 |
 | contact us | site guide | search  |
 |     |
|
      |
|
|
 Districts are free to organize toolbox seminars on their own, without benefit of Center training. The Center will gladly assist these do-it-yourself efforts with free online consultation. If your district should decide to go it alone, we ask that you complete a user survey. To seek online advice about how to implement a seminar, e-mail us at nhc_ed@nationalhumanitiescenter.org. The National Humanities Center's Professional Development Seminar Toolboxes provide online texts and inquiry strategies out of which teachers, collaborating with local scholars, can create their own five-day interdisciplinary professional development seminars in American history and literature. Two toolboxes are available now: "Living the Revolution: America, 1789-1820" and "The Triumph of Nationalism/The House Dividing: Nationalism and Sectionalism in the United States: 1815-1850." In 2004 the Center will offer a third, "The Making of African American Identity: 1865-1915," and in 2005 it will upload a fourth, "The Gilded and the Gritty: America, 1877-1920." Ultimately, the Center plans to produce a series of toolboxes spanning the entire range of American history. Organizing a toolbox seminar requires the following steps: Securing support. The National Humanities Center has designed its toolbox seminars to fit into tight budgets. Access to a toolbox is free. The Center provides organizational advice online at no cost. (See above.) Seminar expenses typically include honoraria for consulting scholars, stipends for participating teachers, food costs, and in some cases mileage reimbursement. A district should construct a seminar budget according to its own policies and resources. To illustrate different ways of doing so, we offer a variety of budget options from the top-of-the-line to the economy model. A district might consider a cost-sharing arrangement with its partner university in which the district pays stipends to the participating teachers and covers snacks and lunches during the seminar week, and the partner university pays the consulting scholars' honoraria. There are a variety of options for grant support of a toolbox seminar. The Center can provide fund-raising assistance to districts interested in developing proposals to government agencies or private foundations. Recruiting faculty. Ideally, a seminar should be led by three consulting scholars: a professor of American literature, a professor of American history, and an instructional specialist with expertise in the teaching of history or literature. However, seminars have succeeded with only an historian and a literary scholar at the helm, and with a sufficiently broad-gauged scholar in charge, they can succeed with a single consultant. Regardless of the number of scholars you choose, be sure to pick good teachers who are flexible and personable and who are neither intimidated by adult students nor condescending toward them. Keep in mind that the consulting scholars, typically accustomed to setting intellectual agendas on their own, will have to follow the lead of their "students" as they collaborate with them to build the seminar syllabus. Setting dates. A seminar will require two after-school planning sessions in the spring. (See below.) Typically, they are held in March, April, or early May, late enough in the semester so that the participants will not have forgotten them by the time of the seminar but early enough to avoid end-of-school madness. The exact timing will depend on local school calendars. The Center has found it most effective to hold a seminar shortly after school ends for the summer, before everyone gets too deeply into vacation mode. Some districts have scheduled their seminars on professional work days just before student arrive for the new school year. In this way they avoided stipends because the teachers were being paid for those days as part of their regular contracts. Seminar scheduling is really a matter of local conditions and preferences. Choosing locations. The planning sessions can be held in a classroom as long as it is wired to connect with the World Wide Web and has a way to project the toolbox for group viewing. The seminar itself should be held in a room that will accommodate adults comfortably for six hours and provide space to spread out texts and notebooks. A place to set out coffee and snacks is desirable, too. Break-out space is also needed if the seminar decides to employ small-group discussions. (Often a seminar breaks up into groups to work out teaching strategies.) The seminar room need not be wired to access documents online. Participants will come to the seminar either with reading notes or with hard copies of the texts. Recruiting participants. The school district promotes the project and recruits participants. Typically, this job is done by a professional development coordinator, a curriculum specialist, a lead teacher, or department chair. Strive for an enrollment of between twelve and twenty. The district decides the level of the participants. Some seminars have included only high school teachers; others have included teachers from high, middle, and elementary schools. These seminars are a type of professional development very different from that with which most teachers are familiar. It may take some explaining to get the teachers to sign on. Once they experience a seminar, however, they are usually hooked. The Center can help with recruitment by providing language for announcements. Planning the seminar. A toolbox seminar requires two planning sessions in the spring. The Center can provide advice on how to conduct these sessions. In the first, the participants and the consulting scholars simply learn how to navigate the toolbox and learn the theory behind the program. In the second, the faculty and participants build a seminar syllabus by selecting texts from the toolbox's resource menus and by adding their own text selections. This latter point is very important because a seminar syllabus should, as much as possible, reflect what teachers actually teach. Both of the planning sessions can be held after school and generally run no more than two hours. Once the planning is done, the participants and faculty can read their texts online from the toolbox or print them out. Conducting the seminar. The Center recommends morning sessions of three hours for discussion of the seminar texts and afternoon sessions of three hours for the development of teaching strategies. The morning sessions could rely on the discussion questions provided in the toolbox resource menus, or they could rely on discussion gambits framed by the consultants or the teachers. The pedagogical discussion should focus as much as possible on how to teach the specific texts and concepts studied in the seminar to the specific students the teachers face in their classrooms. We suggest that the seminar not require teachers to develop lesson plans; one week is simply too brief a time in which to do so. Rather, the seminar should concentrate primarily on the exchange of ideas. The pedagogical sessions should concentrate on how to integrate new texts and concepts into a class or on how to reinvigorate and enrich the teaching of standard material. Fresh, effective teaching ideas are hard to come by. If each participant develops one or two during the week, the seminar will have been productive. Reviewing and assessing. For follow up, we recommend that the consultants and participants reconvene during the ensuing school year, after the teachers have taught the material of the seminar, to review their summer experience and assess the effectiveness of the teaching strategies they developed during it. An after-school session of about two hours should provide enough time for adequate discussion. · User Survey
|
|