WINTER 2001

NORTHWEST REGIONAL EDUCATIONAL LABORATORY

NEW TEACHERS

FROM SURVIVING TO THRIVING
VOLUME 7 NUMBER 2

WINTER 2001

ON THE COVER: 

Lemil Speed was a banker before he switched careers and

found his calling. He credits the Portland Teachers

Project with providing the comfort and comradeship that

made the transition possible. His story, “Pipeline to

Tomorrow,” begins on Page 24. 

PHOTOGRAPH BY MOUNT BURNS.

New Teachers

From Surviving to Thriving

ARTICLES

2 Facing the Future

Meeting the need for qualified teachers will

require fresh ideas, including better support for

rookies and more training for mentors. 

10 Building a Teacher’s

‘Repertoire’ Takes Time,

Training

Dean of the University of Washington College of

Education is helping to pave a more coherent

pathway into teaching.

12 Under the Same Sun

In rural Alaska, village residents are discovering

they can grow into the teaching profession

without having to travel far from home.

20 Mr. Fisher 

Finds His Calling

A rookie teacher navigates the rough waters 

of the first year with a classroom of Oregon

fourth-graders.

24 Pipeline to Tomorrow

A model program recruits, sustains, and inspires

teachers of color.

30 Surviving the Crossfire

In Walla Walla, Washington, a school district

earns praise for its wise approach to mentoring

new teachers.

DEPARTMENTS

42 In the Library

44 Voices
I N T H I S I S S U E

A

ll across the country,

the looming teacher

shortage has been

earning headlines and raising

concerns. This is a democratic trend, affecting schools

in big cities, small towns, and

rural areas. It’s a demographic trend, too, fueled by

the anticipated retirement of

baby boomers. Social factors

also play a role. Before the

civil rights movement,

schools of education were

filled largely with women and

minorities. Today, women

and minorities enjoy expanded career opportunities

in fields offering higher pay

than teaching. And it’s a political issue, with everyone from

the Secretary of Education to

the First Lady to members of

Congress weighing in with

suggestions and sound bites.

By 2010, experts predict that

2.2 million new teachers will

be needed for the nation’s

classrooms. What’s more,

today’s teachers are expected

to help students reach high

academic standards. Students are increasingly diverse, with many facing

challenges related to poverty

or language fluency. The national push for accountability

can make even the most experienced teachers feel as if

they’re working in a pressure

cooker. Many rookies face

the additional challenge of

drawing the toughest classroom assignments.

But all is not doom and

gloom. When education researcher Ellen Moir, founder

of the New Teacher Center,

looks at the faces of students

enrolled in teacher preparation programs, she sees good

reason to hope. “These people,” she says, “are dying to

teach.” The challenge is finding ways to support prospective teachers so that they can

overcome the inevitable

bumps of the first year or two

in the classroom and become

the capable educators they

dream of becoming.

This issue of Northwest Education takes a look at promising approaches to support

new teachers. First, we offer a

look at what research tells us

about why so many novices

leave the field and what

strategies may help them remain in the profession. We

hear from Patricia Wasley,

who is retooling teacher induction at the University of

Washington so that new

teachers gain support over

several years. We take a look

at mentoring programs, such

as the award-winning approach underway in Walla

Walla, Washington. 

We also zoom in for a closeup look, introducing you to

some of the talented individuals who are choosing to make

their careers in the classrooms of the Northwest region. Through the eyes of

Dorothy Epchook, you’ll see

why the bond of a shared

heritage is vital to the success of rural teachers and

their Alaska Native students.

In the words of Lemil Speed,

you’ll hear why seasoned

adults are considering new

careers in teaching and what

kind of support they need to

survive the transition. And in

the story of Sam Fisher, you’ll

experience the highs and

lows of the first year in the

classroom. 

These are a just few of the

fine people who are dying to

teach—the ones who are rising to the challenge with

courage, dignity, and humor.

We hope you join us in cheering for their continued success. 

—Suzie Boss

bosss@nwrel.org 
2
FACING

THE FUTURE

Three future teachers—(left to right) Willa Towarak

Eckenweiler, Paul Reynolds, and Debbie Toopetlook—are

interns in Alaska’s Rural Education Preparation Program.

(Related story begins on Page 12.)

WITH A NATIONAL TEACHER SHORTAGE ON THE HORIZON, 

THERE’S NO TIME LIKE THE PRESENT TO BUILD, SUPPORT, 

AND SUSTAIN A CAPABLE TEACHING FORCE

Story by SUZIE BOSS / Photos by DENISE JARRETT WEEKS

tanding not quite five feet tall, 

Beth doesn’t tower over anyone in

her class of high school freshmen.

And that’s a shame, because she’s 

the teacher.

If she were a tad more intimidating, suspects

the 23-year-old with the sweet face and

friendly demeanor, maybe the students

wouldn’t be so quick to test her. Maybe she

wouldn’t have had to live through the nightmare of seven large boys “deciding to riot 

on me” in the middle of a science lab.

That awful spring day marked the low point

of her first year of teaching. With papers flying across the classroom and students out of

control, she had to “call in reinforcements”

from the front office. Nothing in her four

years of college, nothing in her training to

become a teacher, nothing in her student

teaching experience had prepared her to

manage that kind of misbehavior. Her small,

rural Oregon school district provides no 

induction or mentoring program for new

teachers, so she had no ally to turn to—

not even a friendly shoulder to cry on—

within the faculty.

Did she think about quitting? 

“Oh, yeah.”

Did she feel isolated?

“Not physically, but certainly mentally. Sure,

the other teachers are nice. But they didn’t

seem to want to get to know me or make

sure everything was going OK.”

So why is she back in the same classroom

this school year?

“I made a deal with myself that I was going

to teach for at least three years. Then I’ll 

decide.”

3

S

NEW TEACHERS
The first three years mark a critical period in the life

of a new teacher. Researchers estimate that as many as

30 percent of novice teachers leave the profession by the

third year, and up to half of those teaching in urban

schools depart within five years. New teachers recruited

under fast-track programs—designed to attract those

who have subject-area knowledge but lack a background in education—fare even worse. An estimated 60

percent of those who enter teaching through shortcut

programs leave by their third year. 

Barnett Berry of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future (NCTAF) suggests that employers in the private sector “would not tolerate that kind

of turnover. They would be absolutely mortified,” he told

Catalyst magazine, if they were losing even one out of

three. 

R & R

To improve these odds, both recruitment and retention

are emerging as key strategies. 

On a number of fronts, initiatives are underway to

bring new faces into teaching—from paraeducators

to retired military personnel to mid-career professionals itching for a change. Pipeline programs start as

early as seventh grade to encourage more young people to consider teaching careers. In particular, recruiters are eager for faces that better resemble the

diverse student body filling the classrooms of America.

In 1999, 35 percent of the nation’s 52 million schoolaged children came from linguistic- or racial-minority

families, but only 5 percent of teachers, counselors, and

administrators were from racially diverse groups, reported Mary Hartwood Futrell in the May 1999 issue of

Educational Leadership. 

U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige, announcing $31

million in Transitions to Teaching grants in October,

said, “Casting a wider net for experienced professionals

... will help school districts address teacher shortages,

particularly in subjects where there is a great demand

for qualified instructors.” Both urban and rural districts across the country are reporting shortages in the

areas of mathematics, science, foreign language, English as a Second Language, and special education. (See

sidebar, Page 5, to learn about new Transitions to Teaching programs in the Northwest region.) 

Some communities have already rolled out innovative

efforts to lure new teachers. Most dramatic, perhaps, was

the offer of $20,000 in signing bonuses for recent college grads or career changers who agreed to teach in

Massachusetts. New York City Schools Chancellor Harold

Levy launched his Teaching Fellows program in 2000,

targeting young professionals and mid-career changers

with the promise of financial help to obtain a master’s

degree in education in exchange for teaching in underperforming schools in the Bronx and Brooklyn. Clark

County, Nevada, has become legendary for its aggressive

teacher recruiting, even posting teachers-wanted advertisements in the Las Vegas airport. Chicago has so far

lured 125 “global educators” from a host of countries—China, Ghana, India, Mexico, Pakistan—with

the promise of work visas and help to earn an Illinois

teaching certificate. And a number of school districts

offer new teachers assistance with down payments or low

rates on home mortgages.

More aggressive recruitment is just half of the equation being devised to solve the looming teacher shortage. Researchers and those on the frontlines of teaching

are teaming up to reshape induction programs so that

these new recruits will survive—indeed, thrive—once

they enter the teaching profession. 

As NCTAF’s Berry asserts in Educational Leadership

(May 2001, “No Shortcuts to Preparing Good Teachers”), alternative routes into teaching are necessary, “but

they must be good programs. ... Effective teachers

need to know more than subject matter.” Without adequate preparation, Berry writes, “many mid-career recruits lack the wide range of knowledge and skills

necessary for effective teaching ... understanding how

students think and behave, and how to motivate them.”

Research shows that “knowledge of both subject matter and of teaching and learning acquired in teacher education is strongly correlated with teacher performance

in the classroom.”

The public seems to agree. In a recent opinion poll

by Louis Harris, 89 percent of those surveyed cited having a well-qualified teacher in every classroom as an important measure for lifting student achievement.

Three-quarters of those surveyed oppose allowing those

4

NW Education / Winter 2001
NEW TEACHERS

Although a teacher shortage may be

looming on the horizon for communities across the country, “it’s here

now in rural areas,” says Joyce Ley,

rural education expert at the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory. To recruit and train new

teachers needed in rural classrooms

in northeastern Oregon and southeastern Washington, NWREL has

joined with partners in the region to

conduct a Transitions to Teaching

project, funded by a grant from the

U.S. Department of Education.

In addition to NWREL, partners in

the $750,000 effort include three educational service districts (UmatillaMorrow and North Central ESDs in

Oregon and ESD 123, serving several

counties in southeastern Washington); Eastern Oregon University in La

Grande, Oregon, and Heritage College in Toppenish, Washington; and

40 local school districts—23 in

Washington and 17 in Oregon.

Two additional Transitions to Teaching grants for the Northwest region

also were announced by Secretary of

Education Rod Paige in October. The

Washington Office of State Superintendent will receive $1.2 million to

enhance statewide professional education and certification of new teachers. Salem-Keizer Public School

District in Oregon will receive

$550,000 for a local recruiting

and training initiative. 

In all, the U.S. Department of Education is awarding $31 million to 42

projects designed to recruit skilled

mid-career professionals and recent

college graduates into teaching careers. “Casting a wider net for experienced professionals—those with a

wealth of experience but who lack a

teaching credential—will help school

districts address teacher shortages,”

Paige said, “particularly in subjects

where there is great demand for

qualified instructors.” Areas of high

demand include mathematics, science, foreign language, English as a

second language, reading, and special education. 

