{"id":620,"date":"2013-03-01T01:11:00","date_gmt":"2013-03-01T01:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/cite\/2016\/02\/09\/designing-web-based-educative-curriculum-materials-for-the-social-studies\/"},"modified":"2016-06-04T02:28:21","modified_gmt":"2016-06-04T02:28:21","slug":"designing-web-based-educative-curriculum-materials-for-the-social-studies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/citejournal.org\/volume-13\/issue-2-13\/social-studies\/designing-web-based-educative-curriculum-materials-for-the-social-studies","title":{"rendered":"Designing Web-Based Educative Curriculum Materials for the Social Studies"},"content":{"rendered":"
Curriculum designers have begun to re-envision affordances that planning materials can present to teachers. Along with presenting a lesson and all of the ancillary materials needed for powerful student learning, some curriculum designers are including overt opportunities for teacher learning. These resources have been called educative curriculum materials (ECMs) because of their explicit attempts to help teachers develop better understanding of a lesson\u2019s pedagogical rationale (Davis & Krajcik, 2005).<\/p>\n
Although several studies in other disciplines report that teachers planning with print-based ECMs tend to develop a better understanding of instructional strategies and their impact on student thinking (Collopy, 2003; Grossman & Thompson, 2004; Lloyd, 1999; Remillard, 2000, 2005; Schneider, Krajcik, & Marx, 2000), little is known about the effects of technology-enhanced ECMs or those designed for teaching in the social studies.<\/p>\n
Because of teachers\u2019 familiarity with traditional curricula and the associated planning tasks, ECMs could have little or no effect on teachers\u2019 professional development. On the other hand, teachers\u2019 reliance on curriculum\u2014especially those repurposed to be educative\u2014may make planning resources a potentially effective vehicle for teacher-learning.<\/p>\n
Although researchers employ many different theories to frame discussions of teachers\u2019 learning and development, this paper draws from the notion of professional teaching knowledge. Professional teaching knowledge integrates practitioners\u2019 grounded understanding of orchestrating classroom events with the wise-practice suggestions that researchers derive from scientific studies (Hiebert et al., 2002). We designed ECMs to support the development of teachers\u2019 professional teaching knowledge as it related to a specific pedagogical approach called problem-based historical inquiry and its principles for social studies instruction, that learning should be purposeful, connected, active, and scaffolded (Saye & Brush, 2004). This study was informed by other work in web-based social studies curricula and the design of effective user interfaces.<\/p>\n
This design experiment draws from a larger study investigating web-based ECMs and the influence they may have had on social studies teachers\u2019 conceptions of practice (Callahan, 2009; Callahan, Saye, & Brush, in press). Although our ECMs had limited effects on teacher thinking, our results suggest ways that ECM design might be improved and, thus, be more effective. This paper describes a proposed next generation of ECMs: How they might be constructed, what might they look like, and how might teachers interact with them. Results from our completed research study are used as a basis for proposing strategies, providing illustrative models, and positing recommendations to the field on the optimal design and use of future web-based ECMs.<\/p>\n
\u00a0Review of Relevant Work<\/strong><\/p>\n ECM Research<\/strong><\/p>\n Investigating the possible effectiveness of curriculum resources explicitly designed for teachers\u2019 learning is relatively new for researchers (Schneider et al., 2000). Science, mathematics, and English curriculum designers have pioneered investigations of teachers\u2019 interactions with resources overtly designed to first promote teacher learning then promote student learning. No comparable work has been done in the social studies.<\/p>\n The studies introduced participating teachers to educational reform through the curriculum resources the teachers used to plan classroom events. The researchers found that teachers acted upon the materials: They actively read, selected, and considered various passages and made conscious decisions according to their respective learning contexts. Emerging from the investigations\u2019 findings are the following implications for effective ECM design and implementation:<\/p>\n Design of Online Learning Environments<\/strong><\/p>\n Our design of web-based ECMs is informed by Csikszentmihalyi\u2019s (1997) concept of\u00a0 \u201coptimal experience,\u201d or \u201cflow,\u201d as it has been applied to computer-mediated environments and the study of users\u2019 online experiences (Ghani & Deshpande, 1994; Hoffman & Novak, 1996; Nakamura & Csikszentmihalyi, 2009). When in flow,<\/em> people will \u201cshift into a common mode of experience when they become absorbed in their activity. This mode is characterized by a narrowing of the focus of awareness\u2026 and by a sense of control over the environment\u201d (Csikszentmihalyi, 1977, p. 72).