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Abby Reisman: Spencer Foundation Grant

caption:Abby ReismanAbby Reisman, assistant professor in the Teaching, Learning and Leadership Division of Penn GSE, has received a $49,942 grant from the Spencer Foundation for the project “Using Online Professional Development Modules to Support Practice-Based Coaching for Document-Based History Instruction: A Design Experiment.” The grant will support a two-year design-based study in which Dr. Reisman works with a team of instructional leaders to first design online professional development modules that target instructional practices in history and then embed the modules in a coaching intervention. The project envisions the modules, replete with articulated specifications of practice and video representations of those practices, as providing a common vocabulary upon which to build a shared vision of good instruction.

Dr. Reisman studies how to engage struggling adolescent readers in text-based historical inquiry. Her interests in this area include curriculum design, teacher education, pedagogy and high-leverage instructional practices. Dr. Reisman is studying how to support middle-school teachers as they facilitate discussions around historical texts. Through her involvement in the Core Practice Consortium, she is also engaged in a yearlong comparative study examining pre-
service social studies methods courses that
emphasize practice-based teacher preparation.

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