Note: I am currently a first year member of Teach For America in the Mississippi Delta. I’m from the Berkshires, graduated from Hartwick College in Oneonta, NY and am a 2008 TFA corps member.
So when I flew back to Pittsfield for Easter break, my dad showed me an article in the Globe about Teach For America (TFA). Now I had heard that TFA was branching out to Boston this year (they oddly had that as a region choice last year) but I knew little else.
I’m really interested in any thoughts from BMGers about the whole thing. In Mississippi, teacher unions are generally weak and not a big deal. In addition, TFA has been here since 1991 with by now thousands of corps members coming in and out of the region. We have a good relationship with the Governor and the State Superintendent and have many corps members staying well past their required two years to become solid members of their communities. So, in many ways things look a lot different here than they do back home. (After a year here I still call Massachusetts “home” but I’ve caught myself calling Clarksdale “home” as well)
Teach For America’s website is here. There’s a lot of information but it’s largely a recruiting site, so if you’ve got questions about anything, feel free to ask. I guess I have a conflict of interest, but my experience is largely with the region I’m in and, more specifically, my devotion is to my classroom more than to the organization that has got me into the classroom and continued to help me along the way. I’ve never been too into dogmatic beliefs.
As I’ve discovered many times in the last year, any conversation about Teach For America is also a conversation about everything from dealing with the larger educational problems to budget cuts, to teacher unions to state politics to NCLB to…well, you get the picture. So what do ya’ll think?
already posted on this subject here
I have limited information; I had never heard of the organization before my company hosted a Teach for America event for science and math recruits. I wandered by the reception for a bit, and was quite taken by the idealism and commitment of the young people I spoke to, and I was moved by the speeches of a woman describing her successes and failures as a TFA teacher and the local Boston leader (whose name escapes me now).
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p>Particularly for science education I think it is valuable to have recent graduates who would otherwise go directly to graduate school take a couple of years to share their passion for science with youngsters. I think engaged TFA teachers have an excellent chance of lighting a spark that would otherwise remain unlit in many of their students.
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p>One young woman I met had been the student of a TFA teacher whom she credited with being a major transformative figure in her life; she was now motivated to help others succeed as her teacher had inspired her.
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p>The model of TFA isn’t just about the impact that young, privileged teachers might have on underprivileged kids. Perhaps it’s more significant that the experience will shape the worldview and priorities of the young teachers who (because of their privilege and education, and regardless of their immediate career choices) will have significant influence and power over the next decades.
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p>2. You’re right, TFA discussions are really Rohrshach tests on ed reform.
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p>I love TFA. Lots of the most impressive change agents I’ve seen in this field started with TFA.
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p>We have a couple TFA alums in our school. One is in her 7th year in K-12, another guy is in his 13th year. Phenomenal, both.
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p>3. The average US teacher comes from the bottom third of college grads. TFA folks tend to come from the top 10%.
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p>You’ve gotta think that’s good for kids, even if it creates some resentment from the status quo protectors.
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p>4. Indeed Teach For America seems to have a positive effect on kids.
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p>And principals say they’d prefer TFA folks to other new teachers.
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p>5. The “anti” strategy is the same for all parts of ed reform.
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p>a. Set up straw man. Claim the program seeks to do something much bigger than the program itself says.
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p>b. Knock down straw man.
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p>c. Challenge motivations of people involved with change. They are self-promoters, self-absorbed, and generally bad people.
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p>….Thereby do all possible to maintain our status quo where about 5% of inner-city kids ever get a college degree! Yay.
One question I have is what you learned in your training for TFA. What did they choose to focus on during those few weeks? What did they waste time examining, and what should they have mentioned that they didn’t?
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p>One criticism I’ve read is that many TFA members use the organization to check off the “helped out less fortunate” box on their lifetime/resume to-do list. How accurate is that criticism?
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p>Does TFA prepare you to be a teacher, and are you personally looking forward to a teaching career?
