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When the University of South Carolina experimented with a new program for educating teachers, Irma Van Scoy, a professor of early childhood education, was one of the first to make changes. She pulled graduate students out of lecture halls and onto the carpets in elementary schools, and she used second graders as stand-in professors to explain a card game called Double War. "We would bring a class of university students to the children," Van Scoy explains, "and the children would teach them the games."
Graduate schools of education have gotten a lot of flak lately-in a fall 2006 report, Arthur Levine, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, called teacher education " the Dodge City of the education world ... unruly and disordered"-but classrooms like Van Scoy's are not the reason. While Levine, drawing on surveys that show 62 percent of alumni think schools of education "do not prepare their graduates to cope with classroom reality," calls most schools either "quite mediocre" or much worse, he says one quarter are strong. Their common trait: Like South Carolina's program, they incorporate ideas of the Professional Development School, or PDS, model of teacher education. Born in the late 1980s, the model has grown steadily. Two years ago, educators using PDS collaborated to found the National Association for Professional Development Schools.
PDS programs create partnerships between universities and public schools in an effort to professionalize teacher training-to make it more like medical school and less like an advanced arts and sciences program. Instead of "going into a university classroom and listening to a university professor talk about methods," says Les Sternberg, dean of the College of Education at South Carolina, "you have to be in a classroom-with real teachers, with real kids, with real families-to understand how this all works." Hence Van Scoy's experiments with Double War: When the 7-year-olds explained the game in their own words, their future teachers could get a better feel for how they were thinking. "It always comes down to who are the individual children in that classroom and how well can the teacher connect," she says.
Class act
Real live children, of course, have always been around for student teachers to practice on. After all, it takes practical experience to figure out how to get a classroom full of antsy MTV watchers to sit still long enough to think about math. But demands on student teachers are often slim. "You go there for a while, and then for like a week you'll take over," says Lee Teitel, author of The Professional Development School Handbook. "This is real different. The kids treat them as a teacher."
So do the other teachers. "They're totally immersed into the culture of a school," explains Karen Schafer, director of Towson University's PDS Network and director of the Center for Professional Practice. "They learn all the other things a teacher does: what committees they're on, what meetings to go to."
Ho Chang, a master's candidate at Towson who owned a dry cleaning business for 11 years before going into teaching, calls his two days a week in Patricia Kuehne's high school math classroom invaluable. Chang knows he can't assume he can teach math "just because I have a degree in mathematics," and with 28 years' experience, Kuehne knows not only how to do math but also how to teach it. Watching her helps Chang "fine-tune my skills."
Schafer's research suggests that Chang's time will pay off. Tracking Towson students after graduation, she found that 71 percent of PDS grads were still teaching five years out, compared with just 34 percent of alumni of traditional programs. Another study by Rand Corp. found that West Virginia high school students enrolled in PDS schools outscored their non-PDS school peers.
The arrangement can help participating schools, too. Beth Elliott, principal of Pontiac Elementary School, says her partnership with the University of South Carolina, which brings as many as 12 interns into the school each day, "helps us to keep up with the cutting edge." At Towson, a student intern used virtual trip software to help upgrade a lecture on Mount Vernon, George Washington's estate in Northern Virginia. "All the kids were able to get on the computer ... and take the tour," says Schafer.
As for professors, many say the partnerships also help with their other job: research. Towson requires monthly meetings between professors and teachers, and this sometimes results in collaborative publications. At one recent check-in, says Schafer, a professor who studies math learning listened as a school wrestled with implementing a new math textbook. The professor offered to monitor a class in action, and a project on the effectiveness of math-teaching strategies is now under way.
Teacher checklist
Many universities say they use the PDS model, but some use it better than others. To assess a program, Teitel suggests asking a few questions.
1. Where will I be placed as a teacher? Will it be in a professional development school? "If the answer's no," says Teitel, "then end of story."
2. Are teachers and administrators from the PDS teaching at the university? If they are, that's a sign of a solid collaborative partnership.
3. How much time do university faculty and administrators spend at the professional development school? The more the better.
4. How many of my classes will be tied to work that I'll be doing in the PDS? "If you're taking 12 courses in a master's program and they say one, it's not that different from the traditional model," Teitel says.
Smart Choices
MATH AND SCIENCE.
Too many jobs are filled by nonexperts teaching "out of field," so if you know your stuff you've got it made. Example: Nearly 30 percent of middle school biology teachers have no specialty in biology. PRESCHOOL. Federal and state investments in early childhood ed will make teaching preschool one of the fastest-growing jobs, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says. But beware: Salaries are traditionally low.
Insider Tip
Many states offer financial help to students who promise to teach in certain "shortage" areas (usually math, science, and special ed). Some programs help you pay off loans after the fact: Some FLORIDA teachers in critical subjects got $880 last year toward helping them pay back grad school loans. Other programs, such as GEORGIA's HOPE scholarship, provide fully forgivable loans for graduate students who promise to teach shortage subjects for at least a year. The American Federation of Teachers maintains a list at www.aft.org.
Reality Check
As teachers retire, school districts will hire roughly 2 million new teachers in the next decade.
Population growth will spur especially strong demand in six western states: California, Idaho, Hawaii, Alaska, Utah, and New Mexico.
Average base salary for full-time teachers: $43,000. At public schools: $44,400.
Difference in average salaries between the top-paying state (Connecticut) and the lowest (South Dakota): $23,000
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