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Bridging Learning Communities: A Summer Workshop for Social Studies Teachers
James J. Carpenter, Thomas Dublin, and Penelope Harper
Binghamton University
| TYPICAL PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT for teachers was described in a 1995 report of the National Governors' Association as being "the educational equivalent of junk food."1 It is rare that a participant leaves a week-long workshop and enthusiastically says that it was "excellent [and a] very worthwhile expenditure of my time!" Yet this was the reaction given by an overwhelming majority of twenty secondary social studies teachers and librarians who participated in a week-long workshop sponsored by the Center for the Teaching of American History on the campus of Binghamton University during the summer of 2002. Funding for this workshop was a Teaching American History Program grant from the Department of Education. The overall goals and purpose of this series of grants were clearly outlined in a 2003 article in this journal by Alex Stein. In the same issue, other grant recipients explained that the success of their programs was due to their focus on content, and on providing hands-on experience. In particular, the facilitators of a seminar run at the University of New Hampshire commented that many teachers asked for a greater emphasis on discussing curricular problems and on sharing lessons between teachers.2 At the time that we planned our first workshop, we had little contact with other grant recipients, but we nevertheless designed our workshop along similar lines. We repeated this formula again, with a little tweaking, in 2003. We believe our success in fostering a common goal, namely improving the teaching of American history, was due to three key factors: preparation, content, and collaboration (both with, and among, teachers). This paper will describe our efforts in each of these areas. |
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Preparing the Workshop | |
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The Center for Teaching American History at Binghamton University had been established to reconnect and strengthen relationships between university faculty and secondary school teachers and to increase the content knowledge of social studies teachers. To this end we designed a multi-pronged plan to work with area school districts. The major components of this effort included the creation of a Certificate Program in the Teaching of American History based around core graduate classes, organizing and facilitating week-long professional development workshops to be offered in the summer, and the development of other related activities of interest to be offered during the school year, such as a book reading group. The grant enabled the Center to hire a new faculty member who specialized in American History to focus on these efforts. |
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The timeline of the grant required that plans for the first summer workshop began before the new faculty member was hired and preparation for the workshop began months before it was scheduled to take place. The first step in this process entailed holding three after-school sessions for teachers at a local teacher center. Originally designed to promote conversations with teachers about historical issues (Immigration and Migration in United States history, the Great Depression, and the Civil Rights Movement) and to provide them with access to primary document materials for classroom use, these sessions soon expanded to include a broader discussion of what the participants felt they needed in the way of professional development, and as such, were invaluable to the planning process. Our participants, like teachers everywhere, were not shy about voicing their needs. Three major concerns emerged from these discussions. First, they wanted materials that were ready to go and usable in their classrooms; they did not want to have to spend hours searching through site after site on the Web to find what they needed. Second, they clearly articulated the constraints placed on them by New York State's curricular standards, especially mandated exit exams (the New York State Regents Exams) which put significant time pressures on New York teachers and shape much of the content presented in the classroom. While wanting help in guiding students through specific topics that were emphasized by the core curriculum and that frequently appeared on the state tests, teachers clearly expressed a desire not to be bound by the standards or to spend much time discussing them. Finally, they wanted an opportunity to talk with each other about their practice. They wanted to be treated like skilled professionals respected for what they know and do, and to spend time talking about ideas for effective classroom teaching. |
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These concerns greatly influenced how we organized the first summer workshop. Three university facilitators, two from the history department and one from the division of education, planned the week's activities. We decided to take advantage of this diversity and rotate both the presenters and the topics to be covered. Our first strategy in addressing the concerns of the teachers was to avoid the temptation to rely on expert "talking heads" to present information. To have prepared four or five well-crafted and articulate fifty-minute lectures, while certainly of value, would not have addressed teachers' desire for a "hands-on" approach, nor would such an approach have recognized their own expertise as educators. Instead we decided to prepare pithy introductions to central issues concerning slavery, abolitionism, the Civil War and Reconstruction and to find documents that would permit teachers to explore these issues for themselves and then to concentrate on how to shape activities that would engage their students with these materials and issues. |
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To address teachers' demands for classroom-ready material, we used both the World Wide Web and a text produced by the American Social History Project that combined excellent summaries of recent scholarship with rich photographic and textual documents.3 We provided teachers with time to explore recommended websites that contained documents related to each day's central theme. The text we chose allowed us to present content and historiography in a palatable manner, but it also contained many documents edited to a manageable length suited for teacher use in a single class period or as part of a Document Based Question (DBQ). |