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p>I ask these questions with genuine sincerity, and would appreciate your answers. If I don’t react to them for a while, I apologize in advance, but I will be away from the Internet for the next 5 days or so; I will read them when I get back.
I think before I go on about my thoughts and ideas about Teach For America it’s important to note that I’m just a corps member in the organization. I’m not a staffer, a coordinator or anybody involved at any level in decision making or policy. I’m a teacher and these opinions are all strictly my own.
As I understand it, TFA began less as a “movement” and more as a way to help areas in the country struggling to fill teaching positions with qualified teachers. In most ways this is still the central goal of TFA but, in the twenty years since Wendy Kopp started the whole thing, it has evolved into a “movement to eliminate educational inequity” in this country. That statement is much grander in scope and that, combined with the steady increase in activity and publicity over the last decade, invites certain criticisms.
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p>Regarding the five week training every corps member gets at the beginning of their commitment:
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p>”Institute” is meant to prepare corps members to become good, solid beginning teachers. Note that I said beginning teachers. Teach For America never explicitly said that Institute was all the training you needed, and only a fool would think that. It’s their intention, whether said in the brochures or not, to set you on the path to becoming a highly effective teacher. Quality teachers aren’t manufactured or molded but I’ll say more on that in a moment.
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p> In addition to the five weeks of institute, there is further training once you go to your region and throughout the two year commitment there are required professional development days once a month, additional development meetings for first years and every corps member has a “program director” whose job is to observe you, meet with you on your progress and development and guide you toward becoming a better teacher for your children.
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p>Could there be more? Sure. The primary thing I wish I had more of is in-classroom experience. But you know what? That truly only comes by actually being in a classroom for a long period of time. I have friends who were education majors and their time spent student teaching, while valuable, was not necessarily more effective for their professional advancement than institute. For both of us, it’s time in the classroom working as a teacher that gives you the training you need. It’s like that with any skill set: you can learn theory until you’re blue in the face, but skills need to be honed with practice.
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p>We spent a lot of time learning how to long-term plan, lesson plan and develop effective teaching strategies. I knew I was middle school ELA so I spent additional hours being given training and advice from actual English teachers and literacy specialists. Some were TFA alumni and others were teachers/professionals hired by TFA from the Houston Independent School District. That, and the 90 minutes a day spent teaching a classroom full of actual students were the most helpful things at Institute. Looking back, what I wanted more from Institute was further in-depth training at the specific skills involved in teaching middle school ELA. I wanted to know how to teacher vocabulary, grammar, writing skills, reading comprehension and the like in as highly effective way as possible. I would have wanted a longer institute if possible to help with those things, but by and large the five weeks were crammed (and I seriously mean crammed) with quality instruction. Sure there were times when I felt that time was wasted with sessions on diversity and inspirational messages, but that’s more of a reflection on my personality and experiences once I got to the Delta.
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p>Subutai, you asked also about the criticism leveled at those looking to TFA primarily as a “resume builder”. I have number of thoughts about this:
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p>While I can’t look into the souls of all corps members (CMs), it makes sense that there will be some, maybe even a good sized amount, of CMs who mainly look at their time in TFA as a way to advance their future. I’m not going to pretend that I’m purely altruistic and that I’m upset about the positive impact my time in TFA could have on future endeavors.
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p>But ya’ know what? I can’t imagine surviving these last 11 months if my primary motivation was to pad my resume. I would have been gone by week three of Institute or by Thanksgiving at the latest. I personally know a number of first years who didn’t make it past Institute and have had friends and roommates leave since school began. There’s no statistical data available on the amount of people who leave before their commitment, but people do leave. Yet the vast majority stay, and you can’t stay in the kind of classrooms, schools and environments that TFA CMs all over the country do without loving your children and caring about their futures more than your own. I couldn’t imagine getting through this year only caring about myself. I would have been back home in the Berkshires after my first class fight. I don’t know of anybody in TFA that thinks teaching is simply something to do to pass the time until grad school comes along. .