RURAL INITIATIVE

Beginning in January, a cohort of 30

new teachers will embark on the accelerated, intensive training program

through the Northwest Transitions to

Teaching Partnership being directed

by NWREL’s Joyce Ley. Training will

lead to full state teacher certification

at the end of the second year. “It’s

not an alternative certification program,” Ley points out. “What’s alternative is the pathway they take” to

licensure.

The Transitions to Teaching program

will provide these teacher candidates

with practical training in pedagogy

and instructional practices preparing

them to hold down classroom assignments at the same time they participate in the intensive training.

Some of the coursework will take

place via distance learning and teleconferencing—delivery well suited

to the teachers’ rural geography.

Grant funding will provide stipends

for participating teachers and help

offset the costs of graduate-level

coursework. 

TRANSITIONS

FOR NORTHWEST

TEACHERS

In addition to formal training, new

teachers will receive additional support from mentors in their local

school districts. “The mentor teachers will work closely with them over

the two years,” Ley explains. 

Training coordinators for the project

are Dick Pratt of Umatilla-Morrow

ESD and Bob Plumb, chairman of the

Department of Graduate Education

and Counseling at Heritage College.

Pratt has developed a professional

development toolkit that addresses

topics required for teacher certification. Researchers looking for solutions to the teacher shortage have

identified access to professional development as a key strategy for solving shortages in rural areas, which

often are located great distances

from traditional graduate schools. 

Ley predicts that the new teacher

participants will fit one of two categories. The first category she describes as “placebound. These are

adults who are already living in the

region where they will be teaching

but hold a degree in a field other

than education.” Because of family

commitments or other reasons, Ley

explains, “they can’t easily pick up

and go away to earn certification.”

The second category includes students who are about to graduate

from college and have an interest in

teaching, Ley explains, “but aren’t on

track yet” for a teaching certificate. 

5
with college degrees to enter teaching without also requiring preparation in the field of education. 

Recruiting and training “new quality teachers,” acknowledges Paige, “will require persistence and imagination.” If he makes the cause sound urgent, it’s no

accident. Current forecasts call for 2.2 million new

teachers within the coming decade to replace an anticipated wave of baby boomer retirees and keep pace with

growing student enrollments. In the Northwest alone,

some 35,000 new teachers will be needed by 2005,

according to research by the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory. The spike in demand for teachers

is “unprecedented,” reports the University of Washington’s Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy. 

And it comes at the same time that states are setting

high standards for student achievement. “States are

clearly serious about standards for good teaching,”

write researchers from the Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy, “but not when those standards interfere

with the ability to ensure an adult, qualified or not, in

every classroom.”

Who will teach tomorrow’s children? How well will they

be prepared for the task? At a time when a third of the

nation’s teachers are 50 or older—old enough to qualify for membership in AARP, the American Association of

Retired Persons—these are urgent questions, indeed.

DYING TO TEACH

When she looks out on the sea of eager faces of students

enrolled in teacher education classes, Ellen Moir is

filled with hope about the future of the profession. “We

have people who are dying to teach,” says the veteran

education professor at the University of California at Santa

Cruz and executive director of the New Teacher Center,

a nationally recognized resource. The question Moir has

been working hard to answer: “How do we keep their

spirits alive?” She worries about sustaining rookies’

optimism and energy once they head out to work “in a

[school] system that’s complex, and can drain you.” 

Patricia Wasley, dean of the University of Washington

College of Education, has not lost sight of what drew her

to teaching 30 years ago. “I love working with kids,” she

says. That aspect of the job remains as appealing as ever,

whether teacher candidates are fresh out of college

or—like at least a third of the current crop of UW education students—more seasoned by life and looking

for a career change. 

Yet, a number of factors make it challenging to maintain interest in the profession. Women and minorities—once the mainstay of the teaching ranks—have a

wider range of career choices open to them today than

those who went into teaching before the civil rights

movement. What’s more, many beginning teachers “have

a hard time,” Wasley admits. “We know from research

that they typically get assigned to the hardest jobs, the

most difficult kids. Salaries are low, and esteem is low.

Teachers are often blamed,” she says, if student performance is not up to par. On top of all that, many

teachers begin their careers in virtual isolation—having little interaction with anyone except the students

they’re assigned to teach. “There’s been very little collegial interaction,” admits Wasley. (See Page 10 for an

interview with Wasley about UW’s initiatives to support

new teachers.)

Indeed, researchers Dwight Rogers and Leslie Babinski of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have

written of the “reality shock that comes with being the

teacher in charge. Beginning teachers,” they wrote in an

issue of Educational Leadership (May 1999) devoted to

supporting new teachers, “feel isolated and are afraid to

reveal uncertainties about their practice and reluctant to

ask for assistance for fear of appearing inadequate.”

The Southern Regional Education Board drew on research from the National Center for Education Statistics

to track what happens to those who leave the field. Approximately 25 percent quit within their first five years

to pursue other careers. Another 25 percent leave because they’re no longer interested in teaching, or have

grown dissatisfied with teaching. And 40 percent of

those who quit say they would not teach again. Although

money plays a role, low salaries are cited as the primary

cause by only 10 percent of those who flee the field.

Recruiting New Teachers, a national nonprofit organization based in Massachusetts, suggests a simple way

to think about remedying the complex situation: For new

teachers to remain in teaching, “the good must outweigh the bad.”

6

NW Education / Winter 2001
BETTER BEGINNINGS

The National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future views high-quality mentoring as one of the most effective ways to address new teacher concerns. NCTAF

recommends structuring the first year or two of teaching like a residency in medicine, in which novices continually consult veterans. Instead of coaching rookies

through appendectomies, however, veteran teachers

can help novices overcome such daily challenges as

classroom management, assessing how well students are

learning, lesson planning, and understanding the culture of the school.

About half of all new teachers already participate in

some type of induction during their first year of teaching. The scope and quality of these programs vary widely,

however. As RNT points out in its 2000 publication, A

Guide to Developing Teacher Induction Programs,

“Well-funded, comprehensive, developmental induction programs that serve all teachers who need assistance

are far from the norm in U.S. school districts.”

In a recent NWREL publication, Supporting Beginning Teachers, authors Cori Brewster and Jennifer

Railsback point out, “Although many schools provide orientation programs for new hires, they often focus primarily on school policies and procedures, falling short

of the ongoing professional support, training, and encouragement that new teachers need.”

Well-designed induction programs, RNT reports, hold

promise to slow teacher attrition; remove incompetent

teachers and retain talented ones; help novices continue

to develop as proficient, knowledgeable, and successful

teachers; improve the climate for teaching and learning;

and build community between new and veteran teachers.

The most effective programs, described in A Guide to

Developing Teacher Induction Programs: 

• View induction as a multiyear, developmental process.

Two or three years of support may be needed to move

new teachers from basic survival skills and orientation

to focus on instructional effectiveness and, eventually,

address systemwide issues such as student assessment,

teacher leadership, curriculum reform, and school improvement.

• Ensure that school administrators understand how to

orient new teachers, create supportive working conditions,

7

NEW TEACHERS

COMPETING 

FOR BEST AND

BRIGHTEST

Last year, when the principal of a

small high school in rural Montana

needed to hire a new math teacher, it

took him three months of recruiting

and the offer of subsidized housing

to convince a wet-behind-the-ears

rookie to take the job. Although the

state’s schools of education graduate

about 900 new teachers each year,

increasing numbers of them head off

to greener pastures—states such as

Nevada and California, where the

starting salaries are higher and benefits for new teachers include mentoring and other structured induction

programs. Local school district administrators, often scrambling to

make hires at the last minute and on

limited budgets, find themselves outmaneuvered by professional recruiters eager to snap up the “best and

brightest.”

Who Will Teach Montana’s Children?, published earlier this year by

the Montana Board of Public Education, reports that only 29 percent of

those who earn teaching credentials

in the state are teaching there within

two years of graduation.

It’s a trend that has administrators

and policymakers concerned, not

only in Montana but also in other

parts of the Northwest region. Oregon State University reports that half

of the state’s principals have had difficulty recruiting enough candidates

to fill teacher positions within the

past two years. The twin factors of

increasing student enrollment and an

aging teaching force mean that by

2005, Oregon will need to hire more

than 10,000 new teachers. The

state’s higher education institutions

are on track to graduate only 65 percent of that number. 

Northwest states are facing the future with a variety of strategies—not

only for recruiting new teachers, but

also for supporting novices so that

they will develop the classroom skills

to help students reach high academic

standards. Idaho, for example, has

earned national attention—including

a three-year federal grant—for its

teaching initiative called Idaho’s

MOST (for Maximizing Opportunities

for Students and Teachers). The program focuses on new teacher preparation, certification, professional

development, and the teaching environment, strategies that align with

the “What Matters Most” program of

the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future.

“The best strategies,” argues Dori

Nelson, author of the Montana study

on teacher shortages, “will enrich the

school experience for students, as

well as for teachers.”

In addition, she suggests taking

more aggressive action to spread the

word about the benefits of living—

and teaching—in the Northwest region. Montana schools, she points

out, are known for many qualities

that research has shown to be critical for student success: small

schools and small class sizes;

friendly, supportive communities;

concerned and involved parents; safe

schools; and committed teachers

and administrators. 

The Oregon School Boards Association suggests using “the Northwest

lifestyle” as a recruiting tool to attract qualified teachers to the region.

“Once established in the Northwest,”

the OSBA points out in a recent

newsletter on teacher shortages,

“teachers aren’t likely to trade their

jobs for positions in actively recruiting cities like Los Angeles or Las

Vegas.”
effectively meet their professional needs, and convey to

the entire staff the importance of welcoming, guiding, and

assisting them. This means principals may need training

to be alert to new teachers’ needs and concerns.

• Provide high-quality mentoring, backed by adequate

funding.

• Link inductee evaluation to standards.

Researchers at the Center for the Study of Teaching

and Policy, in a 2001 report called Revisiting What

States Are Doing To Improve the Quality of Teaching,

point out that formal induction programs are becoming increasingly common. In the 1980s, only 15 states

offered new teachers some form of induction. By 1999,

38 states and the District of Columbia had adopted induction programs. They range from small projects that

reach only a fraction of a state’s newcomers to California’s Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment Program, a $100 million effort intended to match every

beginning teacher with a mentor for the first two years

on the job. To the extent that states require new teacher

induction, “they send a powerful message to districts,

schools, and new teachers themselves,” conclude Revisiting What States Are Doing authors Eric Hirsch, Julia

Koppich, and Michael Knapp. 

