The next step in modern day teaching

WILLIAMSBURG - On a sweltering summer day, a cluster of elementary school teachers found themselves back in the 18th century, picking out tobacco worms alongside slaves on the Great Hopes Plantation.

Later, back in the Colonial capital, Betty the slave cook - portrayed by a historic interpreter - led the group through the grand home where she worked for the family of Revolutionary leader Peyton Randolph, the first chairman of the Continental Congress.

The teachers’ guide, Colonial Williamsburg instructor Darci Tucker, then had them ponder the question: “If you had to be a slave, would you rather be a rural or an urban slave?”

After a discussion about the backbreaking work of rural slavery versus unrelenting supervision in the city, Betty weighed in: “How would you like to have your principal go home with you every night?”

Slavery was one of many aspects of Colonial Williamsburg’s weeklong training, offered through each summer to elementary, middle and high school teachers across the nation. The for-credit course offers intensive lessons held inside the Capitol building, governor’s palace and candlelit taverns, and each day teachers discuss ways to make the topics more authentic and engaging to students.

“When you can inhabit the space, you can make it more real,” Carroll Magill, a fifth-grade English and history teacher in New York City, said after the slave-quarters tour.

Making history more real is a national imperative, as a large majority of U.S. students don’t have a solid grasp of it. The National Assessment of Educational Progress found in 2001 that only 18 percent of fourth-graders, 17 percent of eighth-graders and 11 percent of 12th-graders were proficient in history.

Under the No Child Left Behind Act, the U.S. Department of Education created the Teaching American History Program to improve history-instruction strategies. Funding has grown from $50 million the first year to $119.8 million in 2006. Most of the money helps cover participants’ costs at summer institutes such as Colonial Williamsburg’s, and the federal grants most frequently are used at American Revolution and Civil War programs.

Elaine Reed, executive director of the National Council for History Education, said many educators are unprepared to teach history because they lack undergraduate coursework in the subject.

“The importance of these grants is to fill in the gaps with professional-development programs,” Reed said in a telephone interview. “It’s a much-needed bandage to a problem that’s not a teacher’s fault.”

The National Endowment for the Humanities and other groups also offer workshops for teachers to engage in intensive onsite study at places such as Pearl Harbor, Ellis Island and the U.S. Capitol, and develop course materials for their classrooms.

Donna Nestler, a seventh-grade social studies teacher from Monticello, N.Y., and a federal grant recipient at the Williamsburg training, said that it’s important to know how to personalize history, not just recite information to students from a book.

“Kids don’t read. You have to have other ways to convey it,” Nestler said.

The NCHE’s Reed said that the Internet is a key element of history education and can put a trove of historical documents at students’ fingertips.

“Sometimes the medium is the message,” Reed said. “We’re trying to get students to do the work of historians in their own way” by using the Internet to read Civil War soldiers’ letters, view old photographs and listen to historical music.

Despite the hectic pace and distractions of modern life, and shortened attention spans, most students are still eager to learn about real people of the past and their exciting adventures.

“History is made up of a bunch of really good stories. Students love stories; they love the beginning, middle and the end,” Reed said. “Truth is more interesting than fiction.”