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The purpose of this study is to explore decision-making of elementary teachers (n = 5) specific to US/American history content and curricular resources. More specifically for this study, the author asks the following broad research question: When presented with a collection of social studies instructional resources, how do elementary teachers describe the choices they do make/may make?

In this comparative case study, fifth-grade teachers were interviewed using verbal protocol methodology, they discussed their curriculum, teaching and instructional decisions as each was presented with history/social studies resources associated with newly adopted state standards.

Findings indicate these elementary teachers have professional freedom to make instructional decisions in the ways they interpreted the standards, design instruction and select materials for social studies.

This study contributes to and extends the research in elementary social studies. Teachers' voices and decisions are presented as intellectual and pedagogical actions associated with teaching elementary school social studies.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how and why teachers use historical fiction in their classroom (e.g. selection and instruction) through the lenses of their pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman, 1986) and pedagogical tools (Grossman et al., 1999).

The authors explored the following questions: In what ways do elementary school teachers, more specifically fifth grade teachers responsible for early US history as part of their social studies curriculum, use historical fiction in their classrooms? and What factors do elementary school teachers consider when they select historical fiction to use in their classrooms? In order to explore these questions, the authors interviewed eight fifth grade teachers. The authors describe the ways in which these teachers use historical fiction as part of their social studies instruction by employing collective case study (Stake, 1994).

This study has reified this notion that historical fiction is widely used by fifth grade teachers. The authors identified that these teachers are choosing texts that allow them to integrate their language arts and social studies instruction in effective and engaging ways. Many participants described choosing the texts purposefully to address social studies standards during their language arts time. Despite many of these teachers using prescribed curricula for language arts instruction and following state standards for social studies, the teachers in this study felt free to make curricular decisions related to integration. Most importantly, when given this freedom, they chose to integrate purposefully with quality texts.

The primary limitation of this research study is the small sample size (n=8). However among the eight teacher participants, there are two states are represented, varied teaching contexts (e.g. departmentalized, self-contained classrooms), and many years of classroom social studies teaching experience.

The Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts (CCSS) (Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association, 2010) have prompted teachers to present both informational text and literature in equal balance in upper elementary grades. Little research has been done in the last decade about the ways in which historical fiction addresses these standards.

The purpose of this study was to examine how teachers’ constructions of youth inform their text selections, particularly as they relate to a problematic author.

As part of a larger, national study, the authors use interview data from 18 participants – 9 who still teach and 9 who no longer teach Alexie – to consider how teachers’ constructions of youth play roles in their decisions to teach or avoid complex and controversial authors and topics, specifically the work and life of Sherman Alexie in the #MeToo era.

Findings suggest teachers who constructed youth through asset-based frameworks – as complex and capable – were likely to keep teaching Alexie or have conversations about the #MeToo movement. Teachers who constructed students in deficit ways, as “not ready,” harkened back to Lesko’s (2012) critique, and were more likely to either remove Alexie from the curriculum entirely or engage students in conversations about the text only, leaving Alexie’s life out of the classroom.

Building on Lesko’s work on constructions of adolescence and its intersection with Petrone et al.’s youth lens and Critical Youth Studies (e.g., Petrone and Lewis, 2021), this study describes the ways in which teachers’ views of students served as rationales for their teaching decisions around whether, if or how to include the works and life of Sherman Alexie.

The objective of the present study was to assess which teachers hired to teach secondary school dropouts are most likely to adapt their practices to match their students' characteristics. Chile recently initiated a system “second chance” schools for dropouts. Most of the teaching staff were recruited from the secondary schools from which the students had withdrawn. There was little variation in instructional practices or schedules. The second chance schools provide intensive instruction, small classes and flexibility in schedules and sequence of courses. The study sought to identify the teachers most likely to adapt old practices or learn new ones in order to provide students a different educational experience than that offered in conventional secondary schools.

The sampling design for this study was developed by the Statistics Department of the Ministry of Education. Taking enrollment into account, they randomly selected second chance schools from 13 of Chile's 16 regions. Then, they randomly selected 617 teachers from 38 of the selected schools. The teachers were invited to respond to a self-administered survey questionnaire that covered beliefs about and attitudes toward dropouts, and frequency of use of different teaching methods. The analytical procedures used include nonparametric correlations and logit regression.

Teaching methods in the second chance schools are influenced mostly by type of in-service training and not by student characteristics. Most teachers expect most students to graduate; teachers with more years of teaching are the least optimistic.

Relatively little research on second chance schools has been published in Latin America. The Second Opportunity Schools are the first effort in Chile to provide public secondary school to dropouts. The study provides detailed information about background and training linked to current teachers' instructional practices. The findings suggest actions that can be taken to improve the new schools.

This study aims to explore and provide empirical evidence for ways that teachers can simultaneously support students’ literary reading and analytic writing through dialogic assessment, an approach to conferencing with writers that foregrounds process and integrates assessment and instruction.