Out of necessity, California is emerging as a national

leader in supporting new teachers. Since the state passed

a class-size reduction initiative five years ago, local districts have had to scramble to find teachers to fill new

assignments. Between 1999 and 2005, the state projects

hiring another 265,000 new teachers—at least 10 percent of whom are expected to arrive at the classroom

with emergency credentials, without adequate training

or experience.

The New Teacher Center in Santa Cruz grew out of a

California study to identify effective approaches to beginning teacher support. It has been designated as an

exemplary mentoring program by the U.S. Department

of Education and highlighted by Recruiting New Teachers. The center consults with districts across the country, including some in the Northwest region, and attracts

educators from more than 20 states to an annual symposium. The staff, headed by Executive Director Ellen

Moir, also works in close collaboration with local school

districts in the Silicon Valley, Oakland, and elsewhere to

teach classroom veterans how to observe, coach, and

support new teachers. 

Moir and her hand-picked staff of veteran teachers have

developed “a curriculum of mentoring,” but they had to

learn their lessons the hard way. “It took us a lot of messing around to come to our current understandings” of

what new teachers need, she admits, and move beyond

providing emotional support. No one will deny that kind

of support is important for the survival of rookies. “Being

new and facing the complexities of the job causes new

teachers to question their sense of efficacy,” Moir explains. Her research has shown that new teachers start

the school year full of hope and optimism, but then

“their confidence typically falls by October.” 

To keep up their own spirits and bolster their students’

learning, novices need access to materials and strategies to support the development of sound instructional

practices. “We want to support their learning over

time,” Moir explains, and to do so in the context of the

new teacher’s own classroom. A veteran teacher—

known at the New Teacher Center as an “adviser”—can

help by employing such methods as observation, coaching, role-playing, lesson modeling, and assessment.

That way, the program becomes focused on “teacher

learning to support student learning.” What’s more,

the strategies that help new teachers learn align with

sound classroom practices. Formative assessment, for

example, is a powerful tool that advisers use to gauge

new teachers’ understanding of their own learning.

New teachers, in turn, can use the same tool to help their

own students become more self-directed learners. “It’s

all nested,” Moir explains.

Harry Wong, author of the best-selling The First

Days of School, argues that new teachers want instructional support more than hand holding. Although

Wong is a believer in “the efficacy of mentoring,” he asserts in a recent column in Education Week that what

a new teacher needs and deserves “is a tutor, a master

teacher, or ultimately, a group of teachers, staff developers, and administrators who will teach that new

teacher and get him or her up to speed quickly. ...

Novice teachers want teachers—teachers they can watch

teach in their rooms, teachers who will give them activities and lesson plans, teachers who will tell them what

NW Education / Winter 2001

8
NEW TEACHERS

to do with those kids who challenge even the best in the

9

field.”

TRANSFORMING THE PROFESSION

When 18-year teaching veteran Jan Miles was invited to

leave her regular duties and become an adviser for a

group of new teachers, she felt as if she was letting

down the children assigned to her classroom. But then

she thought about all those new teachers struggling to

get along—many of them without teaching credentials,

working under emergency certification because of a

dire shortage. “I told my students that if I didn’t help,

it would be as if I saw a building on fire and walked past

it. I hated to leave my own kids, but I knew I had to help,”

she says.

She’s had no time to look back. As senior outreach

coordinator and educator-in-residence at the New

Teacher Center, Miles has spent the past six years advising

novice teachers in a variety of school settings, including the Silicon Valley. There’s no doubt the program has

made a difference for the rookies—more than 90 percent of whom have remained in teaching after six years. 

The surprise, says Miles, is how much she has learned

about her own teaching from being an adviser. “I knew

before that I was a good teacher,” she says, “but I didn’t know why.” Being an adviser has caused her to examine her own teaching practices, to understand her

own wisdom well enough so that she’s able to share it

with others. 

Moir sees that reflective process as one of the most useful aspects of mentoring. “It means the exceptional

teacher has to ask, What have I been doing that’s so effective? They have to unpack that, deconstruct what they’ve

been doing well in the classroom,” she explains, so that

they’re able to explain their strategies to novice teachers. 

The assignment has given Miles the opportunity to visit

scores of classrooms—also a revelation. “I seldom left

my own classroom in all my years of teaching,” she admits. “I’d never gotten a chance to see all the other ways

there are of doing things.” Perhaps best of all, being an

adviser “has taught me to listen, to pause, to reflect,”

Miles says. 

Another educator-in-residence in the program, Tomasita Villarreal-Carman, sees mentoring as “a real opBIG

SHORTAGE,

BOLD IDEAS In Solving the Dilemmas of Teaching

Supply, Demand, and Standards,

Linda Darling-Hammond points out

that large numbers of under-prepared teachers are hired each year.

Raising standards for student performance has highlighted teachers’

shortcomings, she argues. Meeting

the standards, suggests the Stanford

education professor and executive

director of the National Commission

on Teaching and America’s Future,

“requires system change—change

in recruiting policies and teaching

policies.” What would these changes look like?

Darling-Hammond outlines the following measures to solve the ongoing problems of teacher quality,

supply, and demand:

• Raise teacher standards while

equalizing teacher salaries

• Establish licensing reciprocity

across states, enabling new teachers

in states with surpluses to move

more easily to states that experience

shortages

• Create national recruitment initiatives (including a national electronic

clearinghouse to advertise vacancies), and streamline hiring procedures

• Create scholarship programs to

prepare high-ability candidates in

shortage fields

• Expand teacher education

programs in high-need fields

• Create high-quality induction

programs for beginning teachers

• Just say no to unqualified teachers For more information on NCTAF and

its publications, see the Web site at

www.nctaf.org.

Continued on Page 41
SEATTLE, Washington—

When Patricia Wasley embarked on

her career in education 30 years

ago, teachers didn’t get much in

the way of mentoring, on-the-job

training, or even hand holding.

“On the first day of school,” she recalls, “the principal would say, ‘See

you at lunch.’ At lunch he’d say,

‘See you in the spring.’”

Today, as dean of the College

of Education at the University of

Washington, Wasley is working to

reinvent induction so that new

teachers not only get off to a good

start, but can continue expanding

their skills and knowledge over the

course of their careers.

University of Washington is

working with school district partner

sites in Seattle, Albuquerque, New

Mexico, and Portland, Maine, to

develop “a more coherent continuum” of support for new teachers

that includes mentoring and professional development through

their fifth year in the profession.

The initiative, called Sustaining

and Strengthening Teaching, also

includes Bank Street College where

Wasley was dean of the Graduate

School of Education before joining

UW a year ago. Other partners are

the National Commission on

Teaching and America’s Future, the

Teachers’ Union Reform Network,

and the Center for Educational Renewal, also based at the UW. 

Such partnerships can go far toward breaking down the isolation

between university-based teacher

preparation programs and the

classrooms where teachers practice

their craft. “Too often new teachers

hear that old saw, ‘Well, you might

have learned that in the university,

but you’re in the schools now,’”

says Wasley. “I’d like to see more of

a link so that we have a coherent

pathway into teaching.”

NW EDUCATION / Winter 2001

BUILDING A TEACHER’S 

‘REPERTOIRE’

TAKES TIME, 

TRAINING
This means making changes in

the schools of education, the dean

acknowledges. “We’re redesigning

our teacher preparation to focus on

getting our candidates ready for the

first two years of teaching,” she explains, rather than trying to prepare them for a lifetime in the field.

By their third year, most teachers are comfortable with the routines of their job “and are ready to

go deeper into subject areas.

They’re ready to master content

and learn new ways to present it.”

That’s the time to bring them back

to the university for summer institutes and other forms of professional development that will help

them build their repertoire of classroom skills, Wasley says. By the end

of the fifth year, she expects, teachers who have been through the program should be ready to pursue

certification by the National Board

for Professional Teaching Standards “and see coherence in their

profession.”

Within the UW College of

Education, this new approach to

teacher preparation is getting nods

of approval from the faculty.

“We’ve known for a long time that

induction has been a problem. We

know that many new teachers have

a hard time,” Wasley says. “For our

faculty, it’s a relief to consider a different way to prepare teachers. They

no longer have to try to cover it all

in one year. We recognize that new

teachers need extended preparation

and support,” she says. 

It doesn’t hurt that Wasley has

been down this path before. At

Bank Street College, she led the faculty through a comprehensive redesign of the teacher education

program and built new school-university partnerships with school districts. Previously, she focused on

school change as a senior researcher at the Coalition of Essential Schools and Annenberg

Institute of School Reform at

Brown University.

As the UW teacher preparation

program evolves, Wasley hopes it

has lasting value for educators. “We

hope our alumni will cycle back to

us” for the support they need at different stages of their professional development. “We want the university

to be a place that prepares, sustains,

and supports teachers through the

life of their careers.”

This year, for example, 10 firstyear teachers are meeting regularly

in a beginning career network, facilitated by Keiko Kawasaki who recently completed her master’s

degree at UW. “She gathers them as

a group every couple weeks, and

she also meets with them individually” to provide additional collegial

support, Wasley explains.

The university can also play a

key role in training mentors to work

with new teachers. “We know from

research that mentors need training

to be successful,” Wasley says. For

starters, mentors need to know

“what new teachers learned while

they were here at the university, so

that they can build on that knowledge,” she says. “A mentor should

be able to tell a new teacher: ‘OK, I

know you learned these two ways to

teach reading while you were at the

university. Let’s work with those

methods until you’re comfortable

using them in the classroom, then

I’ll show you something new to

add.’” Mentoring that is infused

with intellectual content becomes

connected to professional development and goes well beyond “showing someone where the erasers are

kept,” Wasley says.

In her own career development,

Wasley frequently returns to the

classroom when she wants to master a new skill or try out a new approach for delivering instruction.

Early in her career, she taught high

school in rural Washington. “It’s

powerful,” she says, to be back in a

classroom. “It keeps me fresh. And

it’s good to remember how hard it

is to teach—how wily kids are!”

What she likes best is finding a

public school teacher willing to

take her on as a temporary classroom partner. “We can decide together what skills we want to add to

our repertoire. Then we can coach

each other.” She hopes to be teaching ninth-grade English part time

next year.

“Expanding the repertoire” is

something all teachers need to do

throughout their careers, Wasley

believes, whether they work in the

elementary grades or teach graduate students. “It’s our professional

responsibility.” Without change,

teachers fall into predictable patterns that fail to excite students

about learning. “Kids figure out

routines quickly. They need greater

variation, and not just in the curriculum. I’m also talking about

pedagogy and assessment. We need

to switch it up on them, keep them

fresh.” The saddest scene in any

classroom, says this veteran educator, “is when we don’t ask enough

of kids, when we don’t push them,

when we don’t keep them on the

edge of their seats.”

