GATEways to Teacher Education

A journal of the Georgia Association of Teacher Educators

As a student, I take notes while the teacher talks, but I’m conflicted because research shows students learn from each other. With a lecture, students may not want to ask a question but might be more honest with each other. This program is centered around constructivist theory, and I feel like I shouldn’t do it (Field Notes, April 2021). Consequently, there is a need for further studies that focus on how social studies methods courses and fieldwork experiences can include more opportunities for preservice teachers to learn best practices for planning lectures. Including lecture as a pedagogical technique in these courses may support pre-service teachers’development into ambitious teachers who appropriately choose pedagogies based on their knowledge of the subject matter and the needs of students.

Athird limitation of this study was that the participants’perspectives on lecture were self-reported and to an extent, based on assumptions about what students needed. Some respondents noted that students expected lecture, which highlights Grant and Gradwell’s (2009) assertion that students get bored and comfortable with “doing school” in a manner that does not challenge them (p. 20). Participants may have conflated students’“need” for lecture as their “want” of lecture in order to passively receive what they were expected to know in social studies class. In order to analyze these expectations and assumptions more critically, further studies need to be conducted on middle and secondary students’perspectives on learning social studies, particularly via lecture, in order to gain greater insights into how learners perceive which instructional methods promote engagement. Such insights could foster greater selfreflection among pre-service and in-service teachers when applying their knowledge of content, students, and contexts of where they teach when they plan their social studies instruction.

Fourth, the lack of probing questions about participants’knowledge of content, students, and contexts pertaining to the pandemic, the social justice protests in 2020, and debates concerning history and civics education is a limitation of this study. The participant who spoke about lecturing in order to meet the remedial needs of their students also explained that they teach in an area that experienced protests after a police shooting of an unarmed Black man. Most recently, disputes over teaching Critical Race Theory in K-12 schools can potentially present social studies teachers with constraints with regard to implementing ambitious teaching methods, albeit with or without lecture (O’Kane, 2021).As a result, future scholarship must focus on how the NCSS’(2016) powerful and authentic framework can be integrated into social studies teacher preparation with the NCSS (2013) C3 Framework InquiryArc Future studies that examine how the implementation of the C3 Framework could highlight how pre-service and in-service teachers’beliefs about the goals of social studies education align with the pedagogical decisions they make when choosing to lecture in online, hybrid, or in-person settings.

Conclusion

The pre-service and in-service teachers in this study did not perceive lecture as a dreaded “four-letter word” when reflecting upon how and why they choose instructional methods for teaching social studies.

Participants believed that lecture could be one of many instructional methods they could employ to foster those goals. As a result, continued research on how lecture can be part of the pedagogical conversation among colleges of education, school