Setting up camp at the great instructional divide - Educating beginning history teachers

This article sketches out a comprehensive approach for preparing history teachers. It argues that grounding in historical content knowledge is necessary for success in the classroom, but such grounding is not enough to ensure that success. For beginning teachers, the problem is not merely acquiring content knowledge but acquiring it in ways that facilitate teaching subjects to young people of varied backgrounds and abilities. In short, teachers need to understand content in the context Of teaching, meaning prospective history teachers must have a robust understanding of history's details, ways in which historians acquire and structure those details, and how teachers can make the subject accessible and worth knowing for students. This approach demands that teachers also know how their students understand history and the assumptions they make about historical events and developments. Finally, prospective teachers need to know how to offer content-rich, engaging instruction within a standards-based, high-stakes testing context.