—Suzie Boss 

11

NEW TEACHERS

KWETHLUK, Alaska—“We

don’t want you there. Get out,” the

Saudi man told the Frontline TV

reporter, referring to the American

troops stationed in his homeland

since Desert Storm. I’d never heard

it stated so baldly before, and it

made me feel defensive and a little

dense, like an expansive guest

who’s just discovered that everyone

at the party thinks she’s a lout.

I watched this television interview shortly after visiting a Yup’ik

village school in Alaska, near the

Bering Sea. The urgency of crosscultural relations, disastrously apparent to all of us after September

11, had preoccupied my thoughts

the day I strode down the rutted

road from Kwethluk’s dirt airstrip

to its community school. I was

there to learn about the interplay of

Western and Alaska Native knowledge in the education of village

youth. But, that day, I was particularly conscious of being a kass’aq,

a white person with good but, perhaps, uninvited intentions.

I grew up in Anchorage, but

this in no way educated me about

the state’s first people. So I felt privileged to walk through Kwethluk,

casting my eyes over the mottled

tundra with its lacework of Kuskokwim River tributaries and having

the chance to talk with students,

teachers, and village elders. I particularly wanted to talk with

Dorothy Epchook.

Epchook grew up in Kwethluk

and has been an associate teacher

at the school for 10 years. She

teaches Yup’ik Studies, instructing

students in traditional skills and

crafts and coaching them in the

use of their native language. I

wanted to talk to Epchook about

the benefit to village students of

having teachers who share their

heritage. I’d heard that Alaska’s

rural schools import up to 85 percent of their teachers—mostly

white—from other states, and that

many don’t stay beyond their first

year. While the Lower Kuskokwim

School District, which includes

Kwethluk, hires the greatest number of Alaska Native teachers in the

state, there are never enough.

I found Epchook in the library.

We sat at a table near a row of Macintosh computers and a wall display of handmade fishnets. As she

talked, her ready laughter dispelled

my worry about being an unwelcome outsider, and, wanting to

grasp every nuance of her meaning, I barely took my eyes off her.

She sat back a moment and reminded me, kindly, that it was customary to lower one’s gaze when

another speaks. I had a hard time

remembering this, but, no matter,

she cheerfully talked about what

I’d come to learn.

“I was raised speaking Yup’ik,

but when I was 10 we moved to

Egegik, and we lost it somehow. We

were teenagers and wanted to be

like everyone else, and the others

didn’t speak Yup’ik,” she told me.

About 250 air miles south of

Kwethluk, Egegik is on Alaska’s

peninsula and has had a history of

white influence since 1818, unlike

many villages in the Lower Kuskokwim region where whites moved in

a century later. English is commonly spoken there. Epchook finished elementary school in Egegik,

but, when it came time for high

school, her options were distressing.

At that time, Alaska typically

funded village schools only

through the lower grades. Village

students were sent to boarding

schools for their high school years.

Like others, Epchook faced these

prospects: Quit school and stay in

her own community, or attend a

boarding school on the other side

of the state or a Bureau of Indian

Affairs high school in the Lower 48.

She chose to stay in school and was

assigned to the Chilocco Indian

School in Oklahoma. It was 1969.

“I learned the word hatred, bigotry,” she said. “In our culture

there was no such thing. I was

taught never to pass judgment on

anybody. Grandfather always said,

if you’re under the same sun, we’re

the same.”

13

NEW TEACHERS

UNDER THE

SAME

SUN

RESEARCH SHOWS THAT WHEN

TEACHER AND STUDENT SHARE

BONDS OF CULTURE, LEARNING

SOARS. IN ALASKAN VILLAGES 

LOCATED FAR FROM TRADITIONAL TEACHER PREP 

PROGRAMS, NEW RECRUITS

WITH DEEP LOCAL ROOTS ARE

TAKING AN INNOVATIVE ROUTE

TO BECOMING TEACHERS.

Story and photos by 

DENISE JARRETT WEEKS

Demonstrating how to use traditional Yup’ik

tools to make fish nets, Dorothy Epchook, an

associate teacher in Kwethluk, teaches her

students skills and values of village life. 
SHAPING DESTINIES

The civil rights movement of the

1960s fueled objections to the Indian boarding school system, but

little changed for Alaska Natives

until the 1976 “Molly Hootch”

Alaska Supreme Court out-of-court

settlement, in which the state

agreed to provide a tax-supported

high school in any village that

wanted one—and nearly all did.

This settlement, coupled with the

1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act that established influential Native corporations,

empowered Native communities to

shape the educational destinies of

their own young people. Schools

were then expected to help village

youth build a firm foundation in

their heritage and language as part

of preparing them for adulthood.

“I think it helps the students to

have a Native teacher because they

understand more about their culture,” said Epchook, who relearned

the Yup’ik language when she returned to Kwethluk as an adult,

“and learning how to make things

for survival. If anything should

happen, they’ll know how to survive anywhere and by any means.

The [attack on the World Trade

Center] towers made me think that

I need to teach the kids how to survive, maybe without electricity.”

She’d invited a village elder to

come to the classroom the next day

to show students how to make a

qalu, a dip net for catching small

white fish from the nearby Kuskokwim River.

“Every one of us is capable of

teaching,” she continued. “By sharing [my teaching responsibility]

with elders, students can learn from

the elders how to stand on their own

two feet. They will understand by

teamwork, by working as one, they

can accomplish anything.”

Epchook herself will be learning

to make dip nets along with her

students—how to use traditional

finger measurements and where

among the stands of reeds and

grasses on the tundra one can find

the special roots needed for the

bindings. Teachers should foster an

exchange of teaching and learning

with their students, she said.

“It’s OK to have a student teach

you, and that way you’ll see how

much they’ve learned, and you can

help them advance. I think being

an excellent teacher you have to be,

personally, humble. By being humble, by being very meek, students

learn more from you, you learn

more. If you let them know that

you are a student, no matter what

age, then you can go from there.

And that’s how our elders taught

us. That way, you have respect and

trust. Even a non-Native teacher

can do that—work hard to learn

the culture—if you’re willing to.

14

NW EDUCATION / Winter 2001

REPP intern Willa Towarak (top) meets with

her university partner, who will work closely

with Towarak and her mentor teacher during the coming school year.

Students in rural Alaska win big when their

teachers share their roots–or are willing to

put down new roots in the community.
A non-Native could be a teacher

and a Native can help convey

meaning to the students—it would

be a working team.”

Such teams are common in the

Lower Kuskokwim School District,

a 44,000-square-mile area encompassing about 23 villages. A quarter

of the district’s teaching staff is

Alaska Native—about 65 teachers—and half of them are instructional aides who assist elementary

teachers (requiring some college

coursework) or teach Yup’ik culture and language (requiring village recognition of one’s expertise

and nomination by the local school

board). While such partnering is

valuable in these bilingual schools,

the need to increase the number of

fully certified Alaska Native teachers persists. Instructional aides

can’t teach core academic subjects

such as mathematics and science,

where the confluence of Western

and Native knowledge is especially

rich. While their classroom experience and cultural expertise help

make them strong candidates for a

teacher preparation program, living in rural Alaska presents

formidable challenges to pursuing

college degrees.

“Life here is very demanding,”

Epchook told me. It’s easy to see

what she means. A village lifestyle

not only includes modern

chores—jobs, bills, taxes, elections, and community meetings—

it involves the traditional demands

of subsistence fishing and hunting,

extended family obligations, close

living quarters, and geographic isolation and hardship. Phone and Internet service can be patchy, if

available at all. There are no roads

to these villages. All transportation

is by small airplane or barge, skiff,

or snowmobile up the Kuskokwim

River from the Bering Sea.

These realities of village life

make it difficult to leave to attend

college in a city. While some Alaska

colleges and universities offer

distance-delivery courses leading to

undergraduate degrees and teacher

certification, an aide who is working full time in the classroom may

need up to 10 to 15 years to complete her program.

“For me, I’m 50, I’m looking at

maybe I should go back and get

that degree,” said Epchook, laughing wryly, “I keep taking [distancedelivery] courses, and I’m always at

level 101. It’s almost like a glitch in

the computer: one-oh-one, one-ohone, one-oh-one.”

And so, the conundrum: To staff

Alaska’s schools with more Native

teachers who are grounded in Western knowledge and Native tradition, prospective Native teachers

frequently must leave their villages

to get their college degrees. But this

separates them from village life

and the sources of tradition that

help make them especially valuable

as teachers.

PREPARING RURAL

EDUCATORS

Since the “Molly Hootch” settlement, the state of Alaska has tried

to provide Alaska Native students

with teachers who can teach the

curriculum in the context of

Alaska’s indigenous heritages. One

strategy has been to prepare all

teachers to teach in village schools.

To be certified in the state, all

prospective teachers must complete

coursework in Alaska studies and

multicultural education. As part of

its reform measures, the state also

introduced voluntary Standards for

Culturally Responsive Schools, a

document prepared by the Alaska

Native Knowledge Network and approved by the Assembly of Alaska

Native Educators.

But the ideal, most agree, is to

increase the number of Alaska Native teachers, especially in schools

serving a majority of Native students. Studies validate this. A recent

study by the National Bureau of

Economic Research demonstrated

that students of color significantly

improved in their math and reading achievement after having spent

as little as one year with a samerace teacher.

The state has launched several

programs over the years to help individuals from the villages earn

teaching certificates. One of the latest is the Rural Educator Preparation Partnership (REPP), launched

in 1996 by University of Alaska,

Fairbanks, with funding from a

half-million dollar federal grant.

In the first year of the program, 11

of the 13 REPP interns who enrolled were Alaska Native. Today,

very few of the 40 interns enrolled

are Native. The reason for the reversal, said REPP Director John

Weise, is the small number each

year of Native students who complete undergraduate degrees, a requirement to qualify for the REPP

program.

“We nearly depleted our qualified pool of Native applicants that

first year,” said Weise.

REPP is a “fifth-year,” or postbaccalaureate, teacher preparation

program that is aligned with the

state’s teaching standards. It enables

students with undergraduate degrees

in any major to earn their teaching

certificates by working full time as

interns in village schools, teaching

side-by-side with regular classroom

teachers who serve as their mentors.

Both mentors and interns receive

guidance from university faculty

members. During the school year,

interns teach, complete assigned

readings, participate in audio seminars, write papers, and occasionally

meet together at the university in

15

NEW TEACHERS
Fairbanks. Their portfolios are expected to reflect their mastery of theory, practice, and academic content,

as well as a deep understanding of

multicultural contexts and how to

involve families and communities

in the schools.

