Teacher Testimonials

Re: The Historian’s Craft

• “For me initially, the draw of the program was [Dr. A].  I am familiar with his work, so having him associated with the program was exciting.  One of the things that I most appreciate about his work in general is that he one of the eminent historians in the country. He’s made a really significant effort over a number of years to work in conjunction with high school and middle school teachers in a way that doesn’t feel condescending.  He takes our intellectual capability seriously.  He knows the difficult challenges that we face within the confines of our schools.  And so I feel he’s brought a real nice balance of the addition of his vast experiences but also brings his ability to empathize with people who are teaching under varying circumstances that share our passion and concerns.” (5/21/08, Focus Group)
• “For me, it’s been the textbook we received that [Dr. A] authored and I used that over my year of teaching and it’s been phenomenally helpful…In fact I wanted to tell him today how much I enjoyed using his book because it added depth to my knowledge of the subject because I didn’t feel mine was deep enough.” (5/21/08, Focus Group)
• “I think that [Dr. A]’s talk also provided me a larger context for me to teach within and encouraged me to expand the context of the content that I’m addressing with my students so I can draw more parallels.  Since I teach early U.S. History with the students, he’s given me a lot of tools for giving global context and really teaching the issues of U.S. history within things that are happening outside the U.S.” (5/21/08, Focus Group)
• “I really appreciate [Dr. A’s] ability to put the specific historical events we study into a larger chronological and geographical context.  [He is] very good at giving us perspective.” (5/21/08, Release Day evaluation)
• “Professor [C]’s discussion of Lincoln’s decision to pull the writ of habeas corpus was a great way to both analyze the extent of executive powers, and also to challenge the ‘legend of Abe Lincoln’.” (8/4/08, Summer Institute evaluation)
• What struck me today was “looking at history through the lives of ordinary people.” (10/7/08, Release Day evaluation)
• I was struck by “the personal side of constitutional law history.” (10/7/08, Release Day evaluation)
• One point of history that I came away with was the “examples of [the U.S.] Supreme [Court] changing their minds in only three years, as opposed to Plessy [vs. Ferguson] to Brown [vs. Board of Education, 1954].” (10/7/08, Release Day evaluation)
• “The law and economic justice info was very provocative and great in view of the times and in view of giving students things to learn and think about related to the law, court system, change, movements, and rights.” (10/7/08, Release Day evaluation)
• “The relationship between economic justice and economic growth that Professor [B] discussed was provocative.  I really look forward to getting her book on taxes.” (1/6/09, Release Day evaluation)
• I was struck by “Professor [B]’s lecture and the discussion centering around “Can we have a period of economic growth while maintaining/achieving economic justice?” (1/6/09, Release Day evaluation)

Re: Teaching and Learning History / Content to Classroom / Teacher’s Craft

• “I learned how to define primary/secondary sources to my kids in a more comprehensible way.” (8/15/07, Summer Institute evaluation)
• “From [Speaker E]’s session, I learned new strategies for actively engaging students in ideas and events – how to help them see it like a story.” (8/16/07, Summer Institute evaluation)
• “I’ve learned to look at my units and find examples, anchors of agency – liberation struggles – to focus upon and deepen understanding rather than surface coverage.” (10/3/07, Release Day evaluation)
• I learned to use “primary sources to illuminate topics in history and to tell alternate perspectives, not just the accepted ‘story’.” (10/3/07, Release Day evaluation)
• “I’d really like to develop a lesson or set of lessons addressing the constitutionality of presidential actions throughout U.S. History.” (8/4/08, Summer Institute evaluation)
• “I feel like my strength is teaching as a performing art.  I’m good at juggling, I’m good at dealing with kids, I’m good at staying a step ahead of them, but I’ve never considered myself to be a content expert.  Maybe I am now in civil rights…The other thing is that our charter school is such a start up that we don’t do professional development.  They give us things like sexual harassment training, but nothing relating to teaching history.” (8/6/08, Focus Group)
• “[Professor D] was excellent.  I learned so much about cases.  I plan to use this information and build a lesson on landmark cases in U.S. History on four issues: race, religion, protest, and privacy.” (10/7/08, Release Day evaluation)
• I am “no longer intimidated by Supreme Court cases.”  I “wasn’t sure how to discuss them.  Retelling narratives, the storytelling style [is] much more engaging [because of the] real people, real issues.” (10/7/08, Release Day evaluation)
• Due to [Professor D]’s talk, I am thinking of “bringing in court cases and decisions to present to students and get them to think about the law and change and personal stories in history as well as economic justice connections.” (10/7/08, Release Day evaluation)
• “[Professor D] helped me teach the arguments of the anti-federalists better.” (10/7/08, Release Day evaluation)
• I was struck by “having students create sentence strips/thesis with the knowledge gained from documents.” (1/6/09, Release Day evaluation)
• After learning about other teams’ lesson studies, “I plan on incorporating the Panama Canal lesson very soon into my curriculum.  I also really look forward to planning a local history component and incorporating it into my curriculum.” (1/6/09, Release Day evaluation)
• “I was working with a student from last year’s 11th grade US History class recently.  She is retaking World History and is currently working on a DBQ essay on the impact of British and Belgian colonization on Africa. The essay question used Lord Curzon’s quote ‘Wherever the Empire has extended its borders … there misery and oppression, anarchy and destitution, superstition and bigotry, have tended to disappear, and have been replaced by peace, justice, prosperity, humanity, and freedom of thought, speech, and action….’  Students were asked to support his claim or refute it.
  This student had structured her entire essay around the question of “rhetoric vs. reality,” which she had internalized from our lesson on the Philippine American War.  She was eager to show me that she was drawing from last year’s class.  Thought I would share the good news/evidence of the efficacy of our lesson.” (2/17/09, WTMA2 Teacher Reflection)