<\/p>\n The following three components of flow identified in research are particularly valuable to the design of online learning environments:<\/p>\n Web-Based Social Studies Reform Curriculum<\/strong><\/p>\n Although we identified no social studies curriculum explicitly designed or marketed as educative, we found several websites with potentially educative features<\/em>. These sites stimulated our thinking about our own educative design.<\/p>\n 1. Civics Online, [re]Envisioning the Democratic Community (http:\/\/www.civics-online.org\/introduction.php<\/a>; Michigan State University\u2019s College of Education, MATRIX & H-Net) provides teachers \u201ca rich array of primary sources, professional development tools, and interactive activities to help in the teaching of civics.\u201d Civics Online attempts to promote \u201cteachers’ thinking about how to design effective learning environments\u201d by providing (a) a search engine to locate multimedia resources, (b) detailed lesson plans, and (c) access to textual case studies where classroom teachers describe their students\u2019 experiences with the resources.<\/p>\n The website also provides a type of professional development worksheet for teachers to complete when reviewing its resources. The worksheet concentrates mostly on \u201cquestions to ask yourself when exploring each case\u201d such as \u201chow could you adapt and use one or more of these approaches in your own teaching?\u201d It was this final feature\u2014promoting teachers\u2019 reflection upon their craft\u2014that was most characteristic of resources attempting to be educative.<\/p>\n 2. Picturing Modern America, 1880-1920: Historical Thinking Exercises for Middle and High School Students (http:\/\/cct2.edc.org\/PMA<\/a>; Center for Children and Technology, & Education Development Center), features primary sources from the American Memory collection from the Library of Congress to help students \u201cpractice history the way historians do.\u201d Picturing Modern America attempts to \u201cbuild students’ skills in analyzing primary sources, especially visual sources.\u201d<\/p>\n The website\u2019s homepage features a hyperlink leading to a multipage, text-only document that explains the rationale behind promoting historical thinking and visual literacy skills. Also, within many of the website\u2019s suggested activities there is a \u201cMore About the Method\u201d hyperlink offering additional explanations of the project\u2019s motivations. The website has potential for teacher learning, as it provides curriculum resources, their underlying rationale, and explanations of the merits of students developing the skills they promote.<\/p>\n 3. Historical Thinking Matters (http:\/\/www.historicalthinkingmatters.org<\/a>; Roy Rosenzweig Center for History, New Media George Mason University, & School of Education Stanford University) provides social studies teachers with multimedia resources and professional development tools. The website is designed to teach students how to critique and construct historical narratives and read primary sources as detectives would, and it features four historical topics for investigation.<\/p>\n Teachers can also access lessons, worksheets, alternative source versions, samples of student work, and an annotated webography for each topic. Teachers\u2019 professional development is promoted through a hyperlink labeled \u201cWhy\u201d on the homepage that directs teachers to a short movie-presentation where a historian discusses \u201chow historians investigate what happened in the past.\u201d This movie-presentation is a pedagogical tutorial explaining why teachers should invest their efforts in developing in their students the habits of mind that historians employ (Wineburg, 2001). The website is potentially educative in that it offers teachers engaging multimedia opportunities to better understand the intended best practice uses of the materials.<\/p>\n 4. The Historical Inquiry Project: Scaffolding Wise Practices in the History Classroom (http:\/\/www.historicalinquiry.com<\/a>; Peter Doolittle, David Hicks, & Tom Ewing), offers detailed explanations of the project\u2019s goal \u201cto bridge the gap between research and practice in terms of preparing teachers and students to engage in the doing of history\u201d and its suggested wise practice teaching strategy \u201cSCIM-C: Summarizing, Contextualizing, Inferring, Monitoring, and Corroborating.