BRIDGING CULTURES

REPP Director John Weise grew up

in Bethel, across the river from

Kwethluk in the district’s largest

community with 5,500 residents. He

is a tall, soft-spoken man with a

ready sense of humor. A professor of

education at UAF, Weise also has

been a classroom teacher and district superintendent in rural Alaska

communities. He remembers being

a college freshman at UAF and flipping through the pages of the

course catalog. To him, it was “like

a supermarket” of tantalizing discoveries, and he wanted to pluck a

course from every shelf. One class,

Orientation to Education, required

him and his classmates to help out

for a couple of weeks in classrooms

at Lathrop High School and Joy Elementary. The experience was a decisive one for Weise. “Something

clicked, I guess, and I wanted to become a teacher,” he said.

At the time, UAF offered a fieldbased teacher education program,

the Alaska Rural Teacher Training

Corps (ARTTC), in which students

could earn teaching degrees while

assisting teachers in rural schools.

Weise chose to earn his teaching

certificate through this program,

and, in his final year, he went to

Metlakatla, on the southernmost

tip of Alaska’s Panhandle. Mornings, he and a few fellow ARTTC

students would study and discuss

their coursework, and afternoons

they would teach in classrooms at

the local school.

The program, later called the

Cross-Cultural Education Development Program (X-CED), graduated

more than 200 Alaska Native teachers through the 1970s and 1980s.

Students followed the same curriculum as campus-based students—general education,

teaching methods, and a teaching

practicum—but their instructors

were UAF faculty field coordinators

who traveled a regional circuit.

Videotapes featuring lectures by

other UAF faculty arrived weekly.

“I learned to be a teacher by

teaching, reading, and looking at

these tapes. I could read Piaget and

then go the next day into my sixthgrade classroom and ask my students if the clock on the wall was

alive or dead—then I’d go back

and read that book again!” said

Weise, poking fun at his first attempts to blend theory and practice.

But he’s very serious about the

value of learning to teach while

teaching, believing it can be better

16

Kwethluk teacher Beverly

Chmielarczyk (at right)

has made the village her

home for several years,

learning by living there to

see where Native and

Western knowledge intersect and how to infuse

this into her instruction.

When village students

learn from both nonNative and Native teachers, they can look to

these adults as role

models for cross-cultural

relationships and ideas.
preparation for the profession than

traditional campus-based programs. He stresses, however, that

any distance-delivery program

must factor in human contact.

As a team, mentor teachers and

interns work closely every day of a

school year. This one-to-one relationship is an essential aspect of the

program, said Weise. And if one of

them is Alaska Native and the other

non-Native, they have an opportunity to model for students how to

work together and negotiate the intersection of Native and Western

cultures, essential lessons for village

youth. Even the most remote Alaska

village has been deeply influenced

by mainstream America, said Weise,

whose own family includes Yup’ik

and Norwegian ancestors.

“You tell me where I can live as

only a one-race type person,” Weise

stated flatly. “You can’t do it in

Alaska.” To help prepare students

for productive and fulfilling adult

lives—whether they choose to stay

in their village communities or

move elsewhere—they need role

models, others who’ve successfully

bridged the cultures, he said.

MENTORING AND

ROLE MODELING

Sam Bailey and his wife Lana grew

up in Unalakleet, on the shores of

the Bering Sea. With an undergraduate degree in mathematics from

University of Alaska, Anchorage,

Sam earned his teaching certificate

through the REPP program. Today,

he teaches math and she is vice

principal at Galena High School,

on the Yukon River.

In some ways, Sam envies Lana,

who received her teacher training

from a traditional program at Pacific University in Oregon (although the REPP program

supervised her student teaching

practicum in Galena). He suspects

he might have learned more about

the nitty-gritty of teaching from

formal coursework.

“You spend an entire year in the

classroom” as a REPP intern, he

said, “but I don’t think you really

understand all of it. You’re at the

mercy of your mentor teacher, and

if they can’t help with methods or

how to present a lesson, you have

to learn on your own. I never knew

what to ask my mentor teacher.”

Although the REPP program

helped them earn their teaching

certificates, Sam and Lana, who

are Alaska Native, are ambivalent 

about creating special programs for

prospective Native teachers. While

the intent might be good, they

worry about creating a two-tiered

system in which Native teachers

might receive inferior training.

“It’s more important to have a

good teacher than to have a lousy

teacher who looks like you,” said

Sam.

But what if you have a good

teacher who looks like you?

Willa Towarak Eckenweiler is

a REPP intern in Unalakleet this

year. For several weeks now, she’s

been working with a small group of

first-graders on their reading skills

at the same school she attended

when she was a child. The youngsters are cute and eager, and they

remind her of herself—at the very

age when one of her teachers made

a lasting impression.

“I had some Native teachers who

were from the village, and I think

about them, about how we were

taught and how we used to enjoy listening to them,” said Eckenweiler.

“I have been thinking about my

teacher I had in elementary school,

who enjoyed telling us stories about

hunting and Native games.”

Today, Eckenweiler is married

and the mother of two daughters.

For the past 14 years, she’s coached

Unalakleet’s Native Youth Olympics

in which students compete for state

17

NEW TEACHERS
championships in such contests as

the Alaskan high kick and the seal

hop. Now, she is training to be a

classroom teacher. It’s easy to trace

the line of influence back to the

teacher who captivated her students

with stories of Native life.

“We need to have role models to

let the kids see that there are jobs to

be had if they go and get their education,” she said. “One way to keep

our culture, values, and traditions

alive is for local people to stay here

and work in the village.”

In fact, as Sam Bailey pointed

out, Unalakleet is a village where

“the professionals look like the

community,” meaning that Native

people are among the physician’s

assistants, dentists, economic developers, airline managers, and other

college-educated specialists. 

“I have 11 brothers and sisters

and ... six got degrees from the

university in Fairbanks. Education

was a big deal in our house,” said

Eckenweiler. “I even have a niece

who will be graduating from MIT

[Massachusetts Institute of Technology].”

The credit must go to the parents in the village for having high

expectations for their children, she

said.

“It was really stressed that you

really needed to go to school. Once

that standard was set, where students went to college, then they

came back and had kids and they

expect a little more from their own

children,” she said.

Eckenweiler expects her own two

daughters to follow suit, but there’s

another part of their lives that she

wants them to embrace, too.

“I would like to see them earn

a college degree and be able to remember their Native heritage,” she

said. “I think it’s important not to

lose our identity. Nowadays, it’s so

easy to get caught up in mainstream society and be just like everybody else. It’s important to keep

our own culture alive, our own

identity, and be proud of it. So they

will not be afraid to accomplish

their goals.”

TEACHING TO LEARN

For many, teaching students about

their heritage becomes a personal

journey in which they, too, discover

the richness of their ancestry.

“Teaching in your own language

builds your self-esteem,” said Nita

Rearden, a specialist in Yup’ik

Studies for the Lower Kuskokwim

School District and an alum of the

University of Alaska, Fairbanks,

campus-based teacher preparation

program. “You discover who you

are, your ancestors, your values.”

While much about village life

has changed from the old ways,

young people still need to nurture

their roots, she said. “They adapt

into another culture, but they still

need their tools, their Yup’ik values. Those were already in existence before we ever had contact

with white people.”

In fact, ancestral ways of viewing and being in the world still exhibit a strong influence on village

youth, and students are more apt to

master Western knowledge if they

also can apply their Native knowledge and skills and learn in the

context of their environment and

culture. “If we build where kids are,

how much easier that would be,”

said Rearden.

Ray Barnhardt, education professor at University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and director of the Alaska

Native Knowledge Network, agreed.

“The extent to which instruction

and curriculum are linked to students’ language and cultural context, you reap all kinds of benefits,”

he said. Students’ academic

achievement rises—even on standardized tests—their motivation

improves, and they’re less likely to

drop out of school, he said.

“If we accept that, then how do

we do it? By developing curriculum

and instructional strategies to engage students in the study of their

place and their culture. But teachers

need to know something about that

place, its history, how they live their

lives. So the next question is: Who’s

best equipped to do that?” he said.

A new non-Native teacher will

need at least a couple of years to

learn something about the village’s

culture and incorporate it effectively into classroom instruction,

Barnhardt said. “And then they

leave. But people who are from the

villages, those people don’t leave.”

Eighty-five percent of the 300

Alaska Native teachers who began

teaching during the past 25 years

are still out there teaching, he said.

“Those teachers are now senior

staff, and they’re beginning to influence their schools ... leading

the way for providing Native students with an education that’s second to none. But we need the

educational system to be supportive

of what they have to offer,” not only

by developing curriculum and instructional models for integrating

Native and Western knowledge, he

said, but by recognizing the special

attributes Alaska Native teachers

bring to the classroom.

“There’s often an expectation

from principals that a quality

teacher is bubbly and high-energy.

Native teachers very seldom exhibit

all of those qualities, yet their students outperform those who don’t

have a Native teacher,” Barnhardt

said.

Expecting those who live in the

villages to leave their communities

to attend campus-based teacher

preparation programs, “like everyone else,” is misguided, he said.

18

NW EDUCATION / Winter 2001
Their cultural expertise is often inextricably linked with being a part

of the fabric of that community.

“Coming to a university in Fairbanks or Anchorage or wherever,

you can become detached from

your own community. In the four

or five years it takes to complete

your degree program, you have

other experiences, and it’s sometimes hard to come back to the village,” he said. Programs such as

REPP allow village residents to do

their studies in the context of their

community and language.

However, Rearden said, “I feel

that it is important to mention to

those who choose to complete their

college degree, it is OK to do so on

campus, and they do not need to

stay in a village. You can always regain any Native knowledge when

you return to your village or in

other villages, but I really think

colleges should include Alaskan

Studies to make the learning on

campuses interesting, relevant, and

to be aware of the importance of

learning our own language.”

But distance-delivery programs

are neither easier nor a shortcut to

a teaching career, said Barnhardt.

“I find the students in the distanceeducation program more motivated, more mature, and less

concerned about grades. They’re

grappling with real-world issues

out there. They’re going to be

going into the classroom the next

day and trying to put into use those

ideas and strategies they’re learning about.”

LEARNING

THE ROPES

In the Kwethluk school library that

day, Dorothy Epchook taught me,

just as she teaches her students

every year, how to make a fishnet

for catching salmon. She brought

out a finished net, maybe 12 feet

long. It was rolled neatly, and the

layers of thin nylon cord gave it a

silky sage-colored appearance, like

a bound lock of hair from a beautiful giant. She showed me how she

grades the students’ handiwork,

pointing to the tight knots of nylon

cord that should align perfectly

when the net is rolled up.

“They must line up, like this,”

she said, running her finger across

each straight row. “Here, I will

show you how to make a net.”

I was nervous, afraid I’d prove

to be a slow learner. She said, “Everyone can learn. This is how I

teach my students.”

