Professional Biography

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 InstructionJournal of Curriculum StudiesTeachers 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.

Journal Editorial Boards

Cognition and Instruction
Executive Editor

Journal of the Learning Sciences
Editorial Board

Theory and Research in Social Education
Editorial Board