\u201d The project offers its rationale through tutorials for teachers to read and then provides models in the form of hyperlinks to short video segments of historians demonstrating historical thinking. This website is didactic in its presentation; teachers visiting this website will find no participatory activities. There are no scaffolds embedded in the materials to produce an educative experience, and though the video segments feature historians thinking aloud about primary documents, the encounter tends to be a passive observation.\u00a0 The design strategy of embedding video segments seamlessly into explanatory text could be educative.<\/p>\n 5. The Persistent Issues in History Network (http:\/\/pihnet.org<\/a>; John Saye and Thomas Brush) \u201cdevelops and supports a national community of teachers who are skilled in engaging their students…with rich multimedia resources.\u201d The website provides curriculum materials that model wise practice instruction and offers over a dozen web-based curriculum design tools, a score of fully developed videocases that feature actual classroom footage and teacher reflections and pre- and post-interviews of the recorded lesson (Saye & Brush, 2005). We saw educative potential in the website\u2019s videocases of teaching vignettes and interviews. Researchers have suggested that watching colleagues in live classrooms can create powerful enrichment opportunities for teachers (Fishman, 2003; Lampert & Ball, 1998; Richardson & Kile, 1999; Tochon, 1999).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n These websites are a step removed from being ECMs, because the teachers\u2019 lessons and the features that could be considered educative are often disconnected and out of context. Each project attempts to reform social studies education by providing exemplary lessons in one online space while presenting the lessons\u2019 rationale in a different space that is often difficult to find and requires clicks on several links to find. Getting teachers in flow while they interact with their curriculum interaction is perhaps the defining feature of ECMs; however, these sites feature virtually no lesson-specific, in situ questions for teachers that might encourage their participatoryinteraction with the materials.<\/p>\n To develop professionally from these websites (e.g., to reflect meaningfully on specific aspects of the craft of teaching and enact lessons accordingly), teachers must navigate from the lesson and its resources to pedagogical explanations, often without overt guidance connecting the two.<\/p>\n Our ECM design incorporated ideas from existing projects while adding further educative elements to link resources clearly and directly to the pedagogical rationale motivating their construction and promote participatory encounters between teaches and those resources.<\/p>\n Theoretical Power of ECMs<\/strong><\/p>\n Although most definitions tend to characterize ECMs rather broadly as teaching resources that are intended for student and teacher<\/em> learning, we conceptualize ECMs more distinctly. We conceive of ECMs as exemplar lessons that strongly illustrate fundaments of wise practice pedagogy and that educatively scaffold to help teachers develop their professional teaching knowledge. This definition necessarily places a heavy emphasis on the scaffolds designed to support teacher learning. They must be nimble enough to overtly guide the teachers toward educative opportunities and facilitate participation with them, while simultaneously affording teachers the independence to discover information and create new understandings.<\/p>\n We conceptualized teachers\u2019 use of their planning resources through the lens of a sociocultural perspective positing humans employ tools\u2014language, mechanical objects, and a variety of environmental features\u2014to collect and interpret information regarding their experiences. Thus, human behavior can be understood as actions mediated by such tools (Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, 1991, 1995).<\/p>\n Scaffolding<\/strong><\/p>\n The term scaffolding has been used in various ways since Wood, Bruner, and Ross (1976) introduced it to describe the natural process adults tend to employ as they help children learn. Scaffolds have been defined as hard or soft (Saye & Brush, 2002); reciprocal (Holton & Clarke, 2006); cognitive, technical, or affective (Yelland & Masters, 2007); conceptual, metacognitive, procedural, or strategic (Hannafin, Land, & Oliver, 1999); a technique or a tool (Rosenshine & Meister, 1992); and authentic or generalizable (Chen & Hung, 2002). These and other definitions of scaffolds are not necessarily mutually exclusive, which has led some to suggest that the term scaffolding is used to describe virtually everything remotely linked to helping learners develop their knowledge and skills and, thus, has lost much of its utility as a specific concept (Pea, 2004).