From a large plastic bag she

pulled out nylon cord, rope, handtooled wood blocks, and net-weaving tools.

“These are made by the students,” she said, showing me a

wooden square block measuring

patneq, or a width of four fingers.

We sat on the floor of the library.

She tied one end of the nylon to the

leg of a chair, let out a length of

cord, and wrapped the other end

around the wooden block, crossing

over and under, and knotting it in

such a way as to create the first

square in the mesh.

“Do you see?” she asked me.

“Here, I will do it again.”

I watched intently, wanting to be

able to replicate her movements exactly. She handed me the spool and

said, “Now you do it.” I tossed the

cord around the wood block. “No,”

she said, “like this. Let me show you

again.” On my next try, I worked

the nylon cord around the block of

wood as she had, knotting it snugly.

“Very tight,” she said. “Make sure it

is very tight. Good! You did it!” She

praised me, and I laughed with her,

proud of my little triumph.

“Now do another one,” she

said, firm in her desire to see me

make perfect knots that would

align in an elegant row. Afterward,

we cleaned up—she, insisting that

I keep my little net and keep practicing—and I noticed that I felt

good, valuable, and worthy. And

this, of course, must be how she

makes her students feel.

That afternoon, Epchook walked

with me back down the dirt road to

the airstrip. She continued to teach

me all along the way—the medicinal uses for the wormwood that

grew beside the road, the historical

value of an age-old sweat house.

When we came to the end of the

road, I asked her how to say goodbye in Yup’ik, and she said there is

no such word. Instead, Yup’ik people say, tua-i-ngunrituq, it’s not

the end. I practiced the word, and

she praised me loudly: “You’ve got

it! You’ve got it!”

Then my plane taxied up, and

we parted. I called back to her,

“Tua-i-ngunrituq!” and, without

thinking added, “Bye!”

“No!” she hollered back,

“There’s no goodbye!”

I hoped she was right. ■

19

NEW TEACHERS
NW EDUCATION / Winter 2001
MR.FISHER FINDS HIS CALLING

NEW TEACHERS

21

IN A FOURTH-GRADE CLASSROOM, A NEW TEACHER

GRAPPLES WITH HIS STUDENTS’ DIVERSE LEARNING

NEEDS, INADEQUATE TEXTBOOKS, AND THE ISOLATION THAT COMES WITH BEING A ROOKIE. CAN HE

BECOME THE TEACHER HE WANTS TO BE? 

Story and photos by SUZIE BOSS

ESTACADA, Oregon—At 6:45

a.m. on the day after Labor Day,

Sam Fisher enters the doors of

River Mill Elementary School and

walks to a classroom located at the

far end of a long hallway. His

fourth-graders won’t join him here

for another two hours and 20 minutes, but he wants to be ready. The

week before, he came in to set up

bulletin boards, arrange desks, and

meet his fellow teachers. A few of

them rolled their eyes and wished

him luck with “that bubble” of

fourth-graders he’s been assigned.

He shrugged off the warnings,

eager to start the year with hope as

his only prejudice. Outside his

classroom, he has posted a construction paper sign that reads,

“Welcome to Mr. Fisher’s School.”

There are 24 little fishes—one for

each student—swimming toward a

schoolhouse. 

At 9:05 a.m., when the students

enter the room, they are quieter

than he expected. He settles them

onto the carpeted corner of the

room for a get-acquainted game.

Shyly at first, they size him up.

They notice that he is bearded but

has shaved his head so he looks

bald as a cue ball. He wears shoes

with the heels missing and tie-dyed

socks. One student asks why he

wears those hoop earrings. Doesn’t

he know that guys wear studs?

When he smiles in response, 24

grins come back at him. He tells

them that he and his brother grew

up in Estacada, too. They play a

name game, filling in the blanks in

the sentence: “I’m _____ and I

like ______.” At the end, he

manages to go back around the circle, showing that he knows all their

names and something special

about each person.

The next day, the school counselor tells him that a boy who had a

rough go of it last year is excited to

be assigned to this classroom. “I

think Mr. Fisher is interested in

me,” the boy confided. Hearing

this, Sam Fisher grabs for his heart.

His teaching career has begun.

* * *
In classrooms all over the country,

about 100,000 new teachers are

launching their careers this school

year. They are among the most

closely observed rookies in history,

as researchers search for effective

ways to support newcomers and

stem the looming teacher shortage.

Half of those who started teaching

in September are expected to leave

the field within five years. Why do

some stay? What makes others

leave? And how do the inevitable

bumps of their first year affect the

learning of students entrusted to

their classrooms? For a new teacher

like Sam Fisher, the school year

opens with more questions than

answers. Has he made the right

choice? Is he up to the task? Can he

be everything he hopes to be? He

and his 24 students will discover

the answers together as the school

year unfolds. 

At 30, Fisher is a little older, and

perhaps a little wiser, than the typical rookie. Although he grew up in

a family of educators, he didn’t

head into the field directly after college. “Money was important to me

for a while,” he admits. After earning degrees in business and theater

from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, he worked in sales in Seattle

and then moved to San Francisco,

hoping to combine his passion for

music with business opportunities

in technology. That bubble burst

around the time a first marriage

failed, and he came home to Oregon to regroup.

Estacada is the kind of place

that made the Westward Migration

worth the walk. Located on the

banks of the Clackamas River and

in the shadow of Mt. Hood, it’s a

classic timber town of about 2,000,

45 miles from Portland. Fisher’s

great-great grandfather homesteaded here in the 1860s along a

spur of the Oregon Trail, and members of his extended family still own

700 acres of forests and fields. From

the living room of the house his

parents built when he was 10,

Fisher can see a patchwork of green

rolling toward the horizon. Every

stick and stone within sight belongs

to someone in his family.

For all its splendor, Estacada

has seen hard times in recent

decades, with a rural poverty rate

pushed upward by mill closures.

When Fisher was in sixth grade and

again during his junior year of

high school, Estacada made headlines for having to close its schools

because tax levies had failed.

Today, the state has a safety net to

prevent such school closures, but

Estacadans are still debating how

to build a more stable economic

base for their town.

For Fisher, especially, Estacada

holds a melancholy beauty. In 1998,

he spent what he remembers as “a

perfect day” here with his parents,

enjoying the sweet, simple pleasure

of being in each other’s company.

A day later, his mother and father

were killed in a car accident. Suddenly, everywhere he looked he

could see their footprints—at the

house they designed to have no

right angles, at the historic community church where the family has

gathered for generations, in the garden they tended during long summer vacations. His mother taught

high school German in Portland;

his father was a school psychologist

in Vancouver, Washington. 

After some soul-searching,

Fisher decided to steer his own career toward the familiar waters of

education. “I took some time first,”

he says, “to make sure I was deciding to go into teaching for the right

reasons.” He re-enrolled at Lewis &

Clark College. But as the old saying

goes, you can never step into the

same river twice. This time around,

he was a graduate student in education, pursuing a master’s degree

in teaching. During the 15 months

of that rigorous program, he somehow found time for love. His new

wife and her two young sons joined

him at the Fisher family home,

which began to feel wonderfully

full again. When he heard the boys’

voices echoing from the loft, he

couldn’t help but smile. This was

a house made for child’s play.

When it came time to look for a

teaching job, Fisher set his sights

on Estacada. During the summer

before the 2000–2001 school year,

the principal at River Mill called to

invite him for an interview. Fisher

recognized the name: Larry Adamson had been his pre-calculus

teacher at Estacada High School.

Fisher was excited by his summer

interview. It involved not only the

principal, but also a team of teachNW EDUCATION / Winter 2001

WHAT EVERY STUDENT CRAVES: UNDIVIDED ATTENTION.
ers. What’s more, the principal had

arranged for five students to come

in so that Fisher could demonstrate

his classroom skills. “It felt

friendly,” he recalls. When Adamson showed him around the building, Fisher discovered that his

classroom would be right next door

to the music room—where the

same teacher who taught him

when he was in elementary school

is teaching a new generation of

children to love music.

To be honest, Fisher doesn’t remember much about his own

fourth-grade year. “I remember the

relationships, but not what I

learned in history or science.” He

knows that standards have become

substantially more important since

he was a kid, but he hopes there’s

room to help kids reach benchmarks and also master social skills.

“A lot of school is about how to relate,” he says. “If these kids can

function as human beings, they

can learn to do anything.”

* * *

A month into the school year,

Fisher stands before his class, textbook open to a unit on earth science. The book describes an

experiment in which students are

supposed to mimic erosion by dripping water onto sand. It isn’t working. Sand doesn’t behave the same

way that soil does. The teacher detects another problem. During his

year of student teaching, Fisher

worked alongside a skillful veteran

who used the inquiry method to

teach science. He remembers the

look in her students’ eyes when

they were engaged in investigations

that answered their own authentic

questions about the world. He looks

up now and sees vacant stares

heading for the windows. He snaps

his book shut and asks the class,

“Is it just me, or is this boring?”

That gets their attention. 

“Tomorrow,” he promises,

“we’ll start a new unit.” 

Then he asks the class to suggest ways that the Earth changes.

That’s the larger lesson that fourthgraders are supposed to master in

science. What do they wonder

about? What intrigues them? In the

lively discussion that ensues, several students bring up questions

about volcanoes. Fisher feels his

own curiosity heating up. “Tomorrow,” he promises, “we’ll start on

volcanoes.”

A promise made to 24 students

means that a rookie teacher will be

23

A BEGINNER’S 

BOOKSHELF

Which books offer the advice

and inspiration a first-year

teacher needs? Here are a handful that Sam Fisher found helpful as he navigated his rookie

year of teaching in a fourthgrade classroom.

• Tribes: A New Way of Learning and Being Together by

Jeanne Gibbs. Fisher relied on

this classic guide to building a

learning community to get the

school year off to a positive

start. Gibbs draws on more than

20 years of experience to outline

a process for building collaboration, cooperative problem solving, and inclusion in the

classroom.

• Comprehensive Classroom

Management: Creating Communities of Support and Solving

Problems by Vernon F. Jones

and Louise S. Jones. Fisher

credits this book with helping

him build a strong foundation

for managing his classroom and

dealing fairly with behavioral

challenges. 

• Mosaic of Thought: Teaching

Comprehension in a Reader’s

Workshop by Ellin Oliver Keene

and Susan Zimmerman. Fisher

first encountered this book in

graduate school and found it

worth another look as he sought

to help students of diverse abilities become more proficient and

enthusiastic readers. 

• Craft Lessons: Teaching Writing K–8 by Ralph Fletcher and

Joann Portalupi. Fisher turned

to these authors to help make

his writing workshops more

successful. He liked the book

for its discussion of concepts

as well as its practical ideas

and mini-lessons. 

