Management experience

CO-TEACH students credit the program for giving them classroom management skills that a university classroom couldn’t provide, lessons in relationship building, and a network of support among fellow CO-TEACH students. The mentor teacher is equally important, because here they have someone who sees them in action and can, with calm reassurance and practical experience, answer that panicked question of “what do I do?”

This is true even for student teachers like Zach Womack, who knew what he was facing, because he grew up near Tacoma and fell in love with teaching as a para-educator at Jason Lee Middle School—which he describes as the toughest in Tacoma.

“I think if I had gone anywhere else, I wouldn’t have done CO-TEACH, and I wouldn’t have done as well,” Womack says. “I couldn’t fail with the people around CO-TEACH.”

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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.

Without the insights of Bob Hitchcock (right), Jael Dalke would have mistaken street savvy for book smarts.

Photo by Laurence Chen
© 2004

Dalke agrees. “You get reassurance, the basics, feedback, and classroom management to emulate,” she says. “You learn that teaching is based on relationships. Mr. Hitchcock builds relationships with parents, he builds relationships with students, and he has students build relationships with each other.”

The latter is the most vital skill a new teacher can bring to the classroom, says Ethel Wellington-Trawick, who, until late July, was principal of Edison.

“I don’t care if someone has a four-point-oh, if they can’t connect with the kids,” Trawick says. “I don’t care if you ace all of those tests and all of those papers if you don’t show a concern and a commitment to children of color. The most important issue with at-risk students is relationships. It is loving the students beyond the façade they present to you.”

That’s a rare skill for a new recruit.

“Very few student teachers come in here with much age on them or life experience,” Wellington-Trawick says, juggling telephone calls, e-mails, and people knocking on her door. “Children who are at risk are so intuitive. And in that way, they may be more mature than many student teachers.”

Which makes the CO-TEACH experience all the more important. As Shinew puts it, “there is no standardized answer for the kid who is homeless and smells bad.”

Song for the future

The clock crawls to 2:45 p.m. in Miss Fisher’s classroom. Students put away pencils and paper, homework folders, and books. They stand beside their desks, set their chairs on top, gather their backpacks and coats, and line up at the door.

Miss Fisher leads them in songs as they await the day’s ending bell. Voices rise. Enthusiasm is far more important than pitch.

“My mother is a baker, a baker, a baker . . . ”

For a moment, all is youthful optimism. Odds are, most of their mothers are not the kind of professional bakers the song describes, but struggling servants to minimum wage service jobs. If they can find work at all.

But because of Bob Hitchcock, Jacqui Fisher, Dawn Shinew, and a long list of others on the CO-TEACH team, some of these first graders may become bakers, engineers, or writers. Or teachers in a tough inner-city school district where kids rely on schools for their square meals and positive adult influences, and struggle to be as book wise as they are street smart.

Veteran journalist Ken Olsen lives in Portland, Oregon.

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