Attempts to close the achievement gap for low-income students have often met with limited success. Maybe that's because such efforts have ignored another kind of gap—the gap between the skills that teachers must have to provide high-quality instruction for disadvantaged students and the preparation that teachers actually receive before they enter the profession. School-university partnerships can simultaneously meet the needs of high-poverty schools and those of teacher education programs. For the last nine years, we have participated in such a partnership, developed by the University of North Carolina-Greensboro and Hunter Elementary School, also in Greensboro.
Before the partnership began, Hunter Elementary was like many high-poverty schools. Of the school's 325 students, 85 percent were African American or another ethnic minority, and 76 percent were eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. Student achievement was low. The school experienced numerous student suspensions and other discipline problems.
In the fall of 1996, however, things began to change. Under the leadership of a new principal, Hunter Elementary entered into a partnership with the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, agreeing to offer field experiences for a full cohort of 25 preservice teachers during their junior and senior years. Hunter benefited by adding 25 adults to the school, allowing more individualized instruction for students. The university also benefited because housing the cohort of preservice teachers at a single school allowed more focused supervision of their field experiences and greater congruence between those field experiences and the university's methods courses.
This school-university partnership followed the professional development school (PDS) model—a major departure from typical approaches to teacher preparation (Holmes Group, 1990). The standard teacher preparation program disperses preservice teachers across a number of schools for a semester-long field experience, with university personnel traveling from school to school to make occasional supervisory visits. Such programs may provide little service to the school and result in conceptually mixed and weakly supervised teacher education in the university. In contrast, the PDS model offers a more comprehensive program.
Today, Hunter Elementary School is a different place as a result of its partnership with the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. Although it remains a high-poverty school—the proportion of students who receive free or reduced-price lunch has climbed to 85 percent—order prevails, students are engaged, and achievement has steadily improved. In 2003–2004, 88.9 percent of Hunter's 3rd grade students, 83.3 percent of 4th grade students, and 84.9 percent of 5th grade students passed the North Carolina End-of-Grade reading test (see fig. 1, p. 65). The school has been honored by the Title I program as a Distinguished School for significantly reducing the achievement gap. At the same time, the university's teacher education program has improved, offering a richer learning experience for its teachers in training. What started nine years ago as a relatively modest “marriage of convenience” between a school and a university has evolved into a rich collaboration with multiple benefits for both partners.
Figure 1. Percentage of Hunter Students Scoring “Proficient” on North Carolina End-of-Grade Reading Test
Preparing Teachers for High-Poverty Schools - table
Year | 3rd Grade | 4th Grade | 5th Grade |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1997–1998 | 44.3 | 44.0 | 43.6 |
| 1998–1999 | 60.7 | 56.5 | 61.0 |
| 1999–2000 | 77.8 | 40.0 | 75.0 |
| 2000–2001 | 64.8 | 68.8 | 75.6 |
| 2001–2002 | 62.5 | 59.6 | 87.2 |
| 2002–2003 | 75.9 | 78.9 | 77.4 |
| 2003–2004 | 88.9 | 83.3 | 84.9 |
Developing the Partnership
Of course, establishing a PDS partnership is not easy. Both partners struggled with what collaboration really entails. Hunter's teachers had to supervise and share classroom space with neophyte teachers and adjust to having many more adults, including professors, in the school. University professors had to find time to become a significant presence at the school while also attending to their ongoing university duties. Participation required commitment and patience on both sides. Gradually, as both partners developed trust, a set of three common understandings began to emerge:
- Judgment-focused teaching is instruction that proactively adapts to fit the demands of the situation. Hunter's teachers routinely assess students' progress during instruction, and if many students are not catching on as anticipated in the original lesson plan, teachers provide additional support as needed.
- Problem-driven instruction is teaching that provides high-challenge tasks emphasizing comprehension and genuine literacy (Miller, 2003). Instead of emphasizing worksheets, Hunter's teachers engage their students in collaborative work on reading and writing tasks that extend over several days and culminate in a public presentation of some kind that parents can attend, such as a skit or an oral report.
