great value. 

This is why the U.S DOE TAH grants have been so beneficial for teachers. Evaluations of hundreds of teachers in AIHE fellowships show that scores increase remarkably for all levels: Teachers with majors in history increased 36 percent to a score of 80 percent; Teachers with minors in history increased 52 percent to score 81 percent; and incredibly, those with no college history background increased 36 percent to a respectable score of 84 percent, higher than both the history majors and those with minors in history. The TAH grants, at least those run by AIHE, have generated phenomenal increases in teacher content knowledge. These grants benefit new teachers without good content foundations; veteran teachers without solid content background, and content masters who need to learn 21st century skills, strategies, and methods. The TAH grants move teachers into 21st century skills through solid content, and with 21st century tools.

They include: the CODiE award-winning, CICERO: History Beyond the TextbookTM; AIHE.TV; Talking History: Realtime and on-demand Professional Development and Discussion Forums; Facebook; TeacherTube, Franklin’s Opus’ blogs; Sojourner: Online African American History; LIVY: Reading History; and Mundanus Americana: America in the World online system, and The History Channel multimedia classroom, inter alia.

Clearly, even with fantastic 21st century tools, teachers and their students who do not have a solid base of rich content knowledge will be mere operators, not masters of their domain.