Local teacher attends 2019 Colonial Williamsburg Teacher Institute

Penny Suydam, a fifth-grade teacher and assistant principal at Immanuel Lutheran School in Batavia, Illinois, recently completed an intense, weeklong immersion in American history at the Colonial Williamsburg Teacher Institute in Williamsburg, Va.

The Teacher Institute was created to encourage history education and make it engaging for students.

Now in its 30th year, the Teacher Institute helps prepare teachers to help students meet national and state history standards through hands-on immersion experiences in colonial history.

Suydam has taught at the Batavia school for 15 years. She holds a bachelor's degree in elementary education from Concordia University-Chicago as well as a master's degree in reading, also from Concordia-Chicago.

The Colonial Williamsburg Teacher Institute provides participants with interactive teaching techniques and skills to become mentor teachers who can assist their peers and other educators to develop active learning classrooms and make history exciting for their students.

During weeklong sessions on location in Colonial Williamsburg and the surrounding area, participants engage in an interdisciplinary approach to teaching social studies with American history as the focus. Teachers have the opportunity to exchange ideas with historians, meet character interpreters and explore engaging instructional strategies for use in the classroom.

Throughout each day, teachers work collaboratively with Colonial Williamsburg staff and Master Teachers to examine interactive teaching techniques and develop instructional materials that improve instruction, raise literacy levels, enhance thinking skills, and bring history to life in the classroom.

Participating teachers agree to conduct in-service training sessions following their attendance at Teacher Institute in order to share their experience with other teachers.

Colonial Williamsburg builds on a nearly 70-year educational outreach tradition by exploring new technologies, expanding successful initiatives and offering new ventures to fulfill its educational mission.

Teacher Institute was developed to improve the quality of American history education in the nations' schools and insure that every student gains an understanding of the principles behind our system of government.

The program began in 1990 with 44 fifth-grade teachers from two southern California school districts.

Today, more than 9,800 teachers from all 50 states, two territories, and five foreign countries have participated since the inception of the Teacher Institute.

Established in 1926, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation is the nonprofit educational institution that preserves and operates the restored 18th-century revolutionary capital of Virginia as a town-sized living history museum, telling the inspirational stories of our nation's founding men and women.

Within the restored and reconstructed buildings, historic interpreters, attired as colonial men and women from slaves to shopkeepers to soldiers, relate stories of colonial Virginia society and culture - stories of our journey to become Americans.

As Colonial Williamsburg interprets life in the time of the American Revolution for its guests, it also invites them to interact with history. Williamsburg is located 150 miles south of Washington, D.C., off I-64.

To learn more about Teacher Institute, visit www.history.org/history/teaching/tchsti.cfm.

To learn more about Immanuel Lutheran School, visit ilsbatavia.org or call (630) 406-0157.