No surprises

Shinew knows about teaching’s grittier side. She attended college and did her student teaching in Ohio, with the familiar white, middle class children she grew up around. Her first teaching job was in Los Angeles County, California.

“Mine was the only white face in the room,” Shinew says. That experience proved invaluable. “I know what it’s like when a kid shows up at school and his brother was shot the night before.

“I have 20 years of experience, and I’m still surprised and appalled about some of the things kids live through,” Shinew adds. “But now it doesn’t immobilize me.”

Most of the people going into teaching also are young, middle-class white women. Shinew doesn’t want them to be immobilized either. Or driven out of the profession in enormous numbers. Which is where CO-TEACH comes in.

Shinew and WSU education faculty Tariq Akmal, Gerald Maring, Michael Pavel, and Merrill Oaks started CO-TEACH at WSU in 1999 with a five-year, $9.67 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education. This one-of-a-kind program is based on the premise that most new teachers aren’t prepared for what they confront in high-needs schools. (Consider, for example, that some of the first CO-TEACH students to arrive in Tacoma were shocked to find two homeless students and their families living out of their cars.) It reaches out across the state, from tribal schools to professional development workshops. But the heart of the teacher-training program is in poor neighborhoods of Yakima and Tacoma.

Like most hallmarks of successful change, it is slow and painstaking and requires enormous effort, infinite patience, endless energy, and optimism. It begins with Shinew and other committed College of Education faculty, who rely on instinct and observation to choose which students to recruit.

“There doesn’t seem to be any correlation between grade-point average and teaching ability,” Shinew says.

Shinew makes it clear to CO-TEACH candidates that they will deal with the most needy students. Meanwhile, the host schools evaluate the WSU students’ portfolios and decide which journeyman teacher will supervise which student teacher. Student teachers spend five weeks observing their mentor teachers before they start their semester of student teaching. Beyond the classroom experience, CO-TEACH students receive intensive mentoring and meet weekly with a supervising teacher and their fellow CO-TEACH students to share experiences and troubleshoot problems.

Students also are observed and critiqued by a variety of experienced teachers. They are videotaped at work in the classroom, a device that is used to show them where they shine and where they must improve.

CO-TEACH’s success in 28 schools bears out the notion that if you prepare student teachers, you retain them. Approximately 100 student teachers have gone through the program in Tacoma alone. More than 70 now teach in high-needs schools.

“This grant has helped us redefine who we are as a teacher preparation program,” Shinew says.

Ingersoll, who studies teacher turnover nationally, is not surprised to hear those results. Mentoring is key to keeping people in teaching. So is a breadth of practical experience.

“It stands to reason that if you have exposure to the realities you will be facing, you are more likely to stay,” Ingersoll says.

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Fisher is always on, always engaged, always moving. Her students never stop needing her attention.

Photo by Laurence Chen
© 2004

Street smarts

Bob Hitchcock leans back against the counter in his second-grade classroom and discusses the day ahead with Jael Dalke. Dalke is a senior from Mount Vernon who is preparing to student-teach in the CO-TEACH program this fall. Hitchcock already has her in the trenches. Today, she will handle both penmanship and a reading class. She should focus on exuding confidence and speaking less rapidly, Hitchcock coaches.

Teaching is nothing like Dalke envisioned, even after practicing in Pullman schools. Southeast Tacoma kids are street-smart, a survival skill they develop as a result of their troubled home lives. Without Hitchcock’s insights, Dalke would have mistaken street savvy for book smarts.

“You can have adult conversations with [these] second graders,” Dalke says. “But they can’t communicate well on paper. They don’t have good critical thinking skills.” Without the CO-TEACH experience, “I would have said, OK, we’re moving on to the third-grade curriculum. I would have been teaching above them. It would have been a disaster.”

Students here also automatically sense any lack of confidence, any opportunity to challenge, any opportunity to walk all over a teacher.

“They ask me, ‘is that how Mr. Hitchcock would do it?’ I’m still struggling with it,” Dalke says.

Hitchcock is confident of Dalke’s success. “She has the touch. She already knows which kids need more time and more help,” he says. “This is the end of her third week. Most student teachers take two months.”

Brittany Carlson ’01, now an Aurora, Colorado, fourth-grade teacher, always planned to teach in an inner-city school. She still was entirely unprepared for the world she encountered at one of Tacoma’s high-needs schools three years ago while in the CO-TEACH program.

“It was definitely an eye opener to me to see kids going through more in their seven years,” says Carlson, “than I had in my 21.”

Continued