<\/p>\n Systematic investigations of scaffolding and its effectiveness in technology-enhanced learning environments, especially those nested within inquiry-based contexts, are rare (Kim & Hannafin, 2011). We identified such studies in science (Krajcik & Blumenfeld, 2006), social studies (Saye & Brush, 2002), English (Dreyer & Nel, 2003), and the cognitive sciences (Demetriadis, Papadopoulos, Stamelos, & Fischer, 2008). These works specifically address technology-mediated scaffolding of student, not teacher, learning.<\/p>\n Sharma and Hannafin (2008) suggested that scaffolds in technology-enhanced learning environments should attend to both cognitive and interface concerns. Others have further conceptualized technology-enhanced learning environment scaffolding into three defining categories: purpose, interactions, and source (Kim & Hannafin, 2011). Purpose<\/em> defines the type of goal for the support (procedural, conceptual, metacognitive, or strategic); interactions<\/em> refers to whether the support is static or dynamic; source describes if the origin of the support is a teacher, a peer, or a type of technology, or as Saye and Brush (2004) called them, hard and soft scaffolds.<\/p>\n From this lens, the scaffolds we created for our study are consistent with Kim and Hannafin\u2019s (2011) purpose and source categories, but blur the distinction between static and dynamic support. While the ECMs we developed contained fixed, or static, hyperlinks presenting teachers with pedagogical information, the prompts were constructed to promote a dynamic, participatory negotiation between the teacher and the curriculum.<\/p>\n Professional Teaching Knowledge<\/strong><\/p>\n In meeting the needs of learners who manifest differing personalities and learning styles, teachers tend to develop an evolving teaching knowledge. However, because of the circumstances surrounding their job\u2014isolation from colleagues, and little time for meaningful professional development (Onosko, 1991)\u2014teachers rely almost exclusively on their concrete, context-specific experiences to form their model of practice. This model may be informed by sporadic professional development sessions, sometimes conflicting local, state, and national initiatives, and collaborations with colleagues via formal conferences and informal conversations.<\/p>\n Unless they are extraordinarily motivated and surrounded with powerful resources, teachers rarely have the opportunity or the time to stay abreast of current educational trends, contribute significantly to professional communities (online, face-to-face, or print), or thoroughly reflect on their classroom outcomes and, subsequently, revise their practice. While these conditions may limit teachers\u2019 potential to create dynamic classroom experiences for their students, it is the realistic starting point from which ECMs attempt to further develop teachers\u2019 professional teaching knowledge.<\/p>\n Investigating teachers\u2019 means of developing their pedagogical models of practice, researchers have concentrated on teachers\u2019 adaptive expertise (Schwartz, Bransford, & Sears, 2005), their design capacity (Davis, Beyer, Forbes, & Stevens, 2007), their pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman, 1986), and their professional teaching knowledge (Hiebert et al., 2002; Saye, Kohlmeier, Brush, Mitchell, & Farmer, 2009). We used the latter concept to frame our study of ECMs. Professional teaching knowledge suggests that researchers\u2019 academic knowledge can be meaningfully integrated with teachers\u2019 craft knowledge to form a dynamic model of practice.<\/p>\n Educational researchers develop understandings of schooling from analysis of literature germane to their specific topic, reviews of progressive trends, and repeated scientific field tests. Researchers then publish suggested guidelines for wise classroom practices in refereed journals for critique and revision. Saye et al. (2009) suggested that, when researchers\u2019 academic knowledge and teachers\u2019 craft knowledge are integrated, the resulting model of practice has the potential to (a) help establish a theoretical frame for teaching activities, (b) facilitate teachers\u2019 reflection and revision of practice, and (c) introduce teachers to current trends and progressive strategies (e.g., inquiry-based activities or modern technologies).<\/p>\n Because teachers rarely trust new strategies before seeing them work in classrooms (Cuban, 2001; Lortie, 2002) and because teachers often lack an infrastructure with which to build thoughtful communities (Thomas, Wineburg, Grossman, Myhre, & Woolworth, 1998), developing their professional teaching knowledge can prove logistically challenging. However, because of their unique placement and influence on classroom experiences, curriculum materials maybe a well-positioned vehicle to help develop a professional teaching knowledge that meaningfully integrates practitioners\u2019 grounded understanding of the classroom with the findings of researchers.