DISCUSS, a Temple-UPenn partnership project, focuses on how social studies teachers grow as discussion facilitators.
History
The DISCUSS project launched in 2020 with generous funding from the James S. McDonnell Foundation’s Teachers As Learners grant. Led by faculty from the University of Pennsylvania (Abby Reisman and Wendy Chan) and Temple University (Tim Patterson and Avi Kaplan), the cross-institutional project sought to follow two cohorts of preservice teachers and early career teachers in their development as facilitators of social studies discussions.
We were curious about how teachers’ discussions changed over time, but we were even more interested in how teachers themselves changed – how did their goals, their beliefs, their self-perceptions, their actions change when they facilitated discussion, and how did they understand and explain these changes. We believe that what a teacher does when they facilitate discussion has everything to do with who they are and how they see themselves as teachers. Teachers will only facilitate discussions if they identify as teachers who facilitate discussions (hence D.I.S.C.U.S.S. stands for Developing Identities for Supporting Conversations and Understanding Social Studies).
The thirteen teachers who contributed their dilemmas and classroom videos to this website are among the 58 teachers, mostly from the Philadelphia region, who have been involved in the project. The dilemmas they contributed to the website represent their reflections on their discussions over time. Our hope is that by offering these real dilemmas to others to consider, we might create opportunities for teachers to gain insight into their own motivations when they facilitate discussion.
Timeline
- February 2020 – This project received funding through a Teachers as Learners grant from the James S. McDonnell Foundation.
- September 2020 – We recruited our first cohort of pre-service teachers at the University of Pennsylvania and Temple University.
- Summer 2021 – We convened our first Summer Institute with Cohort 1. During this week-long professional development program, teachers planned, facilitated, and reflected on discussions with high school students from the School District of Philadelphia.
- September 2021 – We recruited our second cohort of pre-service teachers at the University of Pennsylvania and Temple University. Members of our first cohort continued with the project, now in their first year of teaching.
- Summer 2022 – We convened our second Summer Institute with teachers from both cohorts. In this institute, the teachers sought feedback from high school students about a number of issues related to social studies discussions, such as curriculum revisions and approaches to classroom norms. Participants worked in groups according to the content of their teaching assignments, with an eye towards planning discussions for the upcoming school year.
- 2022-23 school year – Both cohorts continued their participation in the project, now all as in-service teachers.
- Summer 2023 – We convened our third and final Summer Institute with our participating teachers and a handful of recently graduated pre-service teachers. In this institute, teachers were grouped according to challenges they identified as facing while facilitating discussions. They framed those challenges as research questions and spent three days exploring them with a group of high school students. The goal was to help participating teachers clarify their thinking about their discussion facilitation.
- 2023-2024 school year – Both cohorts continued their participation in the project.
- Summer 2024 – We worked with a select number of teachers from both cohorts to develop dilemmas for this website.