- Practice-based learning ensures that students at Hunter and preservice teachers in the university program have ample time to learn. Hunter's students spend much time reading and writing connected text at their individual instructional levels; teacher candidates benefit from more than 1,000 hours of actual teaching experience.
This three-pronged model evolved over several years of working together. Today, the model guides the work of two cohorts of teacher education students who perform their field experiences at Hunter Elementary. One cohort consists of juniors, who take pedagogical methods courses and apply what they learn at Hunter three half-days each week throughout their junior year. The other cohort consists of seniors in their second year at Hunter, who spend three half-days a week in the school in the fall and then teach full-time in the spring semester. Consequently, at any given time Hunter hosts upward of 50 preservice teachers, all of whom are involved in teaching students—sometimes one-on-one, sometimes in small groups, and sometimes in whole-class situations.
Short-Term Success
The school-university partnership has yielded both short-term and long-term success. In the short term, student achievement at Hunter has improved thanks to the additional human resources, enhanced professional development, and enriched research environment that result from the PDS model.
Additional Human Resources
Because of the large contingent of preservice teachers, every classroom at Hunter now has at least two supervising adults. The lower student-teacher ratio means that Hunter's students receive more personalized instructional attention.
The school's guided reading program illustrates the benefits of this arrangement. In guided reading, teachers introduce a text, support students as they read orally and silently, discuss text meaning, reinforce effective reading strategies, revisit the text to extend meaning, and conduct decoding and vocabulary work as needed (Fountas & Pinnell, 1996). For this highly effective strategy to succeed, students must read at their instructional reading levels, meaning that, with some support, they are reading material that is neither too difficult nor too easy for them. Because of the wide ability range in any given classroom at Hunter Elementary, each teacher has to form multiple small groups—which could be difficult to manage with only one adult in the classroom. As a result of having the preservice teachers in each classroom, intensive guided reading has become an instructional fixture at Hunter Elementary, and more students receive more instruction.
The additional human resources have also made it possible for Hunter to initiate a supplemental tutorial program. Third grade is a crucial year in North Carolina schools because students cannot go on to 4th grade if they do not pass the End-of-Grade (EOG) test. Each year at Hunter, a number of students are in danger of failing the EOG. Teacher candidates now provide individual tutoring for these students three times a week throughout the year, usually first thing in the morning in a central location.
Enhanced Staff Development
Because of the presence of advanced graduate students and professors who supervise junior and senior preservice teachers, Hunter's teaching staff has easy access to the specialized knowledge of university personnel—both formally in regularly scheduled staff development activities and informally during classroom visits.
Typically, formal staff development begins with a problem identified by the Hunter staff. For instance, Hunter's teachers recently expressed concern about how to assess reading comprehension. In response, university personnel worked with the teachers to develop assessment procedures that teachers then put to work in classrooms throughout the school. The school decided what the professional development would focus on; the university supported that request.
Less formally, university personnel assist individual teachers in their classrooms. For instance, one professor has worked with teachers on how to insert explicit verbal explanations into guided reading when students are struggling in their efforts to use a particular skill or strategy. The arrangement started with casual conversations during classroom visits and evolved into specific assistance.
The university's preservice teachers also benefit from other professional development activities taking place among the school's regular staff. The school's curriculum coordinator meets with her teachers weekly, and preservice teachers attend whenever it coincides with their internships. They gain valuable information about how teachers study in groups to address problems at their grade levels. This year, some of the preservice teachers participated in a study group on reading comprehension strategies; another group studied process writing.
In an even less formal way, professional development of the Hunter teachers is enhanced by their interaction with preservice teachers enrolled in methods courses. The preservice teachers come to Hunter with new ideas they have learned in their courses and with a desire to try them out. Hunter's teachers then learn about these ideas, and they too benefit.
For instance, preservice teachers learn in their courses how to create enriched literature environments using multiple commercial and locally developed materials, as well as how to use a text inventory to determine the degree to which a classroom is text-rich. Hunter's classrooms are now more text-rich because cooperating teachers discover new ways to enhance classroom literacy environments as they work with the preservice teachers on the text inventory.
