Research

That Matters

School Partners: Making an Impact Where It Matters Most

Suburban schools typically have more resources than their urban counterparts. The teachers have more experience. And most of the classroom students — white, middle-class, well-behaved — resemble most of the college students who become teachers. Chances for success in this cooperative, homogeneous, productive workspace are high. So why not send teacher interns to the suburbs for field placements?

The University of Washington did — for years. “That was our old model,” says Allen Glenn, dean emeritus of the College of Education. “We sent our pre-service teachers out to a master teacher in a model school for their preparation. But, given the challenges facing many schools today, we had to ask ourselves: ‘Is that what we should be about?’ ”

The faculty at the University of Washington College of Education asked the question, examined data showing growing achievement gaps, saw the startling numbers of teachers unprepared to teach in high-needs urban schools, and they answered the question with a resounding “No.”

Times had changed. Classrooms had changed. Even local upper-middle-class suburban districts had changed, with influxes of ethnically diverse students who were learning English. “When test scores in these districts dropped, the first inclination was to blame the students,” says Glenn. “You simply cannot use that argument any more. You cannot lay the blame on the students because we know it’s not right.”

Teaching models at the UW had to change. Student placement strategies had to change. UW faculty made a decision to begin concentrating student teachers in Puget Sound’s highest needs schools and to put the university’s resources into creating meaningful partnerships with those schools, in and outside classrooms.
“We decided as a college to go to high-needs schools, where good teachers work, but more are needed and where far too many students are getting short-changed,” says Glenn.

COMMON TOUCHSTONES

With funding from the Ginger and Barry Ackerley Foundation, combined with Teachers for a New Era funds from the Carnegie Foundation, the redistribution of student teachers moved forward in 2005. In 2001, only one-fifth of the program’s students had been placed in high-poverty schools. By 2008, that number would increase to four-fifths.

Glenn, the first director of the UW Ackerley Partnership, knew the transition wouldn’t be easy. “If you take this seriously, it raises all kinds of issues that must be addressed differently.”

The move to partner schools prompted long conversations inside the teacher education program. How could faculty members reshape their teaching around new classroom realities? How could they learn from teachers inside the partner schools? How could they ready student teachers for an experience that could be overwhelming? How could they not?

“We are in the business of preparing people to teach students,” says Glenn. “We have been in this business for 150 years. The question now is, do you want to be relevant to today’s classrooms or not?”

Under the old field placement model, UW students were scattered in twos or threes throughout dozens of schools. They came back from the field with separate experiences. Under the new model, students are concentrated five or six in a partner school. That means they can share common experiences, and have common touchstones for analysis and discussion. It also means that partner schools get abundant help — from UW students, from faculty working with them, from incentives for teachers’ professional development, from seminars and discussion groups that pull all the players together.

The more personnel and resources in a school, the greater the impact. The greater the impact, the stronger the partnership.

“You can’t just send your pre-service students to the schools with minimum support. You must create a support system for them, for the teachers in the school and for our faculty so that real conversations can take place around student learning,” says Glenn. “You have to gather everyone around the table and give everyone equal input.”

“Then you can start addressing the hard issues, questions like ‘Why aren’t these kids learning math?’ and ‘How do we teach it differently?’”

DEEP-THINK ACTIVITIES

Glenn and his fellow organizers of the Ackerley school partnerships knew that, statistically, teachers are more likely to stick with their jobs, even in high-poverty schools, when the environment was collaborative. Much of the work of the Ackerley Partnership has been designed to enhance that collaborative culture within the schools and between school and university faculty.

There are give-and-take sessions with partner school teachers, administrators and UW faculty that address topics hot from the classroom. These topics might include an examination of classroom materials dominated by pictures of white, middle-class Americans, or ways of dealing with a teacher described by high school students as a “bigot.”

There are monthly meetings with faculty and principals from partner schools that can get down and gritty. “In one meeting with principals, we discussed gangs, violence, drugs, and prostitution in high school. It was very concrete, and very intense,” says teacher education program director Charles “Cap” Peck.

Teacher book clubs, led by Coordinator of Elementary Teacher Education Marisa Bier, generate discussions into issues surrounding diversity. On the book lists are titles such as “Confronting Racism, Poverty, and Power: Classroom Strategies to Change the World,” “Rethinking our Classrooms: Teach for Equity and Justice” and “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” At any monthly session, a dozen teachers may discuss the impact of home life on school life, the educational values of different cultures and how to deal with them in a classroom, and how to handle status issues in a classroom where some students have more voice than others.

“One discussion evolves from the next,” says Bier, who has been a key liaison in the school partnership program. “The teachers may come in with a belief that the expectations for all students should be consistent. Then, through our work investigating what it’s like for different kids from different backgrounds to be in school, they see they have to look at kids as individuals — to have consistently high, but qualitatively different expectations for each child.”

Bier also helps classroom teachers manage collaborative projects that are funded by the Ackerley Partnership. The teachers’ projects include coordinating math curriculum between junior and senior high schools, studying how “white privilege” impacts student learning, and researching ways to reduce high drop-out rates for at-risk ninth-graders.

For teachers, having an opportunity to think deeply during these activities and conversations is both rare and rewarding, says Glenn. “Intellectual isolation is one of the primary reasons why teachers quit the profession.”

‘I CAN DO THIS’

Building sustainable, successful partnerships is complicated, Glenn points out. It takes time. It takes commitment. And it’s not cheap, particularly at a time of crashing budgets and school closures. “But this is where you can get stuff done. This is where you can actually see something happen in the classroom,” he says. “This is where the action is.”

That action heats up when UW faculty show up in partner classrooms with their students in tow to teach methods courses on-site. Statistics show that many of those teacher education students will be back in these high-needs classrooms as soon as they are hired. Unlike many other beginning teachers, however, the UW graduates won’t arrive unprepared. “Our students, when they graduate, think, ‘I can do this.’ They’re not walking into a classroom and panicking because there are four different languages going on at once,” says Glenn.

Teacher education program graduates who can teach at a high-needs urban school, he adds, can teach anywhere.

“And that doesn’t work in reverse.”