Addie Rae Toby, middle school teacher at Shaker-Heights, called to chat about her RRR mini-grant the other night. We talked for a very long time. Addie said some important things to me in that conversation. She talked about how much she’d learned during her three-year involvement with RR& R and about how much her teaching had improved with the resources and from interaction with historians and speakers that the grant provided.
“You know,” she said, “you ask us to evaluate every workshop. Those evaluations reveal how we received the workshops. What cannot be evaluated, however, is the outreach that we’ve done with students other than our own, with other teachers in our building who are not involved with the grant, and with parents. I have developed deep friendships and improved relationships with teachers in my building because of my work on this grant.
“I’ve been a part of other TAH grants. Only this grant has taken me on a journey to develop professional connections…a learning community.”
Of course, I loved what she said, because her opinion about developing a learning community echoed my own passion. In the RRR grant, teachers of all grade levels, represent different districts located along the canalway. They have learned to take risks to create lessons and to share better strategies for teaching history.
Addie’s conversation jogged my memory of another conversation I had with Amy Sumen after the workshop with Dr. Liette Gidlow.
Amy said, “You know, I really talked today, and Nate said to me, ‘Amy, it was so good to hear your voice at this workshop! And you know what else was really good? You didn’t preface every remark with a disclaimer about only being a first-grade teacher.’”
I smiled at Amy, delighted in two different ways. First, I was delighted in Amy’s growth. Over the three years, Amy had altered her own image of herself from first-grade teacher to scholar equal to the high school teachers in our group who teach A.P. history. I was delighted, secondly, that Amy’s peer, Nate, had recognized the change in her and had felt safe and comfortable enough to remark on her growth.
For me, affecting change in the way teachers teach history is the most important part of our work. The goals of this grant are to bring history experts to the teachers and to emphasize place-based history and to focus on historical thinking.
Building an environment of collegial support for those things to happen, however, is the foundation that leads to necessary change in teaching. In a profession that is often solitary and lonely, learning to learn together is often as important as learning time lines and factual information.
