Learning to Open Up History for Students: Preservice Teachers’ Emerging Pedagogical Content Knowledge.

Given students’ preconceptions of history as fixed information, cultivating students’ interpretive and evidence-based thinking is foundational to advancing their disciplinary understanding. This study examines the ways in which preservice history teachers construct tasks that demand students’ interpretive and evidence-based thinking and attend to such thinking in their field placements while being taught to do so in their methods courses. Analysis of methods course assignments, student teaching observations, and assessments of candidates’ disciplinary knowledge led to the construction of three cases of novice teachers’ efforts to teach these ways of thinking to their students. The one novice who attended to her students’ interpretive and evidentiary thinking translated her disciplinary knowledge into lessons that involved analysis of text in developing interpretations and gave general prompts to provide evidence in support of students’ conclusions. This study highlights the role of preservice teachers’ disciplinary understanding and pedagogical content knowledge in developing students’ interpretive and evidentiary thinking in history classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]