Spotlight 4 Success
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Spotlight 4 Success
The Sweet Dilemma of an Education Leader
From field trips to federal policy, Dr. Mark Finchum offers a masterclass in Social Studies education leadership during this illuminating conversation from Gatlinburg, Tennessee. As Executive Director of the Tennessee Council of Social Studies (TCSS), Fincham draws on three decades of experience to share valuable insights about the organization's mission to serve educators across all social studies disciplines.
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Welcome to Spotlight for Success by American Book Company. I am Devin Pintosi, your host. We are here in Gatlinburg, tennessee, at the Tennessee Council of Social Studies, and we are privileged to be here speaking with the Executive Director of TCSS, dr Mark Fincham. So nice to see you, dr Mark.
Speaker 2:Hey, thank you. It's good to be here. Yes, thank you for being a part of our conference, oh well.
Speaker 1:thank you, we're very excited to be here and appreciate all the work that you and your team have done to make TCSS such a success.
Speaker 2:Well, we do have a good time and we do put out some effort. We try to have a good conference and meet the needs of teachers in Tennessee who do social studies, whether it be elementary or middle school, economics or history or geography, psychology, whatever it is. We try to be a good resource for everybody.
Speaker 1:Wow. Can you share with the audience all of the years of experience you have working with TCSS?
Speaker 2:I started with TCSS on the board of directors all the way back in 1992. Wow, and my first national conference to attend was in 93 when it was held in Nashville. Okay, and I've missed one national conference since then 98, because I spent my money to go watch Tennessee win the national championship of football. But that's the only NCSS I've missed, and I don't believe I've missed any TCSS since then. I've been on the board and served a couple of terms as president, once in the 90s, and then again a few years back, and now working as the executive director. That's wonderful. I've enjoyed it. The board are just good people who are dedicated.
Speaker 1:I can feel it here in. The atmospherics here are fantastic for the audience to know. Tcss is a wonderful community of social studies educators and professionals gathered here Really great, great people. Mark, can you tell us a bit about your experience?
Speaker 2:as you were a doctoral studies, I understand you had an interesting dissertation choice I did my PhD from the University of Tennessee, knoxville is social studies education, with an emphasis on teacher education, and the dissertation was on how to have a good field trip to a historic site, and during my career teaching I did probably 100 plus field trips, so I incorporated my personal experiences into a document that involves, of course, research and best practices and everything to help teachers understand a little bit about how to do a field trip to a historic site and how to do it well.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's wonderful, and can you tell us a bit about your experiences? You've been working with the Native American community for a number of years, how that started and what those experiences have been like.
Speaker 2:Well, for some years now I've been the community chair for the Indigenous Education Community for the National Council for the Social Studies. A community at NCSS is just a group of like-minded teachers, and so there are communities on everything from assessment to elementary education, to psychology, to Asia, to just all kinds of different things, and the idea behind that is because NCSS is large and conferences have 3,000 to 4,000 teachers. You can get lost in that, and so a community means you have an opportunity to join and be actively involved with other teachers on a smaller scale about things that you are interested in, and so the indigenous education community with NCSS has tried to have some type of an indigenous focus every year at the NCSS national conferences, and so that might be storytelling and music, it might be a panel of experts, it might be what NCSS calls a vital issues panel, it might be bringing in a guest speaker, it might be taking a bus trip to an important indigenous-related historic site, so a little bit of everything like that. So that's been very fun and rewarding to do that.
Speaker 1:That is fantastic, and so I understand you did an interesting bus tour related with that with NCSS. Was it last year At American Book Company in Woodstock, Georgia? We are committed to your students' success. As you can see behind me, we have our workbooks and we have online testing and e-books that go on fancy iPads over here, for instance. They're all designed to help your students succeed and have higher test scores on their high-stakes assessments. Give us a call 888-264-5877, or find us on the web, ab abck12.com, and you can receive a free trial or a free preview book of your choice. Hope to hear from you soon. Bye-bye.
Speaker 2:Well, we've done a couple of bus tours. One of them was in 2009 when we were in Atlanta. The NCSS was in Atlanta and we took a tour out to New Echota and to the Chief Van House, which is just a bit over an hour out of Atlanta, had a good busload of teachers and I think they really enjoyed getting that kind of a guided tour, and we also included a group of dancers from the Eastern Band in Cherokee, north Carolina, who came over and did traditional social dances and a Q&A panel and so forth. So we try to do things with the NCSS community that you wouldn't get just accidentally show up and find some things you wouldn't normally do. We're working on some resources that we're going to be sharing with teachers as well. That's wonderful.
Speaker 1:And can you tell us a bit you've been. Now you're in your. I understand is it your eighth year with, or starting your eighth year with, tcss as executive director?
Speaker 2:The executive director position with TCSS is a four-year term, okay, and my second term, which we've been consecutive, my second term ends in another year, and so we'll see what happens after that. May do it again, may not, but I really enjoy the people that I work with and the conferences are so much fun. Pulling me in the other direction, there were three little grandkids, you know. So we'll see.
Speaker 1:What do you see as the next trend in social studies or something new and upcoming that you're hearing kind of in the ether about social studies education?
Speaker 2:That's a good question, and currently I think the biggest question is the question Are we going to have a Department of Education on the federal level? How is that going to affect everything below it? And so if things get handed over to the states some of those responsibilities that the federal level has then how well will the states handle it? How much of an emphasis will there be on students who need extra help if the federal government isn't there to encourage that, so to speak? It's just at the moment. I think the question mark is a question mark and that's a concern that teachers have, and it's not a political thing necessarily. It is just what's it going to mean to me? What's it going to mean to my kids and my class and my school?
Speaker 1:Okay, do you feel like TCSS will be able to assist in some guidance for educators.
Speaker 2:TCSS focuses pretty much on social studies, professional development, with limited efforts on the political side, and so, when the time comes, we have done some of that. On other topics that are more social study specific, like what is known as CRT when that came out, we have done some things in that regard, but that was a social study specific content type thing. I don't know if TCSS will be involved in this. If something major changes from the federal level, then we would try to offer any guidance that we could, but it's a big question mark.
Speaker 1:We'll see. Yeah, absolutely Well, stay tuned. You know, give it another year and we'll definitely have a different discussion. I imagine a lot of those question marks will be having an answer and we'll see how TCSS can help solve some of the challenges or opportunities created by change. Thank you so much, mark. Thank you, this was quite a pleasure and I hope you have a great rest of the conference and I hope you enjoy your grandkids.
Speaker 2:Well, we will.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you that goes without saying we're certainly enjoying them.
Speaker 2:Thank you, thank youkids. Well, we will. Let me tell you, that goes without saying. We're certainly enjoying them, thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you, mark, thank you very much.