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Using these resources, we addressed the desire for contact and collaboration with their peers by giving the teachers and librarians in the workshop plenty of time to "play" with the documents together. Typically this was done in small groups given the task of preparing different types of lessons they might use in their classrooms with their students. Group members then presented these lesson ideas to the workshop as a whole. Participants therefore had the opportunity to discuss curricular issues first in small groups with three or four other teachers and then again in the larger group of their peers. Thus the teachers themselves, as educators with very well-formed ideas about what worked and what did not in their high school and middle school classrooms, were able to create many actual lessons to take with them for future modification or use. Another advantage in this approach was the opportunity it gave teachers to discuss both in small groups and with all the participants the relevance of the material presented in the context of New York State Learning Standards in general and in relation to the year-end Regents exams in particular. This gave explicit recognition to the expertise of the teachers as those skilled in translating curriculum materials into meaningful lessons for their students. Eisner described this role as critical to the educational process:
[T]he role of the teacher in curriculum decision making is always important. It is important because the teacher serves as the interpreter of educational policy and because the teacher is the major mediator of what shall be taught—if not learned—in the classroom.4
Teachers possess not just content knowledge but also "skill knowledge" and "professional knowledge." This latter expertise recognizes that practitioners know "about teaching strategies and curriculum: their potential, their forms and their effects."5 |
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The remaining issues that needed to be planned revolved around procedural concerns such as how to divide the day, what themes would be the topic for each day and which faculty member would be responsible for facilitating each session.6 The participants were chosen by the local school districts and they all signed contracts committing themselves to the week's activities and to a follow-up peer review conference scheduled for the following spring. |
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Content of the Workshop | |
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Since one of the wider goals of the Center for the Teaching of American History and of the workshop was to build content knowledge of social studies teachers, we gave considerable thought to how to choose the actual topics to cover during the workshop. We had to reduce the huge amount of material encompassed by the week's topic of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction into manageable units. We decided to blend topics that may not have been emphasized in the teachers' own historical training with more traditional Civil War and Reconstruction topics. We began with the extensive resistance to slavery that existed in the antebellum period, then went on to discuss the sectional conflict that peaked during the decade of the 1850s. This was followed by the roles played by African Americans during the Civil War, and we concluded with some of the political, social and economic implications of Reconstruction. Thomas Dublin, the senior academic historian on the team, assumed the responsibility for creating web exercises that complemented the documents and interpretation offered by our main text. Jim Carpenter from the division of education and Penelope Harper from the history department were responsible for the introductions to each session, for creating activities to engage the teachers based on their classroom experience, and for handouts prepared by the presenters and/or some of the documents found in the text. The time in which the participants did the web exercises always followed two of the other sessions.7 The teachers and librarians were therefore almost constantly engaged in the exchange of ideas and/or in the creation of lessons to share with the entire group. |
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A major advantage in approaching the content in this manner stemmed from the excellent physical resources at our disposal on the campus of Binghamton University. We had access to a room in the School of Education and Human Development that is equipped with the latest technology. Not only could facilitators demonstrate on large screens the various web sites available, present overheads, use a remarkable sound system, and easily switch from one mode to another, but each teacher/participant could use a laptop computer (either PCs or Macs) to access websites at the same time as the presenter. Furthermore, the entire building was wired so that small groups could take their laptops with them into other classrooms and access the internet using wireless cards. The participants, therefore, left not only with a greater knowledge of this period in American history but also with a greater familiarity with the websites available to assist in their planning of specific lesson ideas. |
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Collaboration | |
A third feature of the workshop that worked very well was developing a real sense of collaboration among all those involved. As we noted earlier, the 1995 report by the National Governors' Association states that teachers traditionally found professional development opportunities inadequate and that any connection to meaningful improvement of teaching was, at best, "marginal."8 To avoid this and to effectively produce a collaborative atmosphere, we thought it was essential that the participants have the opportunity to construct meaningful ways to implement the content to which they were being exposed. By not using outside experts we were able to yield control of a good portion of the workshop to the participants themselves. In particular, control for packaging the content into usable lessons was left to those who know "about teaching strategies and curriculum: their potential, their forms, their substance and their effects."9 This strategy recognized the reality that effective
professional development cannot be forced—it is the teacher who develops (active), not the teacher who is developed (passive); the need for change must be internalized if effective change is to occur; the client must have ownership of his own learning experience; and the in-service educator's role is consultative and collaborative.10
It is this sense of validation and empowerment that makes professional development worthwhile for the participants. As Christenson, Johnston and Norris have written, "teachers and professors do different things, they have different expertise. There is value in sharing what we know and in learning from our differences." Furthermore, collaboration such as this "also opens doors to new ideas and teaching practices" and contributes to "dynamic communities of practice as we share, debate, collaborate, and build better contexts for our students."11 This was exactly what happened at our workshop. Each constituency contributed from their expertise to generate exciting new ways to bring history into secondary classrooms. For the historians especially, this was a learning experience permitting them to "learn more about the specific application of theories in particular contexts."12 By the same token, the teachers and librarians were impressed by the fact that, to quote one teacher, "all the presenters valued our input." Too often teachers find this not to be the case and they "have to be persuaded that professional development can help them improve their practice."13 The participants in this workshop felt the week spent together was "impressive," "very worthwhile," and that it was "nice to get specific ideas from our peers." |