This study uses qualitative research methods of three high school teachers’ dialogic assessment sessions with individual students to investigate how these teachers both assessed and taught literary reading moves as they observed and supported the students’ writing. An expanded version of Rainey’s (2017) scheme for coding literary reading practices was used.

The three teachers varied in the range and extent of literary reading practices they taught and supported. The practices that they most commonly modeled or otherwise supported were making claims, seeking patterns and articulating puzzles. The variation we observed in their literary reading practices may be attributed to institutional characteristics of the teachers’ contexts.

This study illustrates how the concept of prolepsis can be productively used as a lens through which to understand teachers’ instructional choices.

The descriptive findings show how individualized coaching of students’ writing about literature can also support literary reading. Teachers of English need not worry that they have to choose between teaching writing and teaching reading.

This study presents dialogic assessment as a useful way to guide students through the writing process and literary interpretation simultaneously.

Social studies research has long advocated inquiry as a desired instructional practice, but the increasing emphasis on the role students’ questions should play in inquiry requires research into what social studies teachers can do to elevate the place of student questioning in classrooms. This study examined the attitudes and actions of two secondary social studies teachers who self-identified as advocates of student questioning and who desired to incorporate more student questioning into their instruction. This study used qualitative research methods and generated data through multiple interviews and classroom observations with each participant along with content analysis of classroom materials. Findings suggest that even though the participants approached student questioning in unique ways, they shared a need for curricular control, often triggered by the pressures of standardized assessments, which influenced how they incorporated student questioning into their classrooms. This study provides valuable insight into the promise of student questioning and factors that must be addressed if teachers are to incorporate student questioning in ways that foster meaningful inquiry.

Social studies educators have displayed an interest in student-created multimedia, including digital documentaries. The research community has responded with a small but growing body of studies, but the literature to date has not explored students‘ perspectives on these assignments. This study combined classroom observations, document analysis, and student interviews to examine students‘ views of technology, the curriculum, and their final products. The findings reveal that students come to technology-based, content-driven assignments with prior conceptions of both the technology and the content. These expectations shape student actions and transform the assignment, in some cases surpassing curricular expectations. Evidence from students‘ products, classroom observations, and interview data, however, also suggest that student agency was limited by the classroom reality of mimetic learning. The results of this study have various implications for teacher educators and educational researchers interested in leveraging technology to improve learning. They must acknowledge the dynamic nature of classroom interaction and the impact student choices have on Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK). Technology integration occurs in the operational curriculum, often in unpredictable ways. Based on our study we know that student preconceptions and desires impact the learning goals. By better under-standing the role of student agency, teachers can plan for instruction that uses digital history to effectively teach content.

This paper aims to examine how two White teachers, experienced and award-winning veteran educators, navigated issues of race, class and privilege in their instruction, and ways that their efforts and shortcomings shaped both teacher agency and classroom spaces.

This study’s methodology centers participants’ experiences and understandings over the course of two years of interviews, classroom observations and discussion groups. The study is conceptually informed by Sara Ahmed’s argument that social justice is often approached as something that education “can do,” which is problematic because it assumes that successful enactment is “intrinsic to the term.” Discussing and/or intending social justice replaces real change, and those leading the conversations believe that they have made meaningful differences. Instead, true shifts in thinking and action are “dependent on forms of institutional commitment […and] how it [diversity/social justice] gets taken up” (p. 241).

Using an in vivo coding approach – i.e. using direct quotations of participants’ words to name the new codes – the authors organized their findings into two discussions: “Damn – Every Time I’m with the Kids, I Just End Up Feeling Frozen”; and “Maybe I’m Just Not Giving These Kids a Fair Shake – Maybe I’m the Problem”.

The participants centered a participatory examination of intersectionality, rather than the previous teacher-mandated one. They “put into action” -xplorations of intersectionality that were predicated on students’ identities and experiences, thus making intersectionality a lived concept, rather than an intellectual one, and transforming students’ and their own engagement.

In the Fall of 2020, three teacher educators in Ohio collaborated on a three-month long online professional development series on how to write Focused Inquiries, a la the Inquiry Design Model (IDM).

The authors detail the contents of the six group professional development (PD) sessions and share the lessons that the authors learned as a result of leading this training.

Given this study’s mixed results, the authors often came back to the questions of “maybe it was us? Maybe it was the pandemic? Maybe there wasn’t enough training? Or maybe IDM creation isn’t a skill that all teachers possess and maybe that’s ok?” The authors share the struggles with these questions and situate all of this within the current culture wars raging around schools today.

Finally, the authors offer the current approach to inquiry training for teachers that situates inquiry creation later in the process after significant structured introductory work.

Recent years have seen a movement toward using active learning to ground professional development in classroom practice. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The present case study describes how a group of middle school mathematics teachers improved classroom instruction through the use of lesson study.

This case study suggests the success of the lesson study in supporting teachers’ active learning.

For the lesson study, teachers’ active learning is assessed across four dimensions.