Abby Reisman

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 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.

Ph.D. (Curriculum & Teacher Education) Stanford University
M.A. (History) Stanford University
B.A. (History) Brown University

Teaching and learning in history classrooms
Teacher education and professional development
Adolescent literacy
Curriculum

“Reading Like A Historian” Curriculum

Principal Certification

Medical Education, M.S.Ed.

School Leadership, M.S.Ed.

Urban Teaching Residency, M.S.Ed.

Urban Teaching Apprenticeship, M.S.Ed.

Teaching, Learning, and Leadership, M.S.Ed.

Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education, Ed.D.

Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education, Ph.D.

Learning Sciences and Technologies, M.S.Ed.

Learning Sciences and Technologies, Ph.D.

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.

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.