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p>In relation to this, you asked about my personal motivations. At Hartwick, I majored in English and Political Science with a concentration in International Relations. I also always thought about teaching since being at Pittsfield High School. I can’t say with any certainty if I’ll be a teacher in ten years. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. Most likely, if I do continue to teach it will be somewhere closer to home. But I may also go to graduate school for an unrelated field that interests me. I don’t really know. But I can say that this first year alone will be seared into my mind for the rest of my life and I have been deeply affected by this experience. I may leave teaching for a few years only to return to it later in life. Again, who knows?
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p>My last point is this:
There is another criticism leveled at TFA primarily by unions that says TFA cheapens the professionalism of teachers. It “devalues” teaching as something that anybody can do and likens it to a volunteer job and less as a career. I can’t think of any criticism that is more off the mark. How anybody could believe after their two years as a CM that teaching is a lesser profession is beyond me. Teaching is a skill on par with lawyers, doctors and diplomats. The truth is anybody can be a teacher . But to teach well, to be an amazing teacher year after year is extremely difficult and those who are great teachers should be valued by all.
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p>Over Christmas break I went back home to Pittsfield. My best friend, a graduate of Fairfield University, applied to TFA and is going to Chicago next year to teach high school science. We’re very different people but I am confident that he has the correct motivations for joining the program. While we were having a party at his house, a mutual friend of ours from Harvard was their with a couple of people we didn’t know. They heard that I was in TFA and we started talking. Two of them were thinking about applying for the third deadline because “in this economy, it’s going to be tough to find a job”. I told them both that if that was the main reason for joining TFA, they better just not bother. I’m pretty sure most corps members agree with me on that.
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p>If you’re interested in the actual experiences of TFA CMs’, try checking out TeachFor.Us, the blogging site for TFA. There’s a whole mess of experiences from all over the country. Let me recommend Dispatches from the Delta who is a friend of mine, a second year CM and teacher of the year at his school and Gary Rubinstein’s TFA Blog
who is a veteran teacher who was a CM in 1991. His criticisms of TFA are honest and stem from a love of the organization that he was part of the beginning of.
of TFA in the beginning including very poor preparation. There are links, I think, in the post you mention. Linda Darling-Hammond expressed these personally to Wendy Kopp and was excoriated by the ed reform people Goldstein mentions.
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p>Darling-Hammond has since conducted more research and found that TFA candidates do know worse and sometimes better than other uncertified teachers.
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p>If schools want to use TFA teachers, that’s their prerogative. If they want to replace laid off teachers with TFA candidats, that’s problematic. On the average, teachers become more effective as time goes on. In the vast majority of cases (85% according to TFA), TFA teachers will leave the profession, ultimately depriving schools of what they need most: a strong corps of experienced, certified teachers.
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p>In Boston, TFA candidates would effectively be scabs, depriving employees of jobs so a bunch of (generally) privileged kids can play at being teachers for a couple of years.
The globe article did not explicitly say that TFA members were replacing teachers that were laid off. In fact it said the exact opposite. Secondly, I’d be a lot more impressed with the indignation of the Boston Teacher’s Union if Teach For America’s presence in Boston was in the preliminary stages. It takes years for TFA to come into a region. Years of meetings with principals, superintendents and governors. I’m sure the unions expressed similar outrage during that period of time. I just can’t find proof of that anywhere.
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p>Again with the biased tone:
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p>Where does that tone come from? I already addressed it as well as I can.
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p>Look, nobody thinks that TFA is the best long-term solution to the very serious and very real educational problems we have in this country. It’s just one small part of a much larger problem.
my point of view is. It is also, I think, reasonable.
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p>I’m glad you’re doing what you’re doing. If you end up in teaching, I’ll be even happier. I know you’re working hard and your heart is in the right place. You’re engaging in volunteerism and trying to help people. That’s commendable, regardless of Teach for America.
