Dr. Abby Reisman is an associate professor of Teacher Education in the Teaching, Learning, and Leadership Division. Prior to her arrival at Penn GSE, Dr. Reisman was a visiting professor at Teachers College-Columbia University, and a researcher at the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing at UCLA. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University, where she directed the “Reading Like a Historian” Project in San Francisco, the first extended history curriculum intervention in urban high schools. Dr. Reisman began her career in education as a classroom teacher in a small, progressive high school in New York City.

Dr. Reisman’s work has appeared in Cognition and Instruction, Journal of Curriculum Studies, Teachers College Record, Journal of Teacher Education, and Teaching and Teacher Education. Her 2011 dissertation won the Larry Metcalf Award from the National Council for the Social Studies, and an article that emerged from it won the 2013 William Gilbert Award from the American Historical Association. Dr. Reisman was awarded the 2015 NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship and the 2019 Middle States Council for the Social Studies Harry J. Carmen Award for outstanding achievement in social studies research and teaching.

Research Interests and Current Projects

Dr. Reisman’s research centers on the challenges of teaching document-based historical inquiry. Her scholarship investigates the design and implementation of curriculum materials, assessments of student learning, teacher education, and professional development experiences that support document-based analysis and classroom discourse. Dr. Reisman’s current projects examine teacher learning in different contexts. In an ongoing design-based implementation project, she is collaborating with a group of history teacher leaders to build an instructional coaching model focused on the core practices of document-based history instruction that leverages online video analysis tools. She has also received funding from the Spencer Foundation and the University of Pennsylvania’s University Research Fund to translate this coaching project into a fully virtual model. She recently received funding from the James S. McDonnell Foundation for a longitudinal study of novice teachers’ discussion facilitation practices that follows them into their first two years of teaching. The products of this work will include an online repository of teacher-annotated videos of social studies discussion to be used in teacher-led professional development.

Publications

Selected Publications

Articles

Reisman, A., & Enumah, L. (2020). Using video to highlight curriculum-embedded opportunities for student discourse. Journal of Teacher Education, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022487119895503

Reisman, A., Enumah, L., & Jay, L. (2020). Interpretive frames for responding to racially stressful moments in history discussions. Theory and Research in Social Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/00933104.2020.1718569

Kavanagh, S. S., Monte-Sano, C., Reisman, A., Fogo, B., McGrew, S., Cipparone, P., & Jay, L. (2019). Teaching content in practice: Investigating rehearsals of social studies discussions. Teaching and Teacher Education, 86, 1–11.

Reisman, A., Brimsek, E., & Hollywood, C. (2019). Assessment of Historical Analysis and Argumentation (AHAA): A new measure of document-based historical thinking. Cognition and Instruction, 37(4), 534–561.

Jay, L., & Reisman, A. (2019). Teaching change and continuity with historical analogies. Social Studies Research and Practice, 14(1), 98–104.

Reisman, A., Cipparone, P., Jay, L., Monte-Sano, C., Kavanagh, S. S., McGrew, S., & Fogo, B. (2019). Evidence of emergent practice: Teacher candidates facilitating historical discussion in their field placements. Teaching and Teacher Education, 80, 145–156.

Fogo, B., Reisman, A., & Breakstone, J. (2019). Teacher adaptation of document-based history curricula: Results from the Reading Like a Historian curriculum-use survey. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 51(1), 62–83.

Reisman, A., Kavanagh, S., Monte-Sano, C., Fogo, B., McGrew, S., Cipparone, P., & Simmons, E. (2018). Facilitating whole-class discussions in history: A framework for preparing teacher candidates. Journal of Teacher Education, 69(3), 278–293.

Reisman, A. (2017). Integrating content and literacy in social studies: Assessing instructional materials and student work from a Common Core-aligned intervention. Theory and Research in Social Education, 45(4), 517–554.

Reisman, A., & Fogo, B. (2016). Contributions of educative document-based curricular materials to quality of historical instruction. Teaching and Teacher Education, (59), 191–-202. (Length: 11 pages).

Reisman, A. (2015). Entering the historical problem space: Whole-class, text-based discussion in history class. Teachers College Record, 117(2), 1–44.

Wineburg, S., & Reisman, A. (2015). Disciplinary literacy in history: A toolkit for digital citizenship. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 58(8), 636–639.

Reisman, A. (2012). “Reading like a historian:” A document-based history curriculum intervention in urban high schools. Cognition and Instruction, 30(1), 86–112.

Reisman, A. (2012). The “Document-Based Lesson:” Bringing disciplinary inquiry into high school history classrooms with adolescent struggling readers. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 44(2), 233–264.