<\/p>\n Researchers within a discipline do not all arrive at the same conclusions or espouse the same vision and purpose of schooling. However, the overall goal of developing professional teaching knowledge is to provide teachers with a sound rationale beyond their anecdotal experiences, to encourage collaboration, and to keep abreast of current movements.<\/p>\n Problem-Based Historical Inquiry<\/strong><\/p>\n The ECMs we created for this study were designed to support the development of teachers\u2019 professional teaching knowledge as it relates to the following four research-based principles of problem-based historical inquiry (PBHI):<\/p>\n Learning Should Be Purposeful<\/em><\/strong>. PBHI lessons are centered around recurring societal concerns that are fundamental to human communities. These societal concerns afford students the opportunity to engage in real-world problem-solving where factual, definitional, and value conflicts are deliberated (Oliver, Newmann, & Singleton, 1992; Saye & Brush, 2004; Shaver, 1996).<\/p>\n Instead of memorizing information from a textbook or lecture, which engrosses few people in society, students have a more authentic purpose with PBHI: deep, sustained learning and struggling with problems of the past to more meaningfully address problems of their present and future. Saye and Brush (2004) stated that social studies \u201cactivities should be a means to a civic end\u201d (p. 128) and that end should be \u201creasoned decision making about enduring social problems.\u201d This type of purposeful academic work consists of more than the ability to demonstrate minimal competence at learning tasks or passing a test; it requires students to think at high levels and develop robust understandings instead of engaging in superficial memorization.<\/p>\n Learning Should Be<\/em><\/strong> Connected<\/strong><\/em>. Researchers in cognitive psychology have suggested that experts and novices tend to think and solve problems differently due to the ability to demonstrate connections in data (Simon, 1976). Experts have larger and more interconnected schema. Novices who develop richer schema may think more deeply and at higher levels, because interconnected data is easier to retrieve and it imparts more complex and sophisticated representations of the world and its problems.<\/p>\n PBHI organizes instruction around profound ideas or concepts that pose major concerns for human societies (e.g., majority will and minority rights or justifiable actions during armed conflict). These profound ideas function as mental-anchors, to which students attach both their previous knowledge and newly learned information. Integrating previous and new understandings and, thereby, creating different, perhaps more robust, connections within their individual schema, students also may recognize links between past and present and causes and effects.<\/p>\n Learning Should Be Active.<\/em><\/strong> Because it focuses on attempts to resolve authentic, recurring societal concerns, PBHI is largely collaborative and often includes students discussing their positions with their peers (Newmann & Wehlage, 1993). Problem-based historical inquiry typically employs rich, diverse historical documents as a means for students to discover the past and presents them with the differing sides of a historical event.<\/p>\n No individual alone can perceive the complexity of social reality, thus a student attempting to understand the past needs the help of others who, through discourse and deliberation, can reason together meaningfully about previous (and present) events. This collective rationality (Moshman & Geil, 1998), socially constructing an understanding of reality through public discourse and critically reasoning together, can broaden and deepen students\u2019 perspectives, especially when students are attempting to solve ill-structured problems about which they are likely to disagree (Parker & Zumeta, 1999; Parker, 2006).<\/p>\n Learning Should Be<\/em><\/strong> Structured<\/strong>.<\/em> PBHI is also founded on the belief that when properly supported, all students are capable of higher levels of thinking. For students to develop the varied skills and rich knowledge needed to be reasoned problem-solvers, teachers must appeal to each student\u2019s individual needs\u2013often at the time the need presents itself. For nearly 30 years educational researchers have used the term scaffolding <\/em>to describe the \u201crole of teachers…in supporting the learner\u2019s development and providing support structures to get to that next stage or level\u201d (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 56).