The Summer Institute for Teachers of Talented High School Students at Carleton College

Excellence in education has once again become a major national issue. Ad­vanced Placement teachers in high schools have never lacked commitment to either excellence or the right of tal­ented students to receive the kind of education appropriate to their level of motivation and intelligence. But what has often been missing, is the support for such teachers beyond the classroom. Even when parents and school adminis­trators have expressed their approval, the hard-pressed teacher of Advanced Placement or accelerated courses has received only meager help from col­ leagues in colleges and universities.

High school teachers attempting to introduce their students to college-level materials have been isolated because typical secondary school texts are often inappropriate or out of date. They also have not had an opportunity to commu­nicate and share their needs and experi­ences with college faculty. College teachers, for their part, have known little or nothing about the previous edu­cational experiences of their best stu­dents who have taken Advanced Place­ment or accelerated courses. And this lack of knowledge has compounded the problem of placing these incoming high school students in courses at an appro­priate level of sophistication and diffi­culty.

Four years ago some faculty and ad­ministrators at Carleton College set out to do something about this situation. We decided to create week-long workshops to be conducted during the third week of June, when high school faculty could escape the pressure of their demanding teaching schedules and, working closely with college teachers in small seminars, explore recent developments in their own disciplines. The object was to foster an environment in which ideas could be shared and course materials revised and brought up to date.

Although a historian was the prime mover in establishing the first contacts with high schools in Minnesota and in setting up the first workshops, these were never restricted to history alone. By the summer of 1983, the Carleton Institute for Teachers of Talented Stu­dents offered seminars in no fewer than seventeen disciplines, ranging from art history to problem solving and from computer science to humanities. From the beginning, however, the program has included courses in both American and European history, each taught by one American and one European his­torian from our department, and in one case from a neighboring institution. In all, some 600 high school teachers have attended at least one of the workshops over the last four years. The Carleton Summer School Office makes the first contacts with high school teachers in late February or early March, when it sends out brochures containing brief descrip­tions of all the workshops and applica­tion forms to department chairs of high schools in the Upper Midwest and selec­tively beyond; the cost is approximately 50 cents per announcement. Advertise­ments are simultaneously placed in newsletters of the appropriate profes­sional and teacher associations. More specific information about readings and assignments is sent to applicants by the individual instructors as the applications come in. All assigned books or other materials are conveniently available by mail through the Carleton Bookstore. After that point, and until graduate credit is awarded formally through the Registrar’s Office, the individual disci­plines and workshops function indepen­dently.

The challenge we have faced in the two annual history seminars was to en­gage teachers in at least some of the most significant new areas, approaches, and debates in the discipline, and ex­plore together how these ideas might be integrated into the typical year-long ac­celerated high school course. From the beginning, we did not try to tell the high school teachers how to teach these materials. Nor did we advise them on the technical aspects of how to set up an AP course. Rather, our goal was to provide the kind of academic environment in which high school teachers could debate some of the most important and excit­ing ideas in the discipline with an eye to using them in their own courses.

The particular topics covered have varied somewhat from year to year. The European history workshop has empha­sized the modern and contemporary period. We have striven for balance among new areas, new approaches, and recent developments in traditional topics, which have remained of central interest both to historians and students. The most obvious were the chronologi­cal and gender extensions: Europe since 1945, which until recently was generally omitted in European/world history courses and is still only barely present in the AP European history examination, and women’s history for which class­room materials have been developed only recently. Most popular and proba­bly of greatest practical value for teach­ers and students have been the units on recent interpretations of the great Euro­pean social revolutions, the French and Russian Revolutions, and the phenome­na of Nazism, fascism, and totalitarianism in our century.

Lest the workshop become all too utilitarian, we set aside time to delve into nontraditional AP materials such as the history of technology, the political economy of economic development and decline, and governability and interest groups in the corporatist state. As foci for the discussions, strong thesis books were assigned, among them Pierre Ayçoberry, The Nazi Question; Theda Skoc­pol, States and Social Revolutions; Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, Becom­ing Visible; E. O. Hellerstein, L. P. Hume, and K. M. Offen (eds.), Victorian Women; Daniel Headrick, The Tools of Empire; Mancur Olsen, The Rise and De­cline of Nations.

In the American history workshop, we have followed a similar pattern, fo­cusing on recent interpretations in the fields of the new social history, intellec­tual history, the history of women and the family, slavery and minority studies, American studies, the Cold War and Vietnam. Particularly popular have been the units on the American Revolu­tion, women’s studies, and Vietnam. Like the European class, the American historians also spent some time on non­ traditional AP materials. A particular concern was how to use novels, short stories, paintings, music, films, and ar­chitecture in the survey course. The seminar began with a discussion of text­book strengths and limitations, prompt­ed by the reading of Frances Fitzger­ald’s America Revisited. Other readings were then used to suggest the spectrum of possible approaches to the study of political and social history, including Robert Gross, The Minutemen and Their World; Allen Weinstein and Frank O. Gatell, American Negro Slavery; William Chambers and Walter D. Burnham, The American Party Systems; and Gerda Ler­ner, The Majority Finds Its Past.

