Susan Graseck
Senior Fellow, Watson Institute;
Director, Choices for the 21st Century Education Program
Main |
Interview |
Biography
Interview, December 16, 2004
Office Hours (OH):
How does the Choices Program work — do the
teachers find you or do you find the teachers?
Susan Graseck (SG):
Both, is the answer. The Choices Program is
really larger than the nine of us here. We work with teachers who come
to Brown in the summer to participate in our summer institutes, and then
return to provide leadership to peers in their schools and regions. We
have been engaging teachers as peer leaders since 1993. This grows out
of the belief that teaching is a profession and, as such, it should be
led from within; teachers working with teachers. When the teachers are
here at Brown, we engage them with scholars at the Institute and Brown
and with the materials that we develop in collaboration with scholars.
It’s this that they draw on for the professional development they
offer to teachers around the country. So it’s a three-step process,
engaging the scholars in the development of materials, engaging a core
of teacher-leaders with the materials and the scholars, and then engaging
these teacher-leaders with other teachers around the country.
(OH)
How do the Watson scholars feel about working with the teachers?
(SG)
The scholars here at the Institute and at Brown in general
consider this a real opportunity. They tell us they learn something new
every time. It’s where the rubber hits the road. High school is
a very different audience from college students. Engaging 16 year olds
in packs of 25-40 in complex international issues, when they’ve
just come from algebra class and they’re on their way to lunch,
and getting them excited about it, you’re asking a lot. So when
you find the teachers able to do that, you also find that they are really
interesting, fascinating people, and the scholars love working with them—they
say they learn from them.
(OH)
How do the teachers pay for the program?
(SG)
It varies. When we started out sixteen years ago, we saw a
lot of personal checks. We’re cheap now, but we were even cheaper
then. Today, it costs $15 to get everything you need to put on a copying
machine and use for your classroom. When we started, it cost $3 and,
of course, we had far fewer topics to offer. We were getting these personal
checks for $3, $6, $9 from teachers.
We see a lot more purchase orders today. Most of the time it’s the schools
that are paying for the materials. And they are ordering a lot more material.
We have almost thirty topics today, and we update materials all the time so we
are really known as the most up-to-date material available.
There are somewhere around 7,500 schools—not teachers but schools—around
the country using our materials. Using material has a broad stretch to it, everything
from a single
teacher
in one school somewhere who ordered some material from us two years ago, and
we don’t know how they are using it, to a school system that has lots of
teachers integrating our resources and approach into several of their courses—and
everything in between. If you look at how many high schools there are in the
country (about 16,000), it’s almost half. And that’s a lot of schools.
As an example from the high-end of the use spectrum, the Denver Public Schools
right now are piloting our materials in their high schools. Right now they have
a core of about 15 teachers who are using several titles on a trial basis. At
the end of the year, they’ll be making some decisions about whether they
are going to integrate our materials and approach into their high school social
studies curriculum throughout the district.
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