<\/p>\n Scaffolding resources allow students diverse avenues for rigorous, sustained thinking. These scaffolds may include hard scaffolds (i.e., static supports that anticipate general difficulties, such as providing definitions for challenging terminology and graphic organizers), and soft scaffolds (i.e., dynamic, situation-specific aids to help learners process data, such as in situ guiding conversations; Saye & Brush, 2002). Because of the socially constructed aspect of PBHI, students are also encouraged to use peers as resources to help them think more deeply.<\/p>\n The Research Study<\/strong><\/p>\n The Materials<\/strong><\/p>\n Integrating suggestions from ECMs, online social studies curriculum reform, and the learning sciences, we designed exemplar lessons that strongly illustrated fundaments of a specific wise practice pedagogy and then grafted educative scaffolds into the hypermedia-rich curriculum materials. We conceptualized teachers\u2019 use of their planning resources through the lens of a sociocultural perspective positing that humans employ tools\u2014language, mechanical objects, and a variety of environmental features\u2014to collect and interpret information regarding their experiences. Thus, human behavior can be understood as actions mediated by such tools (Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, 1991, 1995).<\/p>\n Operating within these assumptions, we wanted to see what influence, if any, our ECMs could exert to broaden teachers\u2019 vision of and deepen their relationship with online planning resources. Could teachers begin to use planning materials as cultural tools in mediated actions to develop their craft?<\/p>\n We developed ECMs with the notion that individual teachers\u2019 personally derived craft knowledge alone is not sufficient as a professional knowledge base.\u00a0 Others have suggested a more concentrated effort to develop teachers\u2019 professional teaching knowledge that would involve merging teachers\u2019 concrete, private craft knowledge with public, propositional, and replicable researchers\u2019 knowledge of general principles derived from academic research (Hiebert et al., 2002; Saye et. al, 2009). We hypothesized that because of their unique placement and potential influence on classroom experiences, curriculum materials may be a well-positioned vehicle to develop professional teaching knowledge.<\/p>\n Our ECMs were designed to support the development of teachers\u2019 professional teaching knowledge as it relates<\/em> to a specific pedagogical approach, PBHI), and its four characteristics of effective social studies instruction: purposeful, connected, active, and scaffolded (Saye & Brush, 2004).<\/p>\n Because of its well-developed video case database, and because it offers free online web tools to its members, we decided to create our ECMs within the online environment, the Persistent Issues in History Network (PIHNet; http:\/\/pihnet.org). By repurposing the PIHNet web tools originally intended for teachers to create multimedia resources for their students, we turned our lessons into educative curriculum materials. The basic PIHNet lesson interface we used had two columns: a narrow column on the left side of the screen displaying an outline and a larger column on the right displaying narrative paragraphs that appeared when corresponding terms in the outline were clicked on.<\/p>\n The lessons\u2019 educative features were manifest through additional hyperlinks embedded in narrative paragraphs. For example, when a teacher clicked a hyperlink from the right column a new window opened, introducing the teacher to a combination of audio, video, and textual information that comprised educative features. For consistency, every hyperlink from the right column led to an educative feature, and every hyperlink from the left column led to a narrative paragraph. Appendix A<\/a> illustrates the differing interfaces.<\/p>\n Participants and Data Sources<\/strong><\/p>\n Our research study (Callahan, 2009; Callahan et al., in press) was a type of design experiment to investigate the following question: Can educative curriculum materials help social studies teachers develop professional teaching knowledge related to problem-based historical inquiry?<\/p>\n Design experiments are typically collaborative and iterative, and they collect data from multiple sources that allow a rich data triangulation (Brown, 1992; Collins, 1992; Denzin, 1978). From the investigation\u2019s beginning, we incorporated participants\u2019 ideas and feedback into the logistical design of successive iterations. For example, during the first iteration each participant (a) visited fewer than half of the lesson\u2019s 20 educative scaffolds, (b) mentioned that they were unsure of which hyperlinks to visit, and (c) thought that the lesson took a very long time to plan. Thus, we revised the materials for the second iteration to (a) include the same number of educative scaffolds as opposed to our original plan, which was to have fewer supports as the study progressed), (b) overtly encouraged teachers to \u201cplease visit all<\/em> of the hyperlinks,\u201d and (c) encouraged participants to schedule planning sessions after school as opposed to during a planning or lunch period.