One of the causes I had no idea I would get so passionate about is teacher preparation. I do believe that if you want to draw the best and the brightest, the education it takes to become a teacher should reflect a challenging curriculum. Nobody thinks oh I could probably walk into surgery and do just fine but there are many people who hold teaching as something they could just do. I do acknowledge that there are many classrooms that people could walk into and just teach and be just fine, but doing just fine isn't really working for the state of education. If instead we required the level of education it took to be in the medical field or even to be certified to practice law, we could raise the level of discourse and achievement in education.
In order to move towards this I want to do some research about Teach for America, an organization whose hearts I believe are in the right place but whose practice seems out of line with my beliefs. Before I begin my research I thought I'd make a list of flaws/improvements I would make to the Teach for America program based just on my experience and the experience of my friends.
1. Teaching is temporary: I know there is a large amount of TFA grads who continue to stay in the profession, but I also have heard in recruiting material "Hey come be a teacher for a while!" Teaching is a profession and while I'm all for methods to recruit people who would normally go into higher paying jobs, I want to recruit them to chose this as an employment path not view it as something they can just pick up for a while. Plus, acknowledging that even people in the teaching profession cannot handle staying in low performing schools, our lowest performing schools need the stability of good leadership rather than a revolving door of teachers.
2. Smartest minds in their field into the worst performing schools: Our worst performing schools need our best education professionals. In my first year of teaching I rarely tapped the knowledge I picked up from 19th century British fiction BUT I constantly thought about the discussions we had in our education courses and the numerous articles I've read about democratic classrooms, ELL language acquisition etc. In fact I was much more likely to draw from my subject matter courses that were geared towards english ed majors (writing theory, history of language, descriptive grammar) than I was to draw on regular English classes. Put the brightest minds in the field in that field and bring them in as mentors for students who want to go into that field or guest speakers on those subjects.
3.Your teacher education comes with your real experience. Yes I learned infinite amounts of knowledge by being in the classroom. My first year of teaching I had so much to reflect on. Coming from a failing, high-need school I feel I can speak about this- these schools often do not have a solid support for teachers. Sometimes they're working on it, but regularly part of the failing high need part is that they lack the educational support for their teachers. When I go into a classroom I have a lot scaffolded (to use and education term) about educational practices etc. so even if I don't get the support standing right next to me, I've got my professors' voices ringing in my ear. I can't imagine trying to learn the research and be in front of a classroom. It sets people up for failure, burn-out etc. People who could be REALLY good at teaching may not be able to handle this sort of information overload. I would much rather opt for TFA being a nationwide teaching college than the sink or swim in the ocean that it's currently set up as.
4. What's wrong with being a classroom aide? or a co-teacher? Here is my dream for TFA- it's an nationwide accrediation process that teaches you the educational research while lining you up for one year of being a teacher's aide (and getting some GOOD teachers to be aides to... come on they should be able to do that.) and maybe then one year of being a co-teacher or student teacher before you ever walk into your own classroom. I hated having to observe a classroom once a week so my partners and I would very quickly take over the classroom for our one hour twice a week or whatever it was WHICH IS FINE because not only by then did I have some educational research, a professor to help walk us through our practices, and a cohort of people going through the same thing BUT there was also an experienced teacher there to help along the way, watch what we were doing and discuss it afterwards. My best observation times came at my very first observation where we taught one class period, watched our teacher for a class period and were able to discuss with a regular class teacher and a special education teacher what we should be doing to alter our practice. I still obsessively write things on the board because of that experience.
I'm going to start with that, see where the research takes me, and I'll get back to you.
3 comments:
Susan,
I landed upon your blog, as an a current TFA corps member who has been through the same education training you have, I thought I could respond/guide your research.
Although TFA is a two-year commitment, 2/3 of corps members stay in the classroom, either in the school or district where they served their commitment, or in another high-needs school. The other third of alums typically go on to work on educational reform in another field, like law. TFA stresses that in order for this movement to work, we need to stay in education in some capacity. So while I agree that education is a profession (obviously), I wanted you to know that the vast majority of corps members I've spoken with see themselves staying in education for the long haul.
As for the training, until I was accepted into the program, I had no idea how rigorous it was. I assumed that having completed a certification program and student teaching would put me about a thousand steps ahead of other corps members. While I definitely was ahead, I was surprised by how thorough training is and how capable other corps members are. As part of the interview, applicants have to teach a demo lesson, which gives a pretty good indication of their comfort in front of a group and their ability to create an objective and a creative way to teach it. Also, everyone in my corps had some type of leadership experience with students in the past, so no one was walking in blind.
After we were accepted, but before we showed up for institute this summer, we had 35 hours of work to do, which included reading, observing, and reflecting. It was pretty repetitive for me, since it was very in line with the education training we received, but I thought that also spoke to the legitimacy of the program. Then, this summer, we came to NYC for our 6-week institute. The first two weeks consisted of sessions all day. We were each assigned a school, a collaborative group (I just had a partner), and an adviser who guided everything we did this summer. We were given a curriculum that was far from scripted, but it did provide us with objectives to cover each day. Then, we worked with our collaborative, with whom we co-taught, and our adviser to plan lessons and classroom management based on the classes we'd been taking. The rest of the four weeks of the summer, we taught for two hours each morning and attended sessions for several hours each afternoon. Then, every evening we had more sessions to go to, and then we had to plan for the next day or the next week. It was a very intense version of student teaching, and again, I was surprised at how rigorous and thorough the training really was. Of course, I was at an advantage having taught before, but I didn't see a single corps member who was a teaching disaster. We received a lot of guidance from summer mentor teachers (aka cooperating teachers who never left our classrooms) and our advisers (who were like student teaching supervisors, completing observations and debriefing them).
Now that we're in the regions in our real schools, we have bi-monthly professional development every Saturday, and we all have a program director, who acts like a student teaching supervisor would. My PD will come into my classroom at least four times each semester to observe and troubleshoot. She's also the person I'll call anytime I'm having trouble, and she'll help me figure out what to do. We're provided with an incredible amount of support outside of what the district has to offer (if anything), so it's far from a "sink or swim" mentality. The amount of support was actually the thing that drew me to TFA. I liked the idea of having that during my first couple years of teaching.
I hope that helped a little bit, and I'm sorry if my thoughts were jumbled. I just figured that I might be able to help you understand what TFA is all about, especially since we're coming from similar perspectives. Of course, TFA definitely has flaws, but I think it really is a much better program than many people give it credit for.
I hope all's well!! I'm teaching 7th and 8th grade writing in Bridgeport, CT. Did you know Connecticut is the state with the largest achievement gap? You really wouldn't believe it here. I have a lot of work ahead of me, but I'm excited. :)
hmm I have a friend from another class that didn't have this same positive experience. Hope all of your classmates get through it with a positive experience! I know out here they released all of their first year class TFA teachers because of the budget cuts.
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