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The teachers and librarians eagerly approached the problem of massaging the historical resources to fit the real world context of limited time periods for teaching and mandated state exams. One of the presentation team members commented that the room was "buzzing with interaction and creativity." One example of the creative lessons crafted during the workshop was a project that used images found on the Library of Congress's "American Memory" website to design a classroom activity tracing the evolving role of African Americans in the Union Army.14 Another group designed a scavenger hunt based on the New York City Draft Riots of 1863. Their source was the City University of New York (CUNY) VirtualNY website.15 Exciting ideas like these emerged each day, based on the materials the participants were using. One of the teachers wrote that the workshop was "refreshing" because it was "teacher needs driven." |
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The participants also committed to creating a specific lesson that they would teach during the school year and then present at a peer review conference scheduled for the following spring. Preparations for the peer reviews began on the last day of the conference when a local expert came to explain a format generally based on the New York State Peer Review Process.16 We modified this process to accommodate the constraints of what was to be a one-day session and the number of people we had. At the ensuing peer reviews teachers presented projects they had developed and used in their classrooms. For example, one group of teachers presented a lesson using the autobiography of Susie King Taylor, an African American woman who lived during the Civil War.17 The teachers found this autobiography to be readable by virtually all high school students and one that held their interest. One of the teachers from our workshop later did presentations at state conferences on how she uses this book in class. It is an outstanding example of using autobiography as a literacy strategy in teaching United States history. Another example is a project designed by two teachers about the election of 1860. One of the teachers had a great deal of political experience and he used that experience to help build a lesson in which students had to "plan" the election campaign of one of the candidates in 1860. In developing this plan students were asked to work in groups and had to design not only election posters but also a videotaped ad promoting their candidate. These are only two examples of the constructive lessons the teachers and librarians created. |
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Conclusion | |
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The Center for the Teaching of American History at Binghamton University has launched several programs that are designed to improve the quality of teaching history in the local schools. Central to this improvement has been the success of the summer workshops for teachers and librarians. Among the desired byproducts of this success have been greater links to and improved communication with those schools. The workshops themselves and the subsequent peer review conferences have reinforced a spirit of collaboration that is often lacking in professional development opportunities for teachers. There are perceptual differences that exist between university and public school faculty that need be bridged to make these workshops beneficial to all concerned. It is necessary to recognize that "the differences are real, and [that] they often make school/university collaboration challenging."18 By encouraging a cooperative spirit from the beginning in our workshop, participants contributed from their own expertise to generate new ways to bring history into secondary classrooms. Constant references to issues such as limited time periods for teaching and the existence of mandated state exams kept the sessions grounded in the realities faced by teachers. Yet the participants embraced the information presented and in a short period of time molded it into exciting and practical lesson ideas. Additionally, this environment encouraged greater exchanges of ideas among professionals who rarely have the opportunity to discuss their practice. "Collaboration has the potential to create dynamic communities of practice as we share, debate, collaborate, and build better contexts for our students."19 This potential became a reality and the focus on teaching students was a common vision for all who participated. |
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Corcoran has urged that for professional development of teachers to be successful, several precepts should be followed. Among these are: 1) providing opportunities for teachers to increase their content knowledge; 2) creating opportunities for teachers to be active learners; and 3) treating teachers as professionals and adult learners.20 The experiences of those who participated in our summer workshop are evidence of the value of these guidelines. Respecting the interests and desires of teachers in a collegial framework of professional dialogue could, as we discovered, produce results that extend far beyond the particular week or peer review conference. The efforts made in our workshop have been beneficial in "building learning communities within and across schools and professional experiences."21 |
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Interest in the wider activities of our Center for the Teaching of American History is great. The book reading circles are at capacity. Visits to area schools by university faculty to observe the lessons generated by the workshops are now common. Contacts are being made through the local and state councils for the social studies to promote greater cooperation and collaboration between these two constituencies. Improvements such as these are having a very positive impact on the teaching of United States history in Binghamton-area schools. In the final analysis that is the strongest bridge that connects these two learning communities. |
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Notes
1. Thomas C. Corcoran, Transforming Professional Development for Teachers: A Guide for State Policy Makers (Washington, D. C.: National Governors' Association, 1995), 13.
