Leading Seminars in Pittsburgh

I was a seminar leader in the Pittsburgh Teachers Institute (PTI) from the spring of 2000 through the spring of 2006. In all, I led seven different seminars. I have just moved from the Pittsburgh region to the Cleveland area and won't be able to participate any longer. I will miss it.

In the fall of 1999, my boss and mentor, Barbara Lazarus, who was then the institutional liaison for Carnegie Mellon University to the PTI, suggested that I consider leading a seminar. I was attracted because of my previous involvement with the Pittsburgh Public Schools as a graduate student researcher, and because both of my girls were, at the time, students in the schools. My field is sociology, and I have a long-standing interest in education. I am deeply committed to public education and I saw involvement with the PTI as a way to put this commitment into action.

There were two things that kept me involved, year after year. The first was the teachers. I learned a tremendous amount from them both in terms of the content of the seminars and about approaches to educating different types of students. These teachers are dedicated, hard-working, creative, caring, smart people. They really appreciate the opportunity to wrestle with ideas along with other teachers, to be members of the university community, and to reflect on their practice.

The other thing that kept me coming back was the pure joy of working with Dr. Helen Faison, Director of the PTI. For very good reason she is greatly admired in Pittsburgh as a dedicated educator. She is also one of the most gracious people I have ever met and I felt honored to be her colleague.

After the first couple years of offering seminars that were squarely within my area of expertise in sociology, I started to stretch myself a bit and offered seminars about topics that would give me the opportunity to learn right along with the teachers. One strategy I used to accomplish this was to invite guest speakers or arrange for field trips when the topic was really beyond me. For example, I led a seminar titled "Law and Order" in the spring of 2005. A fair portion of the subject matter fell within my comfort zone. I started the semester with a discussion that was both philosophical and sociological about how deviance is defined in a society, who has the authority to make and enforce the law, what positive contributions "deviance" might make, and what the definition and control of deviance means for the development of a society. Unlike the undergraduates with whom I tried this approach, the teachers really appreciated the discussion and referred back to it many times during the course of the seminar. On the other hand, when a couple of the teachers in the seminar expressed an interest in forensics, I really didn't feel comfortable covering it myself, though I felt it was a legitimate area of inquiry. So I arranged a two-class segment on forensics, the first in a Chemical Engineering lab at Carnegie Mellon with some faculty who had developed forensics kits specifically for use in K-12 educational settings. The second was a field trip to the county coroner's office. In both cases I learned a tremendous amount, and the teachers were completely captivated.

The experience of being a seminar leader was so engaging, and my excitement about this model of in-service professional development so strong, that I was happy to have the opportunity to get involved in a deeper way with PTI. In the fall of 2002 I participated in the PTI self-evaluation, part of the larger national assessment, by doing a small study about the impact on students when teachers participate in the Teacher Institute model of professional development. This is a hard thing to tease out, of course, since there are so many different things that influence how teachers teach and what students learn and doing a really controlled study is, perhaps, next to impossible. But this was a wonderful way for me to work with some teachers who had not been part of my seminars to date. It became clear through this work that teachers were being energized by their involvement with PTI, and that their students were benefiting from this energy and the creativity that came from it.

I also took over as the institutional liaison for Carnegie Mellon when my dear friend and mentor, Barbara Lazarus, died of cancer in the summer of 2003. In this role I got a glimpse of the larger issues--fiscal and management--behind running an enterprise such as this. Along the way I also became part of the National University Advisory Council, representing the Pittsburgh faculty to the Yale National Initiative. The most fun I had in this role was when I attended a portion of the Yale Intensive during the summer of 2005 and got to sit in on seminars led by some of the Yale faculty. It was great both to see "how it's done" by veteran Yale faculty and be exposed to some of the diverse topics they were covering in their seminars.

I don't think it has quite hit me yet that I'm not going to lead another seminar in the spring. I've just recently moved and started a new job, at a small college that has a very different student population from Carnegie Mellon. This is where it comes in handy that I learned so much from the PTI teachers about how to work with different types of students. I'll miss "my teachers" and the chance to participate in public education in this way. I guess I'll just have to find another opportunity.

Janet Stocks is the Director of the Center for Academic and Professional Success at Baldwin-Wallace College. She formerly was the Director of Undergraduate Research and Associate Provost of Academic Affairs at Carnegie Mellon University