In addition to ongoing programs such as Chicago Teachers as Scholars, the Newberry Teachers’ Consortium, and the History Channel Seminar Series, the Newberry offers other programs and seminars for Chicago-area teachers. These content-based programs, often co-sponsored with another educational or cultural organization, bring teachers to the Newberry to delve into a humanities-based topic in a small group setting.
As with other Newberry programs for teachers, scholars with active teaching and research interests in a particular field lead the seminar. Teachers have the opportunity to explore and discuss the latest scholarly research and explore ways to adapt this research for the classroom. Many of these programs also feature close interaction with the Newberry’s collection and provide participants with classroom-ready resources to use and share with colleagues.
Teacher Programs staff will work with individual schools or departments to develop seminars based on a topic or theme relevant to their professional development needs. For these seminars, participants benefit from close interaction with the seminar instructor and the Newberry’s collections, as well as seminar readings and classroom-ready resources. In addition to discussion of the latest scholarship, participants explore how to implement ideas and materials from the seminar into their classroom teaching with colleagues from their school or department.
Newberry Teacher Programs staff is available to lead workshops at Chicago-area schools on teaching with digital primary sources. During this workshop, we present the Newberry’s free educational resources, available through the Digital Collections for the Classroom website: http://dcc.newberry.org. Workshops take an in-depth look at specific topics in the humanities and social sciences, and may be tailored according to your faculty’s interests. In addition, we will guide teachers through the new website and will introduce special features that enable users to download entire collections, to select specific documents, or to design and share their own collections of Newberry documents. Finally, we will discuss ways of incorporating these digital resources into classroom teaching—both as a source of primary documents and as a means of cultivating digital literacy among teachers and students. All of the techniques and resources offered by this workshop support the development of skills emphasized in the Common Core State Standards.