NEW TEACHERS

See FISHER, Page 36

STUDENT HIGHLIGHTS: SINGING THE ELECTRICITY SONG, WRITING GHOST STORIES.
NW EDUCATION /Winter 2001
NEW TEACHERS

NONTRADITIONAL TEACHER

CANDIDATES OFTEN MUST MAKE

HERCULEAN EFFORTS AND

FINANCIAL SACRIFICES TO

PREPARE FOR NEW CAREERS IN THE

CLASSROOM. A MODEL PROGRAM

HELPS SMOOTH THE WAY.

Story by LEE SHERMAN

Photos by MOUNT BURNS

PORTLAND, Oregon—A trio

of third-graders files solemnly into

the office that Lemil Speed shares

with another teacher at Ball Elementary School. Two little girls,

neatly coiffed in pigtails and cornrows, and a very small boy, as serious as a diplomat on a dangerous

mission, line up before him. It’s

impossible to miss the respect in

their wide eyes as they wait for Mr.

Speed to speak.

You’d expect this powerfully

built man (who looks more like a

former football player than the exbanker he is) to talk in the booming tones of a coach. But as he

leans toward their expectant faces,

his voice is softly reassuring, quietly encouraging. With congratulations for their good work and a

gentle admonition to keep it up,

Speed awards daily stickers to the

threesome before sending them

back to class.

As you follow Speed around this

struggling inner-city school, as you

watch him teach a writing lesson,

pinch-hit for the principal, or

mentor another teacher on meeting benchmarks, you’d think he’d

been an educator forever. But

teaching is a second career for this

56-year-old who grew up in an allblack community in the segregated South. After a long stint in the

Air Force, a couple of years at 

McDonald’s, and then a solid

banking career that included

being affirmative action officer for

First Interstate, Speed found himself out of work during the recession of the 1980s. It was then that

someone told him about the

Portland Teachers Program. And it

was there that he found his calling. Now in his seventh year of

teaching, he says of the profession:

“I don’t see myself doing anything

else.”

For 13 years, the Portland

Teachers Program has been redirecting the talents and ambitions

of people like Lemil Speed toward

the classroom. A public schooluniversity partnership that recruits

and supports minority teacher 

candidates throughout their professional training, the program

serves students ranging in age

from 18 to 55. The average age is

29. These nontraditional students

are, in the words of PTP Director

Deborah Cochrane, “entrenched

in reality.”

“We tend not to take the kinds

of people who have stars in their

eyes,” says Cochrane, who runs the

program almost single-handedly

out of the northeast Portland campus of one of the program’s sponsors, Portland Community College

(PCC). Many of the 65 current students are parents themselves;

many have steered their own kids

through Portland Public Schools,

another PTP partner. Virtually all

have had some first-hand experience working with kids, lots of

them as paraeducators. The program waives full-time tuition at

PCC for two years, and then at

Portland State University for upperdivision and School of Education

graduate requirements. But students are on their own to pay bills

and buy groceries throughout the

five-year program. Most must

make a Herculean effort to support

themselves and their families.

“These are amazing people,”

says Cochrane, who herself grew

up with hardship as a child of

rural poverty. “I was talking to one

of my graduate students last night,

and she waits till her kids are in

bed to do enormousamounts of

homework after student teaching

all day and taking courses in the

late afternoon and early evening.”

Lemil Speed is no exception to

this characterization. He and his

wife tried to scrape by on her 

income and keep up with child

support payments to his former

spouse. But when the budget

wouldn’t stretch anymore, he took

a $6-an-hour job at the Expo 

Center as a laborer.

His keystone through the fiveyear grind was PTP. When the

going got rough, he and his fellow

students found comfort in the

comradeship of others with a similar struggle and shared goals.

Equally important was Cochrane

herself. By all accounts, she is infiPIPELINE TO TOMORROW 25
26

NW EDUCATION / Winter 2001

nitely more than an administrator.

Her role includes mentor, counselor, confidant, and, now and

then, mother. For her students, she

provides encouragement, problem

solving, advocacy, and guidance. 

“There were a lot of people who

helped me along the way,” says

Speed, “but Deborah was the one

who was always there, always

checking in. To me, she is the

Portland Teachers Program.”

Speed’s career has taken off.

Last year, he was recruited for a

new position at Ball—instructional specialist—created to assist

teachers in a districtwide push to

raise academic standards at struggling schools. And he has been 

accepted into a competitive principal preparation program sponsored by the district.

NUMEROUS INITIATIVES

PTP is one of the oldest of a number of programs throughout the

Northwest designed to pull nontraditional candidates into the

teacher-preparation pipeline (see

sidebar, Page 28). The need for

new teachers over the next decade

is critical. The need for minority

teachers who reflect the growing

diversity of America’s student population is perhaps even more

acute. 

In Oregon, for example, minority students make up almost 20

percent of public school enrollment. Yet, minority teachers, including administrators, account

for only 4 percent of faculty

employed by school districts and

education service districts, according to the Minority Teacher

Report: A Ten-Year Perspective

prepared by the Oregon University

System and the Governor’s Office of

Education and Workforce Policy

and presented to the legislature

in February 2001. The report describes progress on Oregon’s Minority Teacher Act of 1991, which

called for equalizing the proportion of nonwhite teachers and the

proportion of nonwhite students.

The act mandated that the

Board of Higher Education require

each public teacher education program to prepare a plan with specific goals, strategies, and

deadlines for recruitment, admission, retention, and graduation of

minority teachers. The numbers

show, however, that 10 years later,

the gap remains. Reasons cited in

the report include sluggish school

employment due to scarce resources and teaching’s low salaries

and prestige relative to other professions. Also, the legislature’s

mandate had no funds attached,

and it coincided with the devastating impact of Oregon’s property

tax-limitation Measure 5. 

But the picture is not all bleak.

“In spite of resource scarcities,” 

the report notes, “numerous initiatives have been instituted over the

past decade to attempt to address

the shortage of minority educators,

particularly teachers, in Oregon

schools.” One such initiative was

the November 1997 meeting, 

Diversifying the Teacher Workforce

in the Northwest, sponsored by the

Northwest Regional Educational

Laboratory. According to the 

report, the Oregon group formed

a planning team that developed a

“multistep plan” that included:

(1) coordinated, statewide commitment and action; (2) multiple,

targeted strategies among the key

stakeholder groups; (3) statewide

policy direction from the top; and

(4) specific projects and initiatives

with the highest priority on paraprofessional career-ladder programs, professional development 

of the current workforce, and a

statewide Oregon diversity teacher

program. That program, the group

said, should be modeled on the

Portland Teachers Program.

Over its lifetime, PTP has turned

out 70 graduates, most of whom

have gone to work in the increasingly diverse Portland School District. But it’s not just the numbers

that make the program an attractive model for others to follow—

it’s the quality behind the

numbers. Cochrane is careful to

point out that the program is selective and committed to turning out

good teachers, not just minority

teachers. “The PTP really pushes

excellence—that’s Number One,”

she says. “We expect that all the

teachers who come out of the program will be exceptional teachers.”

PTP students must keep their

grades up and attend seminars,

colloquia, and other special activities in addition to their formal

coursework. Although students sign

a contract promising to apply to

teach in Portland, and if hired, to

stay for at least three years, a job

with the district is not guaranteed.

“We want Portland Public Schools

to hire them because they’re the

best person for the job,” Cochrane

explains, “notbecause they’re

African American, notbecause

they’re Native American, notbecause they’re Latino or Asian

American.”

FOLLOWING HER HEART

Takiyah Williams grew up on the
27

NEW TEACHERS

West Indies island of Trinidad off

the Venezuelan coast. The diverse

people who populate this former

British colony speak English,

though their lineage spans the

planet, particularly Africa, India,

China, and Syria. When the islanders speak, consonants are soft

and languid. Williams’ voice as she

teaches carries a melodious lilt

hinting of rain forests and azure

surf lapping at trackless sand.

From the birthplace of calypso and

steel drum, she also brings a love

of music. 

If you observe Williams at work

with her first-graders at Faubian

Elementary School, you’re likely to

be invited to join a joyous march

around the room before recess to

“The Marching Song” on a tape

called Run, Jump, Skip, and

Sing. You’ll hear 20 tiny voices

singing the days of the week in

Spanish and see 20 tiny bodies gyrating to silly rhyming songs such

as “My Dog Dingo” or “Luckless

Lucy,” created to teach letter

sounds. And you’ll see students

smoothly transition from one activity to another at the cueing of

a soothing Celtic tune.

“Music and the arts are really

big for me,” says Williams,

lamenting that districtwide budget

cuts have whittled most visual and

performing arts programs down to

bare bones.

Williams perfectly reflects the

program’s emphasis on excellence.

“Principals fight over her,”

Cochrane reveals. Like so many

PTP students, Williams started out

in another field. For her it was

business administration and computer applications, which she studied at City University of New York

while living with relatives and

earning money by babysitting,

walking dogs, and any other flexible work she could find. The child

of an impoverished family who was

the first to finish college, Williams

was initially motivated by the

promise of a fat salary that could

help lift her and her loved ones 

into the middle class. She managed a Wendy’s fast-food restaurant

in New York for a while, worked for

the provost at CUNY, and then

moved to Atlanta where she worked

in human resources at MCI. The

money was good, but she felt no

passion for the work. “It just

wasn’t my thing,” she recalls.

Determined to seek a career in

teaching, she loaded her kids, then

two and six, into the car and headed to Portland, where she has family. To save money on food for the
NW EDUCATION / Winter 2001

28 “A student today could go

through 12 years of education

without ever seeing a teacher of

color,” Mildred Hudson of Recruiting New Teachers told the

National Education Association

in May. In its newsletter, NEA

Today, the teacher union points

out that nationwide, one-third of

public school students are minorities, yet only 13 percent of

the teaching force are minority

educators. Fully 40 percent of

schools have no minority teachers at all. 

To address this discrepancy,

educators in the Northwest are

employing a variety of strategies

to bring more minorities into the

teaching profession and keep

them there. Here is a sampling:

Bilingual Teachers Pathway Program—This Portland State University program is designed for

bilingual and bicultural educational assistants who want to

become licensed teachers. In

partnership with four area community colleges and 20 local

school districts, the program recruits paraprofessionals for a

seamless program of coursework and field experience. With

the support of Title VII dollars,

the program will create a teacher

licensure and degree program

with an English-as-a-second-language endorsement, as well as

providing individualized advising,

assessment, student services, financial support, mentors, and

community building. For more

information, call (503) 725-4704.

