MichiganRadio

Two Cities: Teacher Preparation NEW ORLEANS AND DETROIT (Michigan Radio) - For today's story in our Rebuilding Detroit Schools series, we'll focus on some of the most important people in a school: Teachers.

Some experts say more needs to be done to prepare teachers for urban classrooms, whether that's through traditional teacher education programs or alternative routes like Teach For America.

Kari Detwiler teaches reading to 30 struggling students at a charter school in New Orleans, and she's nothing if not optimistic.

"I love teaching," says Detwiler. "I love being with kids, I'm a hard worker, and I'm ready to do what it takes. But I do feel like I'm missing certain areas of instructional expertise."

This is Detwiler's second year in the classroom. Like the more than 500 other Teach for America members in New Orleans, Detwiler got her alternative teaching certification through a five-week training program in Phoenix, Arizona."

It was a very "harsh reality to go from the classroom in Phoenix to the classroom at one of the lowest performing elementary schools in New Orleans," explains Detwiler. "Being a first year teacher is difficult anyway you look at it, but I definitely feel like I wish I had better preparation in terms of how to teach lower elementary."

That said, she's glad she went through Teach for America, and she thinks she's doing her students a lot of good. Several of her students jumped from a Pre-K to a first grade reading level in half a year.

There are a lot of people who think Teach for America is doing great things for New Orleans schools. And they're excited about the news that 100 TFA members are coming to Detroit this fall.

Keith Johnson, however, is not one of the people who's thrilled with the news.

"We don't need educational mercenaries, says Johnson, who's head of the Detroit Federation of Teachers. "We don't need people coming here to do a two-year stint to have a blip on their resume, to say oh look at me, I went and served in one of the most troubled school districts in the country on my way to my corporate office."

And Johnson says it's absurd to hire people fresh out of a five-week training course to teach in some of the nation's toughest classrooms.

Teach for America officials say those kinds of criticisms are unfair. They say corps members have to apply for jobs just like any other teacher, and they say many of their alumni decide to stay in the profession after their two-year tour is up.

That's what Agnes Aleobua did. After teaching with the corps in Miami, she was tapped to open a new charter school in Detroit this fall. Aleobua says she agrees that five weeks is not an ideal amount of time to train a teacher to hit the ground running in urban classrooms like Detroit's.

"But," Aleobua explains, "we're in a state of emergency. If they get the results we need, where students are learning on a high level, students are going off to college, students are returning to places like Detroit if that's happening, we have to take those routes less taken."

Aleobua is in the midst of hiring teachers for her new school, and she says Teach for America corps members are among the first people she'd entrust with her students' educations.

There are going to be 100 Teach for America members working in Detroit's classrooms this fall: 80 will be in charters, like Aleobua's school, and 20 will be in Detroit Public Schools classrooms.

Even though DPS is shrinking, there's still expected to be a huge need for new teachers in the coming years because so many veteran teachers are getting close to retirement age.

And a lot of education experts say teacher training programs haven't been doing that great a job of preparing new teachers for the really tough work that awaits them in the classroom.

But there are some innovative programs out there trying to fix what's broken.

One of them is the Teacher Education Initiative at the University of Michigan. One of their training sites is Western International High School in Detroit.

This is first period in Tom Hoetger's Advanced Placement History class, and he's walking his students through some practice AP exam questions.

Sitting in the class with Hoetger's students are four future teachers from the University of Michigan. It's just their third time in this class. But they're already working with students.

Hoetger calls it "radically different." He says the kind of teacher preparation he got, and most people still get, falls far short of what novice teachers need to be ready for the demands of a real classroom.

This U of M program is a pilot project that has students on "rotations" similar to medical school training.

The future teachers in Tom Hoetger's classroom are doing their student study rotation, where they can get a better feel for the classroom experience from the student's point of view.

Jake Zunamon is one of the teachers-to-be. He says it's one thing to take teacher education classes, and talk about how classrooms are supposed to function, and how kids learn, or struggle to learn, "but it doesn't really make sense to you until you actually go in the classroom and see it first-hand, and then you can make sense of it."

So in this class, each future teacher works closely with Hoetger's students as they prepare for the AP exam. Zunamon is helping student Patricia Curiel.

And that kind of classroom experience is what will equip new teachers with skills that will actually help students learn, says Deborah Ball. She's the dean of the School of Education at the University of Michigan.

"As a parent," says Ball, "I don't think any of us wants our first grader to be in the classroom of someone who really doesn't know what he or she is doing, and that first-grade year goes out the window and your child doesn't learn to read, and that's what we have right now."

Ball says right now, aspiring teachers do spend a lot of time in schools. They're just not learning how to do specific things with children.

"And if you think about it," says Ball, "we don't do that in any other field. We don't have plumbers learn to fix drains by just sending them out to houses with broken disposals and say: You know, try it and come back and tell us how it worked. Reflect on it."

The rotation program is one of the ways the university is looking to fix that. Students are doing more hands-on work. They're doing it earlier in their teacher education program. And they're also getting intensive direction and feedback on techniques teachers need. Things like how you get kids to pay attention, how you start and end a class, how you move 30 kids from one subject to the next.

Right now, only about 20 percent of students in U of M's teacher education program are taking part in the rotation pilot project. Next fall the university will roll out a completely new program for elementary teacher candidates. A new secondary program will follow in 2011.

To hear other stories in the series "Rebuilding Detroit Schools: A Tale of Two Cities" and see related photos, videos and information, click here.

Send comments to twocities@umich.edu

© Copyright 2012, Michigan Radio