Collaborative Professional Development Featuring Innovative Curriculum Materials

Here I synthesize two research investigations (Callahan, 2018, 2019) that comprise a continuing line of inquiry into the potential of innovative curriculum materials and sustained collaboration as a professional development program to help in-service teachers understand and implement a complex model of social studies instruction. This article features an original innovative curriculum material and specifically explores the question: To what degree can a collaborative professional development program featuring innovative curriculum materials help social studies teachers understand and implement a powerful social studies approach? Findings suggest the professional development program and its innovative curriculum materials helped teachers promote substantive pedagogical thinking and facilitate students’ use of historical photographs as evidence to answer a question about the past. Implications include the need to center teachers’ planning sessions around high-quality questions and a potential tendency of teachers to need explicit scaffolding to systematically review students’ work. The synthesis shared here offers new contributions to scholarship that posit effective approaches for professional development to support in-service social studies teachers.