Re: Lesson Study

• “I just finished my first year of teaching and one of the reasons I came here was that I knew I was going to need as much support.  The lesson study was so helpful to me because I got to work with colleagues that are doing the same subject matter.  We worked together, put the lesson together, and actually watched somebody teach the lesson and then I went back and did it in my classroom…The point is that we got to work on it for almost a whole semester and at the end one of the teachers decides to teach the lesson plan…The other two teachers observed and then we went back and talk about the lesson.  It’s how history should be taught; working with your colleagues, doing lesson plans together and then reflecting.  As a first year teacher, I knew I had a lot of support and that I wasn’t doing it by myself.” (8/13/07, Focus Group)
• “There are three of us who did our lesson study together at the same school and we all teach a different level.  I taught shelter kids, and Sue had the GATE kids, and Kristian had the [inaudible] kids so we were able to present the lesson and see their reaction to it depending on their level.  We actually fine tuned our lesson quite a bit; we changed around our questions, we changed around our format, we changed our paperwork around [our documents], which totally flopped the first time around because they were just too hard for the kids.  So the time I presented it to my kids it was fine-tuned.” (8/13/07, Focus Group)
• “For me, [lesson study] is a big deal because almost all of the places I’ve worked there’s been nearly no collaboration.  The one place I’ve worked where there is collaboration was not structured in any form and had no model.  A formal model is helpful…having a model that’s not set in stone, but it’s formalized…allowed the collaboration to be more collaborative…it maximized our time together…this is a model that I expect to keep doing.” (5/21/08, Focus Group)
• “This is something missing from our teacher education programs.  They tell you go do the curriculum but they never give you a model to do it under.  They don’t do it in a model that’s interactive with the students.  It’s really something that should be taught to teachers when they enter the profession not lucky enough to be in a program like this.” (5/21/08, Focus Group)
• “We don’t have this in my district.  This is the only way for me to get this kind of collaboration and it is extremely powerful on a lot of levels.  Professionally…I get to work with a lot of other professionals.  For the students, they benefited a tremendous among from their interaction with other professionals coming in to look at their lesson and the materials that I can provide for them and I give to the rest of the staff.  It’s incredible, and it’s a complete void in our district.” (5/21/08, Focus Group)
• “I’ve also felt that lesson study has had a ripple effect into our history department in our school.  We have a large group from our school, five teachers from our school are part of WTMA, and it’s now become the norm in our department.  And so our department has engaged in the lesson study structure outside of simply the lesson study that we’re doing for WTMA.  So it’s expanded within the culture of our school as well.” (5/21/08, Focus Group)
• “Four of us are from the same high school and we have had a collaborative this year.  We have been able to use that more successfully this year than in any previous year…we also gained as professionals.  How many times have we said to each other, wow, I can see connections all over the place that I didn’t before.  And I’ve been teaching for a long time.” (5/21/08, Focus Group)
• “If you’re looking for something that has the most direct impact on students, this has had more effect on student outcome than any staff development I’ve ever been to.” (5/21/08, Focus Group)
• “We’ve had richer discussions in our classroom this year than ever before.  A lot it is due to the fact that we’re delving into the material.  We are talking to each other so much about it that I think our students have greatly benefited.” (5/21/08, Focus Group)
• “We were discussing that because we do spend a lot of time in meetings focusing on that one lesson, which is great because we got a lot of good outcomes.  Like you said it’s definitely not the one lesson, you see connections and end up being able to connect the two.  So you do end up with higher learning.” (5/21/08, Focus Group)
• “The focus is on student learning.  It’s not on the lesson or the teacher in this typical pathological rite of passage that they bring for teachers, especially for new teachers where people come in and watch them and evaluate them.  You’re more focused on the students how they learn.  It completely reorients all your objectives and your focus.  I find that the modifications, after we sit in on one lesson, are far better than any other lessons that I’ve done.  Sometimes we have the opportunity to do it two or three times and it makes all the difference.  Each session builds upon the other one.  I don’t know if it’s true for everyone else, but I find that it starts very slowly and then each time you meet there is a momentum that comes.  By the third or fourth time meeting its just clicking on all cylinders; we’re all trained and really supportive and cooperative.  It’s definitely a model that should be expanded on the site levels.” (5/21/08, Focus Group)
• “This is far superior to professional development that’s been done in my district.  The fact that we’ve been doing it for years now and it seems that in our school district with the frequent turnover of district administration and site administration, that we lack continuity in professional development.  I feel like this is a structure that we’ve not only implemented but it’s become part of the culture of our department.  Since we’ve been maintaining it for several years now, there’s no more adjustment to the process and when we meet we’re much more productive because we know exactly what we’re doing.  We’ve been doing it for several years now and we really run with it.” (5/21/08, Focus Group)
• “Lesson study and the WTMA project in particular is powerful professional learning because it respects teachers’ intellect.  It allows teachers to research and reflect on their practice with total buy-in from teachers because they get to decide what to study.  Also it deepens their knowledge of history because as they research and learn about what they will be teaching, they learn an enormous amount in an authentic way.” (2/16/09, Teacher Reflection)
• In regards to the sharing of lessons among colleagues: “Thanks for the lesson, used it as part of our Monroe section and we used the cartoons to explore the Monroe doctrine. Started yesterday and the kids seem to be having a good time with it.” (2/24/09, Email communication between WTMA2 teachers)