A Research Environment
Because the university has a responsibility to do research, both classroom and teacher education practices become subjects of scholarly study. The results of such research are directly applied in Hunter's classrooms and help improve instruction. In addition, the proximity of research is professionally stimulating to teachers who are study subjects or close observers of studies conducted in their immediate environment. One professor, for instance, is initiating a study of how teachers implement writers' workshops in their classrooms, resulting in increased discussion of writing and the writing process.
Long-Term Success
As beneficial as the school-university partnership has been in closing Hunter Elementary's achievement gap in the short term, an equally important benefit is the long-term effect on teacher preparation. The partnership prepares exceptionally competent new teachers who will work effectively with students at other schools for years after graduation. Several factors account for the partnership's ability to produce well-prepared teachers, including programmatic instruction, increased teaching experience, and professors' ability to observe firsthand the results of the strategies they teach.
Programmatic Instruction
The preservice teachers at Hunter experience a much more programmatically cohesive teacher education program than average. They witness in their field experiences what they have learned in their methods courses.
The judgment-focused, problem-driven, and practice-based themes of Hunter's PDS model are common threads, so Hunter's teachers and the university's professors speak the same language as they work with preservice teachers. For instance, the guided reading and tutoring programs are effective because both school and university personnel work together to prepare the preservice teachers to assess and teach students in these school-based programs.
Increased Teaching Experience
Another significant factor that pays off in better teacher graduates is the extensive experience they gain through the partnership with Hunter. As noted previously, teacher candidates at Hunter spend more than 1,000 hours teaching before they graduate. They are veterans of teaching in a high-poverty school and are better prepared when they are employed at other high-poverty schools.
This increased experience is not simply a matter of more hours. It is also a matter of breadth and depth. Teacher candidates work at different grade levels in different semesters and develop extensive instructional projects. For instance, preservice teachers have conducted reading assessments and assisted in forming guided reading groups; they have assessed spelling knowledge as a basis for planning word study units; and they have developed content-area reading strategies to help upper-grade students comprehend expository text. As a result, the teacher candidates gain experience with many different students and with a variety of curricular challenges. They learn to handle a wide range of achievement levels and learning styles and to use numerous instructional strategies.
The Professorial “Reality Check”
The school-university partnership also improves teacher education through the interaction between professors and Hunter Elementary. Because professors who teach the methods classes are in the school supervising teacher candidates, they observe firsthand the effectiveness of the instructional methods they espouse. If the professors see that these methods do not work, they can adjust what they teach. For example, the professors' observations quickly make it clear that for techniques such as cooperative learning to be effective in real classrooms, professors must teach preservice teachers to do abundant advance spadework on procedural and behavior issues.
Professors also interact with the school's teachers, who sometimes assist in teaching methods courses and whose ongoing staff development is congruent with the content of the methods courses. As teachers work with professors and supervise preservice teachers, they provide feedback about effective and ineffective instruction in high-poverty schools. For instance, teachers pointed out the need to build English language learners' essential academic vocabulary before proceeding with content-area instruction.
Expanding the Program
The partnership between Hunter Elementary School and the University of North Carolina-Greensboro has transformed both the school and the university's teacher education program. Hunter's students receive more instructional attention and meet achievement standards in greater numbers, and Hunter's teachers benefit from ongoing staff development made possible in part by the university's close association with the school. For the university, preservice teachers not only receive close supervision but also learn in an environment that integrates methods instruction with field experiences.
These benefits have encouraged us to expand the school-university partnership to additional high-poverty schools in the Greensboro area. Currently, six cohorts consisting of 25 preservice teachers each, together with their University of North Carolina-Greensboro instructors, work in six different elementary schools.
The experience of the University of North Carolina-Greensboro and that of a growing number of other universities demonstrates that the professional development school model offers dramatic short-term benefits for high-poverty students and long-term benefits for new teachers. Although school-university partnerships are not easy solutions to the challenge of raising teacher quality, our experience suggests that marrying teacher preparation programs with high-poverty schools is worth the effort.
