Stony Brook University

State University of University of New York at Stony Brook

The School of Professional Development at the State University of New York at Stony Brook supports Smithtown Central School District (SCSD) in their efforts to improve Teaching American History for Social Studies teachers in the middle and high schools at SCSD and William Floyd Union Free School District (WFUFSD) through the grant proposal for Exploring Controversies to Better Understand America’s Past.

 The School of Professional Development contributes toward the preparation of these teachers to help them succeed as educators in New York and across the nation by providing them with the intellectual rigor of an academic major as well as a professional credential providing in-service credits and other on-campus support.

Faculty, will provide input on pedagogical aspects of Controversies through Cooperative Learning procedures following the principles and processes of “academic controversy” (Johnson & Johnson, 1995) in the project activities involving the five steps of  

• Organizing Information and Deriving Conclusions
• Presenting and Advocating Positions
• Uncertainty Created by Being Challenged by Opposing Views
• Epistemic Curiosity and Perspective-Taking
• Reconceptualizing, Synthesizing, and Integrating

during the course of the program at Stony Brook. Teachers will be placed in groups of four (mixed instructional levels and schools) and two (controversy pairs) to use these procedures. These pedagogical aspects will be exercised for teachers to become familiar with the academic controversy process and to use it with their students.