This study examines the role of secondary teacher candidates as student partners in research into undergraduate students' historical cognition while contextualizing documents. It highlights the unique role of teacher candidates as near-peer interviewers and change agents within higher education and secondary curricula. Through using decoding the…

A colloquium series funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities explored complicity and collaboration during the Holocaust at a community college in New York. Student reactions to this theme were explored to measure their understanding of this atrocity. Twenty-three student participants of this colloquium submitted to in-depth, in-person…

Partnership for 21st Century Skills has continuously identified critical and metacognitive thinking skills to be essential for life and career in post-secondary education and workforce settings. As a response to the Race to the Top (2010) initiative and Common Core State Standards (2009), New York State Board of Regents began an overhaul for all…

This paper makes a conceptual argument for using the Decoding the Disciplines research paradigm as a pedagogical innovation in the field of teacher education. It incorporates empirical findings from a research project in which teacher candidates conduct Decoding interviews to deepen understanding of historical thinking and learn pedagogical…

This study examines student perceptions about (i) whether writing in undergraduate disciplines contributes to the development of student pre-professional identity (PPI) and (ii) how writing in such disciplines affects PPI relative to other classroom activities. The study was conducted at St. John's University in New York, which has a very diverse…

The authors of this article are two teacher educators who worked collaboratively to co-teach an interdisciplinary English and US history class to eleventh-grade students in an urban high school. They wanted to ensure the methods they were teaching preservice teachers were current and effective. The article discusses the foundational beliefs that…

The purpose of this paper is to take a closer look at the states that have designed strong history standards and note what has made them exceptional so other states might do the same. They include Alabama, California, Indiana, Massachusetts, New York, and South Carolina. The report draws on interviews with individuals from each state who sat on…

The personal essay--a paper in which a student brings in his or her own experience or concerns--is probably familiar to most historians. Teaching at the City University of New York, the author has found grading personal essays somewhat perplexing. They are sometimes written in response to an assignment that does not call for personal reflection.…

Background/Context: Educators, parents, politicians, and the media often complain that young people know little history and compare them unfavorably to better-educated, earlier generations. However, the charge is exaggerated. Young people have performed poorly on history tests for decades. Students' poor scores on one test in particular, the focus…

The author is always looking for material to use in her campaign to end the educational "back-atcha" cycle. It is a multi-generational process, wherein unsophisticated fact-centered high school instruction turns out students resilient against understanding historical discipline despite their college courses; these students then go on to…

In teacher's idealized history classroom, students are abuzz with questions. They are eager to jump into a serious analysis of primary sources. They relish additional opportunities to engage historiographical debates. They are, as teachers like to say, "thinking historically." While there are few easy ways to create these idealized…

In the era of globalization, American education remains committed to the idea that all citizens can and should be educated, though this goal may be more comforting than practical. But today's task lies in reaching for the quality standards that made American education the envy and model of the world. This challenge faces every discipline…

Once adapted to the context of the classroom, the tenets of successful counterinsurgency offer teachers a potent intellectual framework for conceptualizing teachers' efforts to build effective active learning communities together with their students. In this article, the author describes a counterinsurgency analogy that shares essential features…

The world civilizations course is an increasingly integral component of undergraduate curricula in the United States. History instruction literature reveals much discussion about desired learning objectives for students in the course. Given today's complex educational environment, meeting those objectives can be a challenge. Instructors'…

In the Spring of 2000, Ruth Meyerowitz and Christine Zinni began collaborative efforts--inside and outside of academia--to enhance a course on The History of Working Women at SUNY Buffalo. Videotaping the oral histories of women labor leaders, they later teamed up with Michael Frisch and Randforce Associates--a research group at SUNY at Buffalo's…