Learning to Teach Disciplinary Literacy across Diverse Eighth-Grade History Classrooms within a District-University Partnership

The CCSS require content area teachers to adapt curriculum and pedagogy to support disciplinary literacy development.[...]teachers accustomed to stressing only factual knowledge must shift to emphasize the disciplinary learning and thinking that undergirds literacy practices in their subject areas.[...]after the fourth investigation, we initiated analysis sessions by sharing two preselected student work samples, generating discussion of the strengths and weaknesses in these essays and exploring what particular aspects of historical argument involved.[...]several activities provided learning opportunities for teachers, all of which were focused on the goal of improving students' historical argument writing and their disciplinary use of evidence in developing and supporting arguments.[...]in our observation data, teachers struggled most consistently with explaining evaluations and the role of evaluation in an essay to students, yet they did not have the same struggle in explaining historical thinking during reading.Since we used the term "evaluation of evidence" to signal students (and teachers) to bring the historical thinking they engaged in with reading into their essays as they moved through the process of writing, we were pleased to see overlap between evaluation and historical thinking in teachers' reflections.