UTEP Builds a New Teacher Preparation Model
In Room 217 of Clara Barton Elementary School on Chicago’s South Side, first-year teacher Kyla McCartney, a graduate of the University of Chicago Urban Teacher Education Program, sat down with her personal teaching coach and expressed concern about the behavior of some of the third graders she had just dismissed for the day.
Sheri Roedel, the coach provided by McCartney’s teacher training program at the University of Chicago, listened intently as she looked out at the U-shaped configuration of empty desks in the room. “You haven’t changed this seating arrangement all year,” said Roedel. “What do you think?” Soon the pair of teachers, one new and one with eight years of experience, were into the details of how to seat 20 distinct personalities in small groups to make sure they learn as much as possible.
“Make it a positive. Tell the kids how you believe in them and that it’s part of the transition into fourth grade,” Roedel suggested. Such one-on-one advice from a veteran teacher is just one of the perks for graduates of the University’s Urban Teacher Education Program as it quietly develops a new model on how to prepare the nation’s teachers for success in challenging city schools.
Unlike many first-year teachers who struggle alone with classroom reality, McCartney has a built-in support system because she received her master of arts in teaching from the University of Chicago Graham School through UTEP. Coach Roedel, who taught fourth and fifth graders at Sawyer Elementary in Chicago for eight years, visits UTEP graduates every other week for their first two years in the classroom. Teachers from the program who leave Chicago receive online support. It is part of a strategy to battle national statistics that have found that at least a third of new teachers leave their first job within three years and half leave within five years.
“The first year of teaching is hard no matter where you do it,” McCartney said, describing how some of her friends educated in other programs left teaching before finishing their first year in the classroom. “I can’t imagine doing this without having support. It would be too hard.”
McCartney’s support system also includes Barton colleagues who share her background. She teaches next door and across the hall from two other UTEP graduates: third-grade teacher Eric Saathoff and first-grade teacher Eliza Bryant. The concentration of teachers trained at the University of Chicago has prompted some to affectionately call this stretch of Barton hallway “UTEP Alley.” In addition, a fourth UTEP graduate, Sonia Wang, teaches social justice, a social studies class for eighth graders, in another wing of the large school, which has about 800 students.
“Being with other graduates is a huge benefit. It gives you colleagues with similar philosophies and goals. You start out on the same page when you discuss your practice,” said Bryant, who is in her second year at Barton, making her the senior teacher on UTEP alley.
Barton also hosts two UTEP interns, graduate students who spend a year in the classrooms of two different veteran classroom teachers, who also serve as UTEP clinical instructors. Both Saathoff and Wang also did an internship at Barton before joining the staff.
This concentration of UTEP brainpower at Barton is not just happenstance. Barton principal Terrence P. Carter said he made a conscious decision to recruit UTEP graduates, along with graduates of some other select schools, because he was impressed with their intellect and their training, especially how much time students spend in actual classrooms while learning to be teachers. Most education schools in Illinois offer an average of 12 weeks or a little less than a semester of actual student teaching. In sharp contrast, UTEP teachers spend an entire school year in the classroom as interns, gradually assuming more responsibility. They also have summer school experiences and tutor students.
“I observed a first-year UTEP teacher and was floored at how well she was doing,” principal Carter said. “She just didn’t look like a first-year teacher and I think a huge factor is how much time she already had spent in the classroom.”
Carter said teacher education programs across the nation need to change and adopt the UTEP model of giving teachers-in-training more classroom experience, coupled with rigorous intellectual work. “The way most education schools do it now – sending out young people with no life experience, a bachelor’s degree and a semester or less of student teaching – is a joke,” he said.
Another major reason Barton recruits from UTEP graduates is their grounding in the balanced literacy method of teaching reading, Carter said. In balanced reading, teachers use a variety of actual books and materials at various reading levels to differentiate instruction for students informed by formative assessments. The goal is to help students improve while also making them into independent readers.
“Most schools of education just are not giving teachers the background they need to teach reading,” said Carter. “They give them a little and then it’s, ‘Go forth and prosper.’ Well, teaching reading is more complicated than that.”