Reisman, A., & Wineburg, S. (2012). “Text Complexity” in the history classroom: Teaching to and beyond the Common Core. Social Studies Review, 51(1), 24–29.

Book chapters

Bien, A., Carlson, J., Kazemi, E., Reisman, A., Scheve, M.A., & Wells, A. (2018). Taking core practices to the field. In P. Grossman (Ed.), Teaching core practices in teacher education. Cambridge: Harvard Education Press.

Reisman, A., & McGrew, S. (2018). Reading in history education: Texts, sources, and evidence. In Scott Metzger & Lauren Harris (Eds.), International Handbook of History Teaching and Learning (Ch. 20). Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell.

Monte-Sano, C., & Reisman, A. (2016). Studying historical understanding. In L. Corno & E. Anderman (Eds.), Handbook of educational psychology, 3rd Edition (Ch. 21). New York: Routledge.

Reisman, A. (2015). The difficulty of assessing disciplinary historical reading. In K. Ercikan & P. Seixas (Eds.), New directions in assessing historical thinking (Ch. 2). New York: Routledge.

Reisman, A., & Fogo, B. (2015). Teaching disciplinary history in history classes. In M. Hougen (Ed.), Fundamentals of literacy instruction & assessment, 6-12 (Ch. 11). Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co.

News & Media

Penn GSE News

America as it actually was: Symposium confronts American myth, complexities of teaching 1776 in light of 1619

“Teaching Independence: Bridging the Communications Gap” brought educators from around the area together to discuss the complicated task of teaching race and its relation to America’s founding in a harshly divided political climate.

April 1, 2022

Preparing citizens to stick their heads in the sand

Penn GSE’s Abby Reisman and Sigal Ben-Porath penned a piece for the Washington Post denouncing legislative efforts to limit classroom discussions on race, gender, and sexual orientation.

February 1, 2022

In the Media

How do we teach history in America today?

Abby Reisman joins five other Philadelphia educators to discuss American history, equity and inclusion, critical race theory, and other hot-button issues schools and teachers face in 2022.

Philadelphia Magazine | August 27, 2022

How to Talk to Your Kids about Donald Trump

Abby Reisman suggests parents and teachers can help students “use history to make sense of the present.”

Time | March 21, 2016

The Educator's Playbook

Teaching students to think like historians

Abby Reisman on how students can develop critical thinking skills by reading history texts

How to make the most of teaching history online

Abby Reisman says historical inquiry gives students a space to think deeply about the past and consider how it connects to and shapes the present.

Teaching Critical Thinking: Media Literacy and Document-Based Historical Inquiry (S1E7)

Arming students with critical thinking skills is essential in this digital era. But how do we do that?

Awards & Honors

Abby Reisman is part of a research team with the SERP Institute that has been awarded the Lyle Spencer Award, a $1,000,000 grant from the Spencer Foundation. The study, called “Academically Productive Talk: Strengthening the Infrastructure for Research and Practice” is being led by co-principal investigators Catherine Snow and Suzanne Donovan. The team will create a video database and instrument-sharing site to promote situated research on classroom talk capable of directly informing classroom practice. They will also conduct research on what makes classroom talk academically productive, and provide annotated video resources for teachers and teacher educators that will support the development of teacher expertise in talk based pedagogy.

Posted on March 15, 2020

Abby Reisman has been awarded $2,464,087 from the James S. McDonnell Foundation for the study “The Development of Novice Teachers’ Role-Identities as Discussion Facilitators in Social Studies Classrooms.” With collaborators from Temple University, Reisman will follow two cohorts of social studies teacher candidates from two preservice certification programs into their first 2 years of teaching in Philadelphia. Using mixed methods, the project aims to generate a rich and contextualized developmental portrait of teacher learning centered on discussion facilitation. The products of this work will include an online repository of teacher-annotated videos of social studies discussion to be used in teacher-led professional development.

Posted on February 22, 2020

Abby Reisman has been awarded $49,994 from the University Research Foundation for the study "Investigating a Virtual Instruction Coaching Model for Philadelphia History Teachers." The study will pair Philadelphia teachers with instructional coaches from different states for coaching focused on document-based history instruction and will investigate whether this model provides teachers with valuable professional development experience.

Posted on February 12, 2020

Abby Reisman 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 is working 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.

Posted on January 16, 2019

Abby Reisman has received a $19,993 grant from the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources Program for the project “The Life of African Americans in 19th Century Philadelphia: Using Library of Congress Resources to Uncover Hidden History.” The project will establish a professional development series to support 10th grade history teachers in Philadelphia in using the Library of Congress’ collection to design lessons in this topic area.

Posted on September 4, 2018

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Theory and Research in Social Education

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