<\/p>\n Three social studies teachers (pseudonyms are used for each) in one southeastern US state participated in the research study: Dill, who had taught for 9 years; and Rose and Fiye who had each taught for 2 years. Dill and Fiye taught in suburban, public secondary schools; Rose taught in an urban, parochial secondary school. Participants were selected through a purposeful, criteria-based sampling that identified teachers who were comfortable with instructional uses of technology, yet were inexperienced using PBHI strategies and practices.<\/p>\n The participants planned and taught three lessons using researcher-designed ECMs. Two participating teachers were traditional novices just beginning their careers; a third participant was an experienced teacher but novice in the sense of being unfamiliar and unpracticed with problem-based historical thinking. They each taught classes with nearly 30 students, oversaw several extracurricular activities, and planned during an off period, at lunch, or immediately after a school day. The teachers were not presented with any form of orientation to aspects of the study\u2019s curriculum resources, and they were unaware that the researchers designed the ECMs.<\/p>\n The ECM lessons occurred near the beginning, middle, and end of a semester-long course section of US History. We gathered data from (a) pre- and postintervention interviews, (b) observations and field notes made from a three-iteration intervention, in which teachers used ECMs to plan and implement a lesson, and (c) member checks. Our data analysis template began with multiple readings of the collected data. We then organized the raw data chronologically by case, creating a \u201ccase record\u201d for each participant to describe their respective experiences as we observed them.<\/p>\n Analyzing the cases individually, we first looked closely at the participants\u2019 words for metaphors, analogies, and concepts to use as emic codes in a description of their experience (Bogdan & Biklen, 1992; Huberman & Miles, 1994). For example, each participant mentioned surprise at how much longer planning with the ECMs took when compared to their usual experiences; we coded this \u201ctimespan.\u201d We then brought order to the data by winnowing it into basic descriptive units of information.<\/p>\n After a review of literature we deduced a short list of etic codes (Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Patton, 1987). Emerging codes were derived from content analysis, reading and rereading the individual cases looking for a convergence of quotations or observations that expressed the same idea, topic, concept, or issue.<\/p>\n A Next Generation of ECMs<\/strong><\/p>\n The underpinning goal of our ECMs was to encourage teachers to construct a more robust conception of practice based in PBHI professional teaching knowledge. To better explain how the next generation of ECMs might build from the implications of our research study, we revisit the educative scaffolds. First is a description of how each PBHI principle was manifest in the wise-practice lesson the students experienced, followed by an explanation of \u00a0how each principle is reinforced through the educative scaffolds. Next is described how the participants reacted to the scaffolds. Finally, recommendations describe how future ECMs scaffolds might be constructed to elicit a more educative experience for teachers. Appendix B<\/a> is a summary of specific aspects the ECM\u2019s original design with amended features we hypothesize might work more successfully.<\/p>\n Learning Should Be Purposeful<\/strong><\/p>\n The lessons were purposefully centered around ill-structured, open-ended, topic-specific questions for which students were to investigate and hypothesize plausible answers. The questions and the discussions that introduced lessons were intended to establish an authentic desire to study the past through historical photographs. Instead of listening to a lecture and copying an outline of facts into their notebooks, students were encouraged to think deeply about previous attempts to combat poverty in order to apply that knowledge to modern attempts to do the same. We then created educative scaffolds and prompts to graft onto the lessons that both explained and modeled this type of problem-centered instruction.