Kavita Kapadia, director of UTEP at the University of Chicago Urban Education Institute, said partnerships with Barton and other Chicago Public Schools are critically important to the program, which was founded in 2003. Today, 26 graduates representing UTEP’s first three graduating classes are now teaching in urban public schools. Most of them, 21 teachers, are working in Chicago classrooms while five are in settings from California to Africa. Another 12 UTEP students are doing internships in Chicago schools, where they each work closely with a veteran teacher who serves as a UTEP clinical instructor.
“We are trying to create a community of support for our teachers,” Kapadia said.
Increasingly, other Chicago schools, like Barton, have clusters of UTEP graduates, interns, and veteran clinical instructors who can help improve each other’s practice while also providing a source of personal and professional support to each other. For example, this allows a young teacher to observe how a variety of teachers with different experience levels tackle instruction or classroom challenges, encouraging discussion, collaboration, and professional growth among all teachers and interns. Veteran teachers share the wisdom of their experience while young teachers help infuse new ideas into a school.
“A UTEP grad can visit the classroom next door to see how a fellow novice is using guided reading groups and then the same teacher can observe and talk with an experienced clinical instructor in the same school,” Kapadia said. “Ideally, there is conversation focused on practice, along with support and collaboration, among the entire community.”
It all represents the synergistic approach of the University of Chicago’s Urban Education Institute. The initiative seeks to improve pre-k-12 urban schooling through a combination of basic and applied research, teacher and leader training, the operation of four campuses of the University of Chicago Charter School, and support to a network of other new Chicago schools.
At Barton, such synergy is evident in the recent collaboration on a literacy lesson by University of Chicago-trained teachers McCartney and Saathoff, whose classrooms are right next door to each other. The teachers decided to help their third graders understand figurative language, including concepts such as metaphor and simile, through poetry. After reading poems by Langston Hughes to Dr. Seuss, the students were assigned a poetry writing exercise.
Saathoff’s students wrote poems based on “Misery is…” and “Bliss is…” while MCartney’s students tackled poems that used color to describe their feelings over a three-day period. Their students then switched books and assignments.
“Have you two thought of hosting a poetry slam, where the classes share their poems?” Roedel asked McCartney during a coaching session and yet another learning activity was born.
“I’ve really found it valuable to just bounce ideas off Sheri and she can help me get them to the next place,” said Saathoff. In one example, he mentioned to coach Roedel that his students liked to perform before the video camera. She suggested that his third graders write and act out their own story, which Saathoff could film. Soon the third graders had produced a video mystery tale about a student’s stolen gloves, which grew out of a child’s personal experience.
“Every teacher wants to find the like-minded soul in your school, where you can pull up a chair at the end of the day and share a moment with your students,” Roedel said. “That keeps you in the classroom, but it won’t necessarily push your practice. My job also is to ask the questions and provide the resources that go to that next level.”
Roedel said she first became became involved with UTEP as a clinical instructor when she taught at Sawyer. She remembers that having a UTEP intern helped her improve her own teaching.
“It takes you off autopilot. When you have to explain why you are doing something to someone else, it shows you the holes,” said Roedel, who is certified by the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards.
For Barton teacher Wang the informal support offered by her UTEP-trained colleagues is as important as the coaching and professional collaboration. Once a week, she carpools to work and takes a yoga class with McCartney and those commuter discussions often touch on what is happening her eighth graders. Her roommate also is another UTEP graduate, who teaches at Zapata Elementary School in Little Village.
“In UTEP, we really learn to educate the whole child, their minds as well as their social and emotion al needs. It’s recognizing the circumstances,” Wang said. She said she misses the Soul Strand, the aspect of UTEP studies that explored teacher identity and how race and culture affect teacher and students.
Those rides to and from work with McCartney, the dinners or drinks with other members of her graduating class and talks with her roommate all help feed her soul and keep her in the classroom.
“In any setting, your ideals don’t completely play out,” Wang said. “But talking to the people from my program reminds me what my aspirations are; what my nonnegotiables are as a teacher.”