2. Alex Stein, "The Teaching American History Program: An Introduction and Overview," The History Teacher (February 2003), 178–85. Judith Moyer, Joseph Onosko, Charles Forcey, and Casey Cobb, "History in Perspective (HIP): A Collaborative Project Between the University of New Hampshire, SAU #56, and 13 Other School Districts," The History Teacher (February 2003), 186–205.
3. William Friedheim, Freedom's Unfinished Revolution: An Inquiry into the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: The New Press, 1996). This text is a product of the American Social History Project.
4. Elliot W. Eisner, The Educational Imagination: On the Design and Evaluation of School Programs, Second Edition (New York: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1985), 129.
5. Wilfred Carr and Stephen Kemmis, Becoming Critical: Education, Knowledge and Action Research (London: The Falmer Press, 1986), 42.
6. To view the complete schedule for each summer workshop in 2002 and 2003, see the website for the Center for the Teaching of American History (CTAH) at Binghamton University, <http://ctah.binghamton.edu>.
7. Logistically, we decided that the last session of each day would bridge to the first session the next morning. This strategy provided greater continuity. The introductory sessions were then followed by a session dedicated to exploring internet sources on the World Wide Web.
8. Corcoran, Transforming Professional Development for Teachers, 13–14.
9. Carr and Kemmis, Becoming Critical, 42.
10. Christopher Day, "Professional Learning through Collaborative In-Service Activity," in John Smyth (ed.), Educating Teachers: Changing the Nature of Pedagogical Knowledge (London: The Falmer Press, 1987), 219 (emphasis added).
11. Mary Christenson, Marilyn Johnston and Jim Norris, Teaching Together: School/University Collaboration to Improve Social Studies Education (Silver Spring: National Council for the Social Studies, 2001), 7.
12. Ibid, 7.
13. Corcoran, Transforming Professional Development for Teachers, 25.
14. The url for this site is <www.loc.gov/rr/print/081_cwaf.html>. Teachers can also access <http://memory.loc.gov/> and then click on "Teachers" to access "The Learning Page" which contains collections of documents, lesson plans, and activities among other menu choices. For instance by navigating through this site a person can find <http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aaohtml/exhibit/aopart4.html>, part of a collection entitled The African American Odyssey that focuses on the Civil War.
15. The url for this site is <http://virtualny.cuny.edu/draftriots/Intro/draft_riot_intro_set.html>.
16. A detailed description of this process can be found at <http://www.nysatl.nysed.gov/booklet.pdf>.
17. Susie King Taylor, A Black Woman's Civil War Memoirs: Reminiscences of my Life in Camp with the 33rd U.S. Colored Troops, Late 1st South Carolina Volunteer, edited by Patricia W. Romero (New York: Markus Wiener Publishing, 1998). This lesson idea is available online at <http://ctah.binghamton.edu/taylor.html>.
18. Corcoran, Transforming Professional Development for Teachers, 25.
19. Christenson, Johnston, and Norris, Teaching Together, 7.
20. Corcoran, Transforming Professional Development for Teachers, 15.
21. Ibid, 13.
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