The practical format of both work­shops has been adapted as far as possi­ble to the circumstances and needs of the high school teachers. The letters from the instructors, detailing seminar objectives, assignments, and approxi­mate daily schedules, were sent out about two or three months before the sessions. Included in these letters were the titles of the four to five major books that would serve as starting points for the discussions each day. During the workshop week, the seminars met every morning from 8:30 to noon, with a common coffee break for all institute participants from 10:00 to 10:30. After­noon sessions varied in length and for­mat, but usually ran from 1:30 to 4:30, with some time set aside for individual consultations and coffee or library breaks. In the later afternoons and eve­nings, participants were free to read assignments or begin work on their course outlines and lesson plans.

In the daily routine, the college in­structor normally took the lead at the start of the class and introduced the context for the book under discussion. The group then proceeded to explore the broader implications  of the particu­lar interpretation and investigate sources for further study. During that discussion and in the  early afternoon, the teachers commented further on ways in which these perspectives might be integrated into an accelerated high school course. Later in the afternoon, time was set aside to share practical experiences with different approaches, materials, and methods in AP or other advanced courses. Here participants have appreciated extensive suggestions by the college instructors for further reading and for books that might be used effectively in the high school class­room. Beyond that, however, the high school teachers played the leading role in this part of the workshop by sharing their experiences with certain topics and materials, and asking each other about different options of course organiza­tion, emphases, teaching aids, and read­ing materials in open discussion.

The written assignments have been similarly tailored to the needs of the participants. Generally, teachers were asked to write up course plans or pre­pare particular units that would inte­grate some of the new perspectives dis­cussed in the workshop. In practice, the end products have ranged from com­pletely new syllabi to revised units on particular topics. In European history, for example, one participant did a so­phisticated revision and expansion of his unit on Nazism and the Holocaust, which was of particular interest to the students in his suburban school. Anoth­er designed a topical unit on autocracy vs. totalitarianism, which allowed her to try a wholly different thematic ap­proach. The new course plan ranged from a completely new syllabus of a new AP teacher to a revision of a fine tradi­tional course emphasizing the classics to include the materials that would enable his students to take the AP examination and gain Advanced Placement credit in college. Most plans in one way or anoth­er incorporated new approaches and fresh readings, especially in relatively new areas such as women’s history and changed fields such as history and tech­nology. All syllabi included major revi­sions and expansions of the reading lists.

. . . the hard-pressed teacher of Advanced Placement or accelerated courses has received only meager help from colleagues in colleges and universities

In American history the pattern has been similar. Individual participants wrote syllabi for entirely new courses or created new units for established courses. One teacher developed a set of primary sources on the Pullman Strike, including extensive statistical informa­tion. Two teachers from suburban schools worked up annotated reading lists for new units on the Cold War and Vietnam. Yet another, seeking to focus on concerns that were central to her own students’ experiences, designed a new unit on youth in the 1920s. And a teacher from a parochial school created a “diplomat game” that allowed his stu­dents to role play and understand the dynamics of diplomatic history.

Economically, the workshops have not been overwhelmingly profitable for the college. Our goal from the begin­ ning was, at best, to break even finan­cially. This goal has been reached con­sistently. At a cost, in 1983, of $180 tuition and $95 room and board for those who chose to stay on campus—as did most participants—the program has been self-sustaining, and the college has not sought outside funding. A number of the teachers have been sponsored by their school districts, usually in connec­tion with planning new Advanced Place­ment courses. Faculty salaries have been modest, but we have felt richly reward­ed by the experience. The history work­shops, which have each drawn between eight and fifteen participants a year, have attracted some of the most inter­esting and lively minds among history teachers from all over the country. They have been ready to debate, challenge, and rethink historical materials from the moment they arrived on campus until the moment they left. They have been highly stimulating to teach. We have gone back to our college class­ rooms in the fall, and especially to our freshman classes, with enthusiasm and a fresh outlook.

To judge from the formal (and anon­ymous) evaluations by the secondary school teachers at the end of the Insti­ tute, the workshops were as successful as we had hoped in at least several related ways: they offered fresh per­spectives on old and new topics in his­tory, expanded old reading lists and, above all, refreshed the minds of all the participants. Several of the evaluations commented specifically on this last point. The experience has similarly al­lowed those of us in our department who have taught workshops—two of the five Europeanists and one of our two Americanists have been involved until now—to share with our colleagues the insight’s we have gained into the Ad­vanced Placement program and the high school teaching of gifted students generally.

Thus, both the high school faculty and the college instructors have benefit­ed from the workshop experience. The intense week of work has demonstrated that teachers from both levels can work cooperatively together, helping bridge the gap that too often exists between high schools and colleges. Perhaps more importantly, both high school and col­lege faculty have come to believe that this type of program can encourage the kind of quality education for the most talented students that in recent years has all too often been neglected in this country’s public schools.