Treating Student Teachers Like Doctors-In-Training
Tired of seeing ill-prepared teachers, Kansas’ Emporia State University has adopted an “all hands on deck” approach to training their students.
By Benet Magnuson
The Department of Education is not impressed with typical teacher preparation programs in the United States. “It has long been clear that as a nation, we could do a far better job of preparing teachers for the classroom,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan wrote last November in a press release announcing new proposed regulations of the programs.
The think tank National Council of Teacher Quality was more blunt in its 2013 report on the country’s teacher preparation programs, charging they had become “an industry of mediocrity.” Critics argued its methodology was deeply flawed and its findings “ridiculous,” but there was little disagreement that some programs left graduates woefully unprepared for the challenges of the classroom.
Shane Heiman, a second grade teacher in Kansas, said he saw the effects of a poor preparation program firsthand when another teacher at his school had a crisis during her first year. “She struggled with maintaining consistent classroom management on a daily basis. If you don’t have this, teaching content subjects effectively is nearly impossible,” he said. “Her program, you could tell it didn’t prepare her.”
Nationally, three out of ten new teachers leave the profession within the first five years. But despite being “tired, absolutely exhausted” during that first year, Heiman is still teaching eight years later. He attributes his career today to the intensity and the support of his college program at Emporia State University in Emporia, Kansas.
In 1992, when the dean of Emporia State’s teacher college was looking for new ways to prepare teacher candidates for the classroom, he looked for guidance from the medical school at the University of Kansas. A teacher’s first year in the classroom can be overwhelming, and Emporia State’s dean wanted to find out how medical school prepared students for the stresses of their first year as doctors.
Fascinated by the medical school’s model, where students are placed in hospitals early in the program to practice coursework under close supervision, Emporia State implemented a professional development school for education students in 1993.
Instead of one semester of student teaching, which is common at many teacher preparation programs, students at Emporia State complete a full year of student teaching at partner school districts across the state. Students are strategically matched with “mentor teachers” to ensure a good fit — a shy student would, for example, be matched with a mentor who has had success helping student teachers overcome classroom stage fright. Mentor teachers and principals are trained on how to supervise student teachers.
Every Emporia faculty member is involved with student professional development, supervising at least one student teacher each year (at many teachers colleges, most faculty members spend their time teaching or conducting research rather than directly supervising student teachers).
During the year of student teaching, the faculty supervisor, the mentor teacher, and the student teacher frequently evaluate each other. Matt Seimears, the current department chair at Emporia State’s program and a former eighth grade science teacher, says those assessments, along with independent review of the assessment data by the school’s Office of Field Placement and Licensure, help ensure the year of student teaching is a rigorous preparation for the first year in the classroom.
“When I taught, the best teachers at my school were always Emporia grads,” Seimars said. “I came from a one semester student teaching model, and I struggled.” He eventually decided to leave his middle school classroom and join the university’s professional development faculty. He says the Emporia program has almost 100 percent job placement for its graduates. Over three-quarters are still in the classroom five years after graduation, higher than the national average.
The program even offers schools a ‘guarantee’ on its graduates: If a teacher isn’t successful during the first year in the classroom, a supervisor from Emporia will travel to the school and provide one-on-one professional coaching for the teacher. Two months ago, the program won an award for exemplary achievement from the National Association for Professional Development Schools.
It’s been ten years since Emporia State last reviewed and revised its professional development school model. The school has set up a redesign committee to study what changes the program will need to make to keep up with new challenges in education. Graduates from the school are heading into classrooms that are more diverse than ever, in a turbulent political environment that — both in Kansas and around the country — threatens big changes in education funding, teacher employment protections, and student evaluations.
Making things more difficult, a third of Emporia State’s teacher college faculty plan to retire in the next five years, taking with them decades of experience. “We will have to get the new faculty acclimated to the professional development school model,” said Seimears, appearing anxious about the prospect. He paused and added, “We need to seek diversity.”
Recruiting diverse faculty and students has proven difficult at Emporia State. I sat in on the school’s reading teaching methods class, and while the students were working on small-group exercises, I asked the professor if the skewed demographics of the class — I counted twenty women and only one man — were common at the teacher’s college. “Yes,” she said, “and you notice they’re all white.” She said there were a few more men in her class the previous semester, but the vast majority of teacher candidates continue to be white women.
Nationally, the demographic gap between teachers and students in the United States is stark: Seventy-five percent of public school teachers are women, and 82 percent are white, while nearly half of public school students are kids of color. With recruitment efforts failing to attract significantly diverse teacher candidates, schools like Emporia State are developing curricula that prepare graduates to teach students across the demographic divide.
Jill Jones, an instructor at Emporia, has written a book with her colleagues on how to teach science to elementary students who do not speak English as a first language. The book grew out of a seminar that Jones and her colleagues teach to Emporia State students each semester, part of a broader curriculum the school has developed to prepare teachers for diverse student populations.
“The Hispanic families at our schools [where we used to teach] were very trusting of us,” Jones said. “They would listen, ask a couple of questions for clarification, but then explain that we were the experts and whatever we decided, they would support.”
Heiman, the second grade teacher, said Emporia State’s diversity curriculum was a reason why he chose to teach at his current school, the poorest and most diverse in the district, over a job offer at the second richest school in the district. Megan Cronk, currently a junior at Emporia State, similarly said she feels her coursework has prepared her to student-teach next year at a school in Wichita with many English language learners. “I’m excited for it, to practice how to teach students from different cultures,” Cronk said.
Looking ahead, Cronk admits she’s a little anxious about her first year in the classroom. “They say in your first year of teaching, you learn more than your whole time in college,” she said. But she’s also excited to finally have the job she wants, with plenty of guidance and mentorship for when she makes the inevitable mistake.
When I asked if she plans to stay in teaching for her entire career, she nodded and gave a little shrug. “I haven’t dropped out yet.”
Illustrations by Gracia Lam
Bright is made possible by funding from the New Venture Fund, and is supported by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Bright retains editorial independence.