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p>You’re a college graduate. You undoubtedly worked hard and did well. I won’t make any assumptions about your background, but if TFA’s website is to be believed (and I think it can), you have a bright future ahead of you, or you wouldn’t have been chosen to teach in the program. TFA turned down about 15,000 people and chose you as part of a cohort of 2,900.
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p>Even if you weren’t privileged before you went to a private college that costs 32,000+ a year, you are now. Maybe not as privileged as the kid from Princeton, Duke, Wellesley, and Spelman, but privileged nonetheless.
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p>In addition to corpsmembers who don’t complete their commitment to TFA, almost all of you will not enter teaching. If Boston teachers are laid off and the BPS turns around and pays TFA teachers, they are replacing them. The Boston teachers won’t have an average SAT score of 1320; most, if not all, will not have graduated from a competetive college; few will become future leaders. But the laid off Boston teachers would do something the TFA teachers do: stick around until they are effective.
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p>TFA should not enter into the Boston schools until that time when they aren’t replacing a large group of laid off teachers. The BPS laid off, or is laying off, teachers to meet budget needs, then they’re going to turn around and pay TFA teachers? How does that make sense? Why is that a good thing? There is no valor in being a scab.
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p>It should come as no surprise to you that I oppose TFA. If a school system wants them, so be it. That’s why we still have somewhat local control of our schools. The danger in TFA is distracting policy-makers from the real problems facing education and some of the real solutions, such as getting more teachers properly educated, dedicated, and certified.
Thoughts on that?
And something else:
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p>I’m not sure “volunteer” is an apt description of TFA members. Sure, I’m a member of an organization that is, in part, funded by Americorps, but I’m an employee of the Clarksdale School District and not of TFA. Theoretically I could quit TFA right now and still keep my job. But that’s Mississippi and not Massachusetts and I appreciate the difference.
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p>Mississippi’s primary problem is teacher shortages. Some schools are filled with a majority of teachers on emergency certification programs that are renewed every year because the schools can’t find any qualified applicants. Does the problem look the same in inner city Boston schools? Of course not. And that’s where critics have a fair point.
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p>Of course I’ve been privileged to have had a quality college education. I was privileged to go to solid public and parochial schools my whole life and I was privileged to be able to afford going to Hartwick after attending Berkshire Community College. But I can’t apologize or do anything about the privileges I’ve been afforded in life other than to work hard to ensure that others not born into the socioeconomic conditions I had get a reasonable shot at succeeding in life.
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p>You say that “TFA should not enter into the Boston schools until that time when they aren’t replacing a large group of laid off teachers.” I tend to agree with that. I know there has been a similar problem in Dallas this year as well as with other urban areas. But to characterize TFA CMs as willing “scabs” in this budget fight is unfair and tells an incomplete story. Not a wrong story, but an incomplete one.
to belittle what you’re doing. There are probably more lucrative career paths for you to pursue, but you chose to make some sacrifices in order to help people. That is commendable. I may disagree with TFA as policy, but I respect what you’re trying to do.
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p>As far as TFA teachers as scabs goes, that would be the effect of their entry into the Boston Public Schools. I don’t see that as unfair. People are still out of jobs. That’s what matters. That may not have been the intention of TFA when negotiations with Boston started, but that’s the effect. The organization can choose not to enter Boston at the moment. Laid off teachers can’t choose to get their jobs back. What else matters?
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median is the best statistic to describe the central tendency of teacher persistence. What’s the modal average, for example? Still, if half of Boston teachers leaves in five years, half stays longer. Almost all TFA teachers will leave in two years. Your thoughts on that?
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p>Most teachers that leave the profession leave in the first five years. That’s well-established by research. Persistence is one key to improving academic achievement.
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TFA candidates could take the normal route to becoming a teacher. It requires some coursework, student teaching (pre-practicum and practicum). this can be done in undergraduate preparation, even at high-end colleges. I attended a top five national liberal arts college and took education licensure courses. Why didn’t they?
