Toolboxes for Building Professional Development Seminars

Richard R. Schramm

The National Humanities Center is seeking partner universities, colleges, and school districts to help disseminate an innovative model of teacher professional development designed to improve the way American history is taught in the nation's schools. The Center, located in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, and best known for its residential fellowship program, has offered summer institutes for high school teachers since 1984. Over the years these programs evolved into a model that reaches beyond the Center to bring teachers and scholars together to create interdisciplinary seminars on American history and literature in their own locales.

The model relies upon online "seminar toolboxes" that provide texts and inquiry strategies out of which teachers, collaborating with historians and literary scholars, can build five-day summer seminars. The development of the first toolbox was led byW. Fitzhugh Brundage, the William B. Umstead Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Lucinda MacKethan, a professor of American literature at North Carolina State University, both Fellows of the National Humanities Center. Together with twelve master high school teachers and Center staff they built "The Triumph of Nationalism/The House Dividing," a toolbox that explores the tensions between nationalism and sectionalism in the United States between 1815 and 1850 at <http://www.nhc.rtp.nc.us:8080/sbpds/sbpds.htm>.

The toolbox was uploaded in January 2002. Over the following spring, at five sites in North Carolina and one in Pennsylvania, American history and literature teachers from elementary, middle, and high schools tested the toolbox. They custom designed seminar syllabi by picking texts from the toolbox's "resource menus" and adding their own text selections. According to Daniel Dupre, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who served as a consulting scholar for one of the North Carolina pilot sites, planning the seminar was easy. "It involved very little preparation work for me," he wrote. "The documents had been collected and edited, and the web page had been set up before we met in the spring to establish a final reading list. I have some experience with using online material in my teaching, but I always find it a bit daunting and time-consuming getting that material organized. So it was a treat for me not to have to worry about any of the technical aspects. The toolbox is very user friendly." It is also intellectually rigorous. "The chosen material was intellectually stimulating," wrote Professor Dupre. "I loved blending history and literature, and I would use a number of the documents in my own classes. We had opportunities to narrow down the reading list and also to add to the list. We ended up with a great selection."

When the time came to study for their seminars, the participants accessed their texts through the toolbox and either read them online or printed them out. The seminars ran through June and July 2002. In each, the teachers and consulting scholars discussed their texts in morning sessions that ran for three hours. In the afternoons they explored ways to teach the texts and concepts they discussed. Thus each seminar combined content study with the development of pedagogy expressly designed for that content.

All six of the pilot seminars were successful. "I loved the seminar itself," said Professor Dupre. "The teachers were engaging, very collegial, and eager to sink their teeth into the history and literature. I wish more of my students had that kind of enthusiasm." And that enthusiasm came through strongly in the responses the teachers provided on evaluation questionnaires prepared by consultants from the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh. "[The seminar] exceeded my expectations overall," wrote a history teacher. "I'm planning to use more [primary] texts [in my classes] than I'd anticipated and gained a great deal even from those texts I don't plan to use. . . . I also appreciated the opportunity to spend an entire week discussing content [and] strategies. During the school year, we aren't able to do that within our own department, let alone [with] others." An English teacher wrote that she is "now more knowledgeable about history and how history plays a crucial part in many of the pieces of literature I teach." Another participant pointed to an unexpected benefit, the education of university professors. "I don't think [the two consulting scholars] knew very much about high school and its demands. I feel we grew in their esteem! It was good for them to have a better understanding of the background of their students."

The Humanities Center has begun work on a second toolbox, "Living the Revolution: America from 1789 to 1820." Scheduled to be uploaded to the Web in January 2003, it, like its predecessor, will be the product of a collaboration between master teachers and two Center Fellows--Christine Leigh Heyrman, a professor of American history at the University of Delaware, and Robert A. Ferguson, the Woodberry Professor of English and Law at Columbia University. A third toolbox on the making of African American identity from 1865 to 1900 is scheduled to be uploaded in January 2004. It will include works of art in addition to historical and literary texts and is being developed by Colin A. Palmer, the Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University; Richard Powell, the John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art History at Duke University; and Trudier Harris-Lopez, the J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, all Fellows of the National Humanities Center. Over the next few years the Center plans to develop a series of interdisciplinary toolboxes spanning the entire range of American history.

Toolbox seminars provide an easy, convenient, and cost-effective way to offer K-12 history and literature teachers professional development that accords with current research on what professional development ought to be. They engage teachers both individually and collectively as active learners. Sustained and rigorous, they link to challenging content and performance standards for students and relate content directly to pedagogy. The seminars enable teachers to collaborate with scholars as peers and colleagues. Because the seminar toolboxes are designed and directed by teachers, they operate on the best principles of adult learning, fostering greater subject-matter knowledge and deeper understanding of learning, balancing a teacher's intellectual growth with school and district needs.

The seminars achieve other noteworthy goals as well. They provide teachers with the intellectual stimulation and renewal necessary for strong, enthusiastic work in the classroom. The toolboxes also allow teachers to re-engage with serious scholarly inquiry and thereby remind themselves that teaching is a learned profession. Finally, they give historians and literary scholars a way to apply their expertise to the challenge of improving the teaching of American history and literature in K-12 schools.

To learn how your institution can implement toolbox seminars, e-mail Richard R. Schramm, the National Humanities Center's Director of Education Programs, at <rschramm@ga.unc.edu>.