PREPARING PRESERVICE SECONDARY SOCIAL STUDIES TEACHERS FOR COMMON CORE

For history and social studies educators, the Common Core standards present a new challenge, asking teachers explicitly to integrate literacy skills into their instruction. As K-12 and higher education institutions think about how to support teachers to meet this charge (Gewertz, 2012b; Sawchuk, 2012), this study uses the work of preservice teachers to examine how they address and fail to address Common Core standards. Our findings are based on qualitative analysis of unit plans (105 lessons) from preservice secondary history teachers. Analysis was completed on individual lessons and then on each unit holistically. Finally the units were analyzed collectively in order to draw more generalized findings. This study identifies specific aspects of the standards where educators are more likely to struggle with implementation of the Common Core ELA standards and provides suggestions on how teacher educators can better prepare preservice secondary history teachers to attend to the framework. As educators grapple with the implementation of the Common Core standards, there is a prevailing sense that the initiatives for mathematics and English language arts offer a major departure from previous reform efforts (Alberti, 2012/2013; McTighe & Wiggins, 2012