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p>Many practicing teachers see TFA people and participants in the former state program for accelerated licensure (which practitioners came to call “ten week wonders”), as people seeking a short cut to the profession. This, in their opinion…and mine, most of the time…cheapens the profession. And they don’t last; and there’s some research supporting that.
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p>Student teaching is classroom time, supervised and immediately reparable (if it’s going badly). TFA people are simply thrown into the classroom; and quite frankly, with evaluation as poor as I have witnessed it, a TFA could be a disaster for the kids. Those people usually leave in short order and the system has to backfill.
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p>Tachers see themselves as professionally committed; and they see TFA as dilettantes.
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p>And finally, the fact mentioned that these people came from elite colleges…well, so did I, and that was certainly no guarantee of anything. I had probably 30 student teachers assigned to me over the years, and the very worst one…the one we begged the supervisor to fail (he refused, and gave the kid a B) was from Harvard. The VERY best, the one we knew could teach after one week, and we begged the system to hire (they didn’t) came from UMass/Boston. My sibling is nationally board certified, and has won national prizes for teaching…and did all preparation at one of our state colleges.
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p>Takes more than good SAT scores to teach. There’s more than a little stink of elitism about how TFA is presented.
I know of teachers that are impressed by the TFA teachers around them, I know of teachers that are pleasantly surprised that TFA teachers are better than they expected and I know teachers that still don’t like the idea of TFA in their schools. What I don’t have are any statistics to back up my anecdotes. Do you?
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p>What I do have is a survey of principals that have TFA teachers in their schools that shows:
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p>Principals are also impressed or content with the level of training TFA corps members have as well as their achievements in the classroom.
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p>Now this was a survey done by Policy Studies Associates that TFA trumps on their website. I can only find the summary of the survey, so do with that what you will.
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p>To answer your question about not going down the traditional educational path:
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p>Personally, it was always in my mind that I wanted to be a teacher, but not enough to commit to majoring in it within the two years I had at Hartwick. I double majored in the areas I was most passionate about. I know of many certified teachers that taught me in school that came from industry and elsewhere that went into teaching later in life that were excellent teachers. Maybe some people think that doing TFA is the easy way into teaching, but I think many students chose majors in college other than Education because they had broad ideas of where they wanted to go with their passions after college.
I am quite certain you couldn’t have majored in education. Most liberal arts private colleges don’t have education majors and many states, Massachusetts among them does not accept an education major any more ( a mistake for elementary education, in my opinion). I majored in British Lit and took certification courses.
Hartwick offers, like most liberal arts private colleges, a College Teacher Education Program. But it still is true that the course requirements for the Foundational Course work and the Pedagogical course work in addition to the hours required for student teaching would have been too much for my two years at Hartwick.
One thing I haven’t seen mentioned in this thread is that Boston already has a successful program designed to train new young teachers. Its called the Boston Teacher Residency (BTR).
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p>http://www.bpe.org/btr/program
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p>The programs are somewhat similar although BTR has full year of in-classroom teacher training in addition to its Masters Degree Curriculum. I believe also that BTR has a focus on recruiting locally (they advertise on the T all the time) so that they get applicants who will stay in the Boston system past their BTR term.
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And that’s the kind of thing I wanted to hear about. To hear me talk about TFA so far may make it seem as if I’m its most ardent supporter. But have a casual conversation with a normal corps member (and I said normal, not a full convert) will show that from the inside we see a lot we’d like to be different. But for now, and I know this seems stupid, I can’t go too far off the reservation in terms of my public opinions. It’s part of the deal with Americorps as well as part of the generally smart notion that it’s not a good idea to criticize the groups you’re currently in (future recommendations, employment opportunities within the program itself etc.) That doesn’t mean I don’t share similar thoughts to some of you and that doesn’t mean the corps members I know don’t hang around at bars on weekends complaining about certain things about TFA. My purpose of the post was to hear thoughts and ideas of all sorts about TFA coming to Boston. I’m happy with the reaction.
