Moreover, in social studies as well as other academic disciplines, content
knowledge has changed since most teachers were in college. So has the way
middle schoolers are taught. The California frameworks, for example, did
away with the survey courses in American and world history that many adults
remember from their own days in school -- the ones that teachers could never
seem to cram into one year. "We have a whole generation that never
got to the 20th century," laments Linda Mehlbrech, social studies coordinator
for the Long Beach schools.
Now, sixth-grade teachers must cover ancient civilizations, a topic they
may not have prepared to teach in detail when they were in college. In the
seventh grade, teachers are expected to dig deeply into the history of medieval
times. The curriculum breaks up American history into two consecutive years
-- eighth and ninth grades.
For Ann Robertson, the advent of the curriculum frameworks and the abandonment
of the old "survey" approach to the teaching of history meant
substantial changes in how and what she taught. Instead of dashing through
300 years of American history in nine months, she now focuses on concepts
relevant to the first two American centuries. This opportunity to explore
history in greater depth, she reports, "is immensely more enjoyable.
We share more details and are able to tell more stories. Kids like it because
they are able to do so much more digging into the reasons why things happened."
Robertson needed help moving from her role as a textbook-bound teacher who
didn't like noise to the director of an activity-centered classroom who
knows how to get her students to probe information and make sense of it.
Fortunately for Robertson and her kids, LBUSD's growing emphasis on strengthening
the content knowledge of subject-area teachers meant she had plenty of help.
Digging deeper into content requires personal commitment
Linda Mehlbrech has been Robertson's chief mentor, serving as a coach and
friendly critic who frequently drops into her Hill Middle School classroom
unannounced. Robertson has also taken advantage of the district's professional
development programs. She learned how to integrate writing skills and literature
into history studies through the "Writing to Learn" summer program.
She helped develop the social studies standards for the Long Beach schools;
and she's active in the Seamless Education Project, a effort of the Long
Beach Community Partnership to create a collaborative relationship among
all teachers and faculty, from kindergarten through the undergraduate years
in college.
Robertson has also participated in National Faculty seminars, which bring
outside scholars to the district to help teachers explore history, math,
and science in depth. She's also a member of a teacher study group exploring
new teaching and learning strategies.
As chair of Hill's social studies department, Robertson uses department
meetings to foster discussions about the impact of the district's new content
standards on everyday teaching. She encourages teachers to bring student
work and talk about how what students are doing is helping them meeting
standards.
While district support has been important, much of Robertson's transformation
depended on her own commitment and her willingness to give up personal time
to get the job done. She set aside every morning for a month last summer
to work at school, on her own, to align her instruction with the social
studies content standards. She evaluated each unit and lesson, sometimes
reluctantly discarding favorite activities because she realized they would
not help students meet the standards.
Robertson says she knows she's a good teacher, "but I had never done
a check on myself. I needed to set priorities so I would be sure to get
where I needed to be on the content standards."
Knowing it and teaching it equally important
None of the strategies Robertson chose to pursue in her quest to increase
her grasp of her subject were traditional. She did not go back to college
and take some extra courses, but chose instead to combine more intense study
of her subject matter with an exploration of ways to help students dig deeper
themselves.
As important as it is for teachers to learn more about the subjects they
teach, their primary mission is to teach it to their students. This means
"learning something at one level and then being able to translate it
at a lower level," as Don Schwartz of California State University at
Long Beach explains it. Just taking courses in a discipline doesn't help
a teacher understand how to get it across to kids, he says.
That is why the Seamless Education Project, which Schwartz directs for his
institution, is helping both teachers and faculty work together on skills
as well as on content. For example, the Project's history and social science
group drew up a list of skills students need to "think historically,"
including being able to distinguish fact from opinion, to recognize bias,
and to perform basic skills such as deriving the main meaning from a paragraph.
Meeting monthly, the 30 to 50 people in the group discuss issues in their
discipline and delve into content, such as immigration or religion in Latin
America.
The college faculty are also willing to visit public school classrooms as
guest lecturers, and Schwartz believes the closer contacts between faculty
and the K-12 sector will benefit both groups. As professors learn more about
the school system's use of performance standards and portfolios, for example,
he believes they may begin to see the value of such strategies for their
own classrooms.
Focus on content a new priority for LBUSD
The overall goal of the seamless education project, which also includes
the Long Beach Community College, is to eliminate all remedial skills work
within 10 years. But Melhbrech identifies another plus for the linkages.
In the 10 years she has been with the district, "this is the first
time we have really focused on content. Always before, the priority in the
district and on the college campuses was methods courses." Methods
courses focus on how to teach a subject without delving much into the meat
of the subject being taught. For many elementary and middle school teachers,
methods courses were the beginning and the end of their undergraduate training
in a particular subject area.
The question of how well teachers know academic content is a sensitive one.
"The more you want kids to be able to do important things, the more
you have to know about your discipline, and it's just lacking in most teachers,"
says Lynn Winters, research and assessment chief for Long Beach. She admits
that she has been accused of "teacher bashing" when she expresses
this opinion, but from an assessment point of view, she's firm in her point
of view.
Without a lot of content knowledge, she says, "you don't know what
kinds of tasks get at deep understanding, you don't know how to get feedback
about where kids are, you don't know how to look for misconceptions and
preconceptions, you don't know what underlying theories kids bring with
them and how to look for those things."
Content knowledge, Winters explains, is about knowing the right "postholes."
In history, they might be the overriding themes and crossroads events that
shape the destiny of a people or country. A teacher who really understands
history will know how to select subjects for study that tie together the
past, present and future. The study of "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too,"
she says, does not have the same value as focusing on the New Deal. With
the latter, "you can cover American history forward and backwards and
can connect to economics and to government. If you spend your time on Buchanan,
you won't have such good luck."
National Faculty experience sparks teacher
learning
Teachers may not realize how out-of-date their knowledge is, according to
Schwartz. Those who prepared to teach history before the 1970s missed out
on the emphasis upon social history. Textbooks don't help (current Long
Beach history textbooks are "shallow," according to Mehlbrech,
and are not due for replacement until next year). Furthermore, many sixth-grade
teachers are organized in a core, sharing a group of students with another
teacher, and often it is the English teacher who also teaches social studies.
Taking on ancient history without good preparation is an extra challenge
for someone who isn't even a social studies teacher.
Still, Schwartz finds teachers are eager to talk to college faculty about
content. The National Faculty institutes -- all-day, one- or two-week sessions
for about 30 teachers -- are when "you see sparks coming out of teachers,"
he says.
Not only do the professors who teach at the institutes address the practical
"how-do-I-teach-it" concerns of teachers (Long Beach leaders have
insisted on this), they generate lots of discussion and connect teachers
to an array of resources. "They're on e-mail with each other and in
here looking for ways to follow up," says Mehlbrech of her offices
at the LBUSD Teacher Resource Center, where she has assembled resource books,
video lists, museum kits, and literature lists around the social studies
content standards.