<\/p>\n The wording of the educatively scaffolded prompts is perhaps the best example of our attempts to manifest a sense of meaningful purpose to the ECM lesson. We thought that the participants would consider working with the interactive, multimedia resources so unfamiliar that simply planning instruction would be interesting or cause mild cognitive dissonance that they would seek to resolve. The ECMs promoted a pedagogy that sharply contrasted with the more traditional dispositions, teaching strategies, and classroom experiences that we observed and that the teachers self-reported.<\/p>\n We worded most of the educative hyperlink prompts as declarative statements written in a professional tone. For example, we included the following hyperlinks in both the first and second iterations: \u201cCLICK HERE to learn why one teacher thinks this type of lesson is worth the time and effort needed to plan it.\u201d This hyperlink followed a narrative paragraph encouraging the teachers to introduce students to the topic-specific question. We also included a hyperlink that read: \u201cCLICK HERE to watch an experienced teacher think historically about photograph-one from this lesson.\u201d This hyperlink followed a narrative paragraph encouraging teachers to model historical thinking for their students.<\/p>\n Since the teachers agreed to participate in a study concerning progressive teaching strategies, we thought they would be intrigued with these unfamiliar sounding strategies and want to hear from experienced teachers advocating for them\u2014so intrigued that they would take the extra step to learn more about effective teaching strategies.<\/p>\n Curriculum designers\u2014even those claiming to be reformers\u2014tend to prize the pragmatic over the notional. Thus, traditional teaching materials consist of a lesson plan and its requisite resources and occasionally include a summary to further describe certain constituent elements. Beyond providing and explaining an exemplar lesson, we designed our ECMs to scaffold teachers toward developing a more professional model of practice. However, our study\u2019s ECMs did not seem to convey to the participants that the materials\u2019 underpinning purpose differed from more traditional resources.<\/p>\n No participant seemed to develop a deep understanding of this idea that struggling with authentic problems of the past might better prepare students to address contemporary problems. In fact, it is difficult to determine to what degree the teachers even understood that idea to be a desired goal of the ECMs. For example, Fiye devoted the fewest minutes to planning with the ECMs and visited the fewest educative hyperlinks. However, one of the few educatively scaffolded features she visited during each iteration was the hyperlink addressing the lesson\u2019s purpose. During the first iteration, she read the hyperlink\u2019s information and then acknowledged,<\/p>\n Foundational and conceptual knowledge is a part of every goal and course of study, and so we\u2019re [the school\u2019s social studies department] all geared toward that here. And, of course, civic responsibility is important. It\u2019s amazing how many different answers you\u2019ll get. And that is really the point. \u201cWhy should the government build a fence across the border with Mexico?\u201d and someone calls out something ignorant.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Fiye\u2019s comment suggested that she was interested in developing her students\u2019 abilities to enter a public debate concerning policy question. However, she was virtually silent when prompted during our interviews with opportunities to articulate a rationale for having students contemplate persisting societal concerns.<\/p>\n Simply put, the teachers did not seem to acknowledge the alternative model of practice that the ECMs sought to support. Perhaps this thinking led them to approach planning with the study\u2019s educative materials as though they were doing so with traditional materials. To underscore an emphasis on the centrality of an authentic purpose, a next generation of ECMs could include at the very beginning of its lesson plans a video segment of an exemplar model of a classroom experience based on the principles that the ECMs are attempting to convey (as in Figure 1). With this video the ECMs might keep the teachers in flow by structuring their experience through reflective prompts (e.g., What seems different about this class? How are students\u2019 experiences in this classroom different from those you had?). The goal of this proposed new video segment would be to help teachers concentrate on a holistic vision of what is possible when implementing the principles of PBHI.<\/p>\n Figure 1. <\/strong>Illustration of initial educatively scaffolded hyperlinked page, a classroom vignette which could be added to establish purpose and to engage teachers.<\/p>\n\n
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