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p>But please when you think about TFA (and I get the sense that some of you do already) please think about it as a two-tier organization. At the top level is the corporate model run by Wendy Kopp with agendas, politicking, public relations and the controversy it invites. But on the lower level are thousands of young people (and some a bit older) that don’t have time to think about the larger picture but just work hard every day to make sure their students have a quality education. Some fail or struggle (God knows I had a rough beginning) but others excel at an extraordinary level. But what should be the mark of any TFA teacher in the struggling/failing schools their placed in is a dedication to constantly improving themselves. If a TFA teacher is content with their mediocrity or struggles and is not working every minute of every day to improve, than their not what the program wanted.
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p>So keep that in mind as we all do. Criticizing TFA is not criticizing all TFA teachers. Believe me, we understand that.
and I tell my kids every day to reread what they write before they hand it in to me.
TFA put up “Boston” as a site to choose when I applied in 2007/2008. I put that, CT and NYC as my top choices because I felt that I would be more likely to stay in the area after my commitment for the obvious reasons of friends, family and familiarity. In reality I may stay for three or four years, but I was raised in New England and can’t see myself raising a family in the area I’m teaching in. There’s a Mississippi Teacher Corps program that does the same thing as BTR. I like both ideas.
I think it’s important to remember that TFA is placing a total of 20 teachers in Boston, Cambridge, and Chelsea. Pro or con, it’s not a big program in this area yet.
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p>I don’t think TFA teachers will be replacing any laid off teachers. My son and daughter are BPS students and have had an uncertified math teacher all year; I would be happier if they had someone young, bright and ambitious who doesn’t know what she’s doing rather than the older, apathetic teacher who doesn’t know what she’s doing they’ve had this year.
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p>Having said all that, there is certainly an agenda among some education reformers to deprofessionalize teaching. I don’t believe this comes from TFA, but I do think TFA is absolutely used by these forces as an example against teachers’ unions and professional teachers in general.
to the question pablophil asks: TFA grew out of the movement that believes anyone can teach if they know their subject.
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p>For the life of me, I can’t find the article I read about Linda Darling-Hammond’s first encounter with a very arrogant Wendy Kopp when she first launched TFA. The training in those early days was abysmal, and Kopp was convinced that it was adequate.
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p>Personally, ideologically, I find the premise of TFA, that involving the “best and the brightest” in education for two years will lead to great improvements in education, repugnant and not the way education will be improved.
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p>As pablophil points out, high SAT scores don’t correlate with good teaching. I’ve been in the profession for a while and my best student teachers and best teachers weren’t the best college students. And it wasn’t their subject matter that made them good teachers; it was their subject matter pedagogy and interpersonal skills that did the trick.
adquately assessed until a significant number of TFA teachers have been in the trenches for at least 10 years. Until then, I’m sorry.
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p>I can’t agree more with the folks here who have pointed out to you that good teaching has little to do with the teacher’s SAT scores or expensive private college tuition. Bullshit.
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p>Good teaching has everything to do with the efficacy of one adult’s ability to convey information in a lasting and meaningful manner to a child. Do traditional teacher prep programs ensure that? No. Do trendy TFA programs do that? No.
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p>Get back to me in 10 years; we’ll chat.
what makes the most difference in success in class. It’s emotional intelligence, classroom management, and creating and nurturing the human motivation to learn.
My SAT and “high-powered” BA from the College for the Criminally Overprivileged (a fond nickname, believe me)proved immediately inadequate for the job of teaching in an urban middle school. Firstly, parsing out John Donne’s conceits wasn’t covered in the curriculum; and secondly getting them to sit and open their minds was a primary focus.
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p>I knew great teachers from Ivies and great teachers from Westfield State. TFA seems to have decided that what schools need are more people from Ivies. I disagree, even as someone eligible for The Right One dating service. What we need are good teachers. TFA may produce some; but along the way it may produce some disasters as well. I’d suggest gently that people pursuing the traditional route to licensure have a higher final success rate.
