Apprenticeship program a boon for novice teachers

February 15, 2003

When Irv Moskovitz was superintendent of the Denver Public Schools, he had plenty of opportunity to observe how often beginning teachers were ill-prepared to meet the challenges of an urban classroom.

So he was intrigued by the challenge offered to him by former Sen. Hank Brown, president of the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, to come up with a better way to prepare teachers.

He and his colleagues designed an apprenticeship program for future teachers. "We went retro," Moskovitz said.

The 150 students at UNC's Center for Urban Education, housed at the old Lowry Air Force Base in Denver, will get four-year bachelor's degrees and their licenses as elementary teachers (the first class will graduate next year). But from the very beginning they work half-time as paraprofessionals in the same kinds of schools and classrooms where they will teach full-time as professionals.

By the time they graduate, they will have nearly 3,000 hours in the classroom, structured and supervised so they have practiced and demonstrated all the skills they will need. The goal, Moskovitz says, is to prepare teachers who are "competent and confident from the very first day" in their own classrooms.

"I'm ready now," said Kim Lindley, a junior who is now lining up her fourth-year student teaching experience. And compared with peers in traditional teacher-ed programs, she is.

Students work in the morning, and come to the center afternoons for their classes. They take one academic course at a time, three days a week for five weeks, and the year runs from late July until Memorial Day so they can finish in four years. Sometimes that's hard, Lindley said -- the juniors had just taken a science exam the day I visited, and there was a certain air of unease apparent.

Moskovitz said the liberal-arts curriculum is heavy on English, starting with English composition, but it also emphasizes math and science because those are often weaknesses in elementary teaching. "We want to open their minds," he said, "and make learning something they do for themselves and not just for other people."

By itself, that academic model would not be distinctive, but what makes the center's program unique -- as far as Moskovitz knows -- is the apprenticeship part of it, the way the students' work experience is integrated with one-credit methods courses spread over the first three years.

Colorado standards for licensing lay out dozens of skills teachers are supposed to demonstrate, in areas such as content, classroom management and communication with the community. The center has divided those skills into levels appropriate to each semester of the program, established how proficiency will be measured and what level of performance qualifies as proficient. In fact, said Twila Norman, the apprenticeship coordinator, the staff spent the whole first year (1999-2000) on the process before students enrolled.

For example, under "planning and preparation" first-semester students are expected, among other things, to discuss developing lesson plans with teachers and mentors. They progress to developing their own plans, first for individuals, then for small groups and then for the whole class. By the fourth year, they are responsible for preparing a complete class lesson plan for a whole week. Each stage is monitored, and every student has to be proficient at every stage. It sounds quite regimented, and it is. But the advantage is that all the members of the class are working on the same skills at the same time, so their methods classes are tightly aligned with what they are expected to do.

"Being in the classroom, you can put what you learn into practice the very next day," Lindley said.

The methods curriculum is laid out in great detail, Norman said, so that by the time students begin student teaching in the fourth year, they will have practiced every skill they need.

Besides the natural camaraderie that develops in each class -- "lots of potlucks," Moskovitz observed -- students get additional support from mentors, most of them retired teachers each of whom advises a group of six to eight students. The methods classes are kept small, around 20 students. In addition, the students get a lot of support from the teachers and the principals in the schools where they work.

The center plans to enroll about 60 freshmen a year, Moskovitz said.

Most of them are women, and in their 30s or 40s, though the age range is from 18 to 60-plus. Often, like Lindley, they have been paraprofessionals for several years before they start college. The retention rate is good. "If they're not cut out for this," he said, "They know by the first Thanksgiving." But he expects most of them to finish the program on schedule. "They will change their communities," he said, "and their lives."