Teaching for Diversity
Models and Strategies for Improving Recruitment, Preparation, and Credentialing
During the morning of the Networkshop's second day, participants gathered to hear Ana Maria Villegas discuss particular strategies for recruiting teachers of color. Jacqueline Jordan Irvine offered ideas for restructuring teacher education to prepare teachers for diversity, and a panel of representatives from higher education and state legislatures discussed their perspectives on credentialing.
Recruiting Strategies
Ana Maria Villegas opened her comments with a telling projection: the United States faces a teacher shortage. "A shortage of teachers has been reported in mathematics and science, foreign languages, special education, and bilingual education." Overcoming this problem requires broad-based, well planned strategies for recruiting. Three promising strategies include the teacher cadet model, the community college model, and the teaching assistant model.
The teacher cadet model.
This model is based on the principle that future teachers must be identified early‹in middle and high school grades‹and that these students should be encouraged and prepared not only to succeed in college, but also to be excited about teaching as a career. To do this, teacher cadet programs in colleges of education give middle and high school students information about teaching and provide real-life experiences such as tutoring, taking over a class, visiting teacher education programs, and allowing them to observe good teaching in action.
In addition, students involved in teacher cadet programs receive tutoring to assure their own academic success. They are prepared for taking the SAT, they receive academic counseling to assure they remain on a college preparatory track, and they are given assistance in preparing their college applications. One such project in Atlanta requires that students enroll in an intensive four-week summer program between their junior and senior years in high school. During this time the "cadets" focus on academic preparation, study and test-taking skills, and on actually teaching or tutoring in day care or summer camp settings.
"The teacher cadet model entails long term partnerships between teacher education programs and area schools," Villegas said. "And that can be a challenge‹to find schools willing to commit, and within them, teachers and administrators who are supportive."
The community college model.
This approach involves cooperative arrangements as well, but between local community colleges and graduate teacher education programs at four-year institutions. This model involves formal agreements in developing academic, social, financial, and support programs for the transfer of students from community to four-year colleges.
In one such project, targeted for Hispanic students, faculty teams from a college in, New Jersey, worked with two area community college faculty teams to review and strengthen their education curriculum. The teams developed courses congruent with the content and skills areas that student teachers would see on the National Teacher Exam (NTE). The college later developed review sessions for students, including an intensive summer course, and used academic profiles to predict particular subjects and skills with which students needed help.
"Many institutions have student academic support services," Villegas said, but the difference in this New Jersey college project was that its support was prescriptive, allowing faculty to zero in on individual problems. Furthermore, she added, "students were required to take action once their needs were identified."
In other such collaborative efforts between two- and four-year colleges, challenges include providing support for the student's transition from one to the other. In some cases, students are placed together into a cohort of peers who are experiencing the same transition. In addition, financial aid is almost certainly a factor for students coming out of community colleges, as is class scheduling, because a high percentage of them are employed or are adults with families. "Balancing the demands of school, home, and work present major obstacles," Villegas said, "and here's where cohort support plays a major role in overcoming them."
Teaching assistant model.
The third model is one in which school districts employ students of nearby teacher preparation programs as teacher assistants. This approach has been particularly successful in California, where as many as 25% of students are of limited English proficiency, primarily Spanish native-speakers. Teaching assistants have mentor teachers in their schools, and get release time from teaching to attend the college classes they need. At the same time, they are treated as professionals, and by the time they graduate from their teacher preparation programs, they are able to start teaching at a salary above the entry level.
A common link among all three strategies, Villegas concluded, is that each provides non-traditional support systems for non-traditional students. "You can't just recruit non-traditional students and put them in traditional programs. That's setting any program up for failure."
Next Page: Restructuring Teacher Education to Prepare Teachers for Diversity