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p>Structuring long and short term lesson plans according to some stretegic plan is teachable…what you do on Day 1 when a fight break out in class and you don’t cover the plan is a very different thing. And often not teachable beyond general bromides.
for a student teacher, and I have to say that for all the angst and reflection occurring these days in teacher prep programs, both traditional and nontraditional, some things remain the same: classroom management and instructional persona cannot be taught in college. And the failure or inability to successfully master these two essentials will make or break a teacher in short order.
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p>Teaching is all about schtick, the persona. With the right persona, classroom management is not an issue, engaging students is not an issue, and getting students to stretch and extend is not an issue. Unfortunately, the only way to find out if you’re going to be an effective teacher is to actually practice on real, live students. Not a good bargain there for kids, but it’s the nature of the beast.
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p>Attracting the right personalities to teaching is a much overlooked factor in all the brouhaha over effective teaching–and there’s good reason for that. No matter how high your tuition or your SAT scores are, there’s one thing your college cannot do for you: make you charismatic.
Of course, traditional prep allows you to practice before it’s for real…not that you are really READY for that first real class.
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p>And this is what makes many TFA’s unprepared: they don’t get to practice…they’re immersed for real.
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p>I’ve argued for years that teachers should license themselves…a professional standards board, where teachers decide who is licensed and then we are responsible for evaluating and (yes) removing the bad ones. But the two travel together, determining who is a teacher and determining who is NOT a teacher.
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p>Of course, I’ve also heard that teachers are not interested in reform of the professiona and the system.
and soft-spoken. She gets eaten alive pretty regularly by one of my rowdy classes, so her focus there has not been so much on delivering creative lessons but merely trying to hold on for the ride. One of my other classes, however, poses a different challenge. They are high achieving and she has had difficulty establishing authority (not control). And what does her expensive private college program worry about? The long-form lesson plan. It’s all about the lesson-plan-as-script. WTF?
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p>What she has gotten that’s helpful, however, is one-on-one coaching in wresting control back from the natives. I can say to her, “I don’t even believe you. Say it again like you mean it.” Or, “It’s okay to tell them you think it’s boring, too. Take every opportunity to establish some intimacy.” Or, “There’s no law that says kids have to like everything they read. Liking is not a synonym for learning.” Or, “And sometimes the lesson you thought was sublime is actually a piece of shit. Tell the kids you screwed up and try something else.” Had she been tossed to these classes as a TFA newbie, she would not have made it.
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p>Speaking of wresting control, teachers have been their own worst enemy in establishing a credible level of professionalism around the discipline. It’s bullshit like high SAT scores or ivy league schools or rheumatic state college teacher prep programs that get in the way of meaningful reform. Until the old paradigms are jettisoned, little will change and we’ll be trying on the latest and greatest program once again as TFA and its clones fade into the sunset.
for the most part I agree with you. While I was never timid or soft spoken, I didn’t exactly know how to be for most of this year. It was trying new things, getting that teacher look and teacher voice and establishing the I was the dominant person in the classroom. While it’s been improving these last few months, I cannot wait until next year when I walk in on the first day knowing what to expect from the school and from the kids and I know just how to be. I don’t think that’s strictly a TFA thing at all. That’s the nature of the profession. You gotta do it to be good at it. What was tough sometimes was getting the teachers who were doing it for 15-20 years and who forgot just how tough their first year(s) were. I have been helped so much by my principal and the relatively younger colleagues at my school who have observed me and helped me along this year. I have all the respect you can have for experienced teachers.
that one-on-one mentoring you do is replicated by the good Program Directors TFA has. The good ones (and I have one of them) observe you regularly, have you observe other good teachers, discuss honestly how to be better in all aspects and follow up with your improvement.
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p>This isn’t enough. One good thing the traditional prep programs provide is extended daily partnering with a supervising practitioner during the entire time the student teacher is teaching, every day, for months. Having a mentor is not the same thing. And periodically observing other teachers, while helpful, does not go far in shaping daily rigorous instruction for months on end.