Montana Systemic Teacher Excellence Preparation (STEP) Program—A National Science

Foundation–funded project, the

STEP Program was designed to

smooth the pathway between the

state’s seven tribal colleges and

campuses with teacher preparation programs, according to Professor Elisabeth Swanson,

Director of the Science and Math

Resource Center at Montana

State University, Bozeman. To attract more Native American students to the teaching profession,

particularly in math and science,

the program has held a series of

summer institutes to bring faculties together to reform math, science, and education curricula.

They have also worked on ways

to attract and retain minority students. Because “there can be

more students in one introductory course at the university than

in an entire town on the reservation,” Swanson says, many Native students find four-year

colleges “daunting” and “scary.”

So the program has organized

“bridge” institutes to provide cohorts of tribal students with math

and science coursework and experience in campus life within a

supportive structure. For more

information, call (406) 994-5952.

Alaska Recruitment and Retention Project—To keep new

teachers in the classroom and

address a severe shortage of

teachers in Alaska’s isolated villages, a $2.5 million U.S. Department of Education grant is

funding a variety of activities delivered through school districts

and service providers, says Eric

Madsen, project director. One

strategy is providing trained

mentors and extra inservice days

for all new teachers. A rural

practicum for preservice teachers

gives novices a “realistic picture

of teaching in the bush—that it

isn’t ‘neat and romantic’ as some

people imagine,” says Madsen.

Other incentives aimed at retaining teachers in the bush include

improving teacher housing by

providing, for example, new carpeting and insulation, and paying

for professional development

expenses. The other piece is

providing better “connectivity” to

ease isolation—that is, reliable

phone, Internet, and e-mail

services, according to Madsen. 

For more information, call 

(907) 465-2970.

RECRUITING 

TEACHERS 

OF COLOR
NEW TEACHERS

seven-day drive, she bought a one- 29

burner hot plate and cooked oatmeal, eggs, and rice in rest stops

and supermarket parking lots

along the way. 

It wasn’t long before she heard

about PTP, but the application

deadline was tight. With no typewriter or computer, she was frantically trying to finish the application on the bus just hours before

the deadline. She flew off the bus,

ran to the PTP office, squeezed

herself into the crowded office, and

begged to use the computer.

Cochrane says this kind of 

intensity is the norm for her students.

“I really feel passionate about

the commitment level of my students—they really want to be

here,” she says from her office as

she juggles a constantly jangling

phone and a steady flow of students dropping in for a minute of

her time. “When you ask them,

‘Why do you want to be a teacher?’

they say things like, ‘I want to

make a difference for someone like

me,’ or ‘My kids are in public

school, and I don’t like what I

see—I want to change it.’ The

career-change people say, ‘This

wasn’t satisfying to me,’ or ‘I realized money’s not important,’ or ‘I

want to do something meaningful.’ A lot of it is just wanting to

give back to the community—

somebody made a difference in

their life, and they want to pass

that on.”

ROLE MODELS FOR ALL

Bud Mackay’s ancestry is a blend of

European and American Indian.

Although his dad came from the

Ute tribe (from which his home

state of Utah got its name), he was

raised by his mom and stepfather

off the reservation. In the small

town of Vernal, Mackay stood out. 

“Nary did I ever have a teacher

of color as a role model,” he 

recalls. “It was not uncommon for

me to be called ‘nigger’ as a child.

I was the closest thing to black that

they had in our district. It was

painful and hurtful.”

It was partly to spare other children the experience of being

“negated” that he decided to pursue teaching after his used-car

dealership failed during an economic downturn. He landed a job

at Clark Elementary School, where

he teaches ESL behind the scarlet

curtains of a stage converted to a

classroom. “I think it’s very important that we have teachers of color

in the classroom,” he says. He felt

validated the very moment he met

Cochrane. “She gave me this feeling that ‘you may have been

negated then, but you’re not going

to be anymore.’”

Cochrane offers several reasons

that kids should have teachers who

represent all groups in the nation’s

multiethnic mix. First and most

obvious, she says, children of color

need role models who “look like

they do.” They need to see that

“they, too, could achieve a position

of authority and power—the

power to pass on knowledge. They

need to know that they can accomplish things, that they can go to

college and get a degree and be

a professional.”

Second, she says, kids need

teachers who are connected to 

their culture, teachers who 

“understand the cultural implications of learning, understand different learning styles, understand

family dynamics and incorporate

that into the curriculum.”

Third, says Cochrane, these

teachers can bring cultural

insights into the school as a whole,

sharing their perspective with 

other teachers and with administrators. And, finally, minority

teachers are important role models

for kids who don’t look like them,

as well.

“On a larger scale, long term,

what you really hope is that having more diversity in the teaching

workforce will have some impact

on racism in this society,” she says.

“If children—all children—learn

from a diversity of cultural and

ethnic perspectives, then they grow

up with a whole different view of

reality.” ■■
NW EDUCATION / Winter 2001

SURVIVING THE CROSSFIRE

Tracy Williams (left), mentoring coordinator, and Margaret Yount, president of the teacher’s union, display the district’s Distinguished Winners award.
NEW TEACHERS

WALLA WALLA’S MENTORING PROGRAM 

HELPS NEOPHYTES TRIUMPH OVER THE CHALLENGES OF TEACHING

STORY & PHOTOS BY JOYCE RIHA LINIK

WALLA WALLA, Washington—

Amidst the arid bunchgrass and

sagebrush plateaus of southeastern

Washington winds a verdant river

valley, steeped in history. The Walla

Walla, Nez Perce, Cayuse, and

Umatilla tribes once roamed this

valley and fished in its rivers and

streams. Lewis and Clark passed

through during their legendary

westward journey in 1805 and

traded goods with the Native Americans. Not long after, the settlement

of “many waters”—Walla Walla—

was established as a fort and

trading post, while the neighboring

Whitman Mission became home

to one of the region’s first

schoolhouses. 

Evidence documents that this

school’s early teachers faced monumental challenges: the harshness

of frontier life, for starters, plus the

charge of teaching “reading and

writing” and “the rudiments of

agriculture” to the Cayuse and

Walla Walla Indians, alongside the

settlers’ children. Unfortunately for

one Judge Saunders, these challenges were augmented by a particular incident involving flying

tomahawks when a dispute broke

out between the mission’s founder

and a small band of Cayuse, ending the career of a promising

young schoolteacher caught in

the crossfire.

Although today’s education

challenges are decidedly different,

they are no less formidable to new

teachers saddled with enormous responsibility and often dodging the

latest crossfire in the public education arena. It’s no surprise that,

without proper support, nearly a

third of new teachers abandon the

profession within the first three

years and as many of half are gone

within five.

But history is not repeating

itself in Walla Walla where an

award-winning teacher mentoring

program has managed to boost the

new teacher retention rate to 93

percent in the five years since the

program has gone districtwide. 

“It started out as a real grassroots effort,” says Tracy Williams,

mentoring coordinator for the district. Williams recounts her own experience as a first-year teacher in

Walla Walla nearly 20 years ago,

when she was one of 15 new teachers on a staff of 26. “We were lost,”

she says. “We’d stand around the

copy machine and say, ‘What are

you going to do?’ ‘What are you

going to do?’ And we just tried to

figure out how to teach on our

own. So I was really committed to

the fact that people who are new to

the profession of teaching need

some guidance and peer support.”

About 15 years ago, Williams reports, the program started as “a

voluntary, after-school kind of

thing.” Williams and others in the

district took it upon themselves to

take new teachers under their

wings and tried to find ways to plan

helpful workshops. “It was hit and

miss,” Williams says, “until, about

seven years ago, we applied for a

pilot grant from the state of Washington and got the resources to

make it more formal.” 

Today the program is a finely coordinated effort carried out by the

Walla Walla School District and the

Walla Walla Valley Education Association. Working as a team, a school

principal, the mentor coordinator,

the local education association president, and an assistant superintendent pair up veteran educators with

teachers who are either new to

teaching or new to the district. In

addition, the team provides training

and ongoing support throughout

the year to ensure success.

This collaborative process was

recently recognized when the Walla

Walla Mentoring Program was one

of six programs across the country

selected as Distinguished Winners

in the 2001 National Education Association/Saturn/United Auto Workers Partnership Award for Teacher

Mentoring Programs. Recipients

were honored for their use of strong

union-management partnerships to

create outstanding mentoring programs for new teachers. 

Current funding for the program comes primarily from Washington’s Teacher Assistance

Program (TAP), which provides approximately $1,400 per new teacher

as long as the school district meets

certain training criteria. This

money is split between stipends for

mentors and new teachers, and release time for participants to engage in classroom observations.

The district provides additional financial support, funding the district coordinator’s salary and

footing the bill for training and

materials. 

JOINING THE RANKS

This year, Walla Walla has 21 firstyear teachers and 19 new-to-district

teachers in the program. All 40

have a mentor. 

Some even have two. 

Each new teacher is assigned a

“peer coach” and a “peer mentor.”

The peer coach is a veteran teacher

who has taught the same or similar

curriculum and can help the neophyte “develop a yearlong plan

with the curriculum that they’re

actually going to teach,” Williams

explains. The focus is on the

“what” of teaching, addressing specific course content. The peer mentor focuses on pedagogy, the “how”

of teaching, with an emphasis on

31
issues of performance and classroom management. When possible,

one person fills both roles. When

this isn’t possible—for instance,

when there is no “job-alike” in the

building—two separate veterans

are assigned the roles of peer coach

and peer mentor. In these cases, the

peer mentor will most likely be a

veteran within the same building,

while the peer coach may be from

elsewhere in the district.

These pairings are monitored

and adjusted when necessary.

Today, for example, Williams and

Margaret Yount, president of the

teachers’ union, are discussing

changes. In one instance, they’ve

decided to assign a new peer mentor to one of their new-to-district

teachers, a 40-year-old veteran who

may relate better to a contemporary

than to the 22-year-old teacher

originally recommended by the

principal because of a similar job

assignment. In another case,

Williams and Yount discuss alternatives for a mentor who both

think may be “overbearing.” 

“We want new teachers to succeed,” says Yount, “because when

teachers don’t succeed, then you

have plans for improvement and

probation, and then a teacher is

ushered out of teaching. Nobody

wins. It’s much better to train

them, get them the right mentor in

the beginning so that they’re successful teachers.”

But even with this thoughtful

attention to matchmaking, mentoring goes far beyond the simple

pairing of veterans and neophytes.

According to research, programs

that do little else than assign mentors inevitably fail. Training and

ongoing support are essential elements of a successful induction

program. 

TRAINING 

THE JEDI KNIGHTS 

Like the valley’s early inhabitants,

Williams—the key figure in the

development of Walla Walla’s mentoring program—has demonstrated great resourcefulness.

Elements of the program are based

on a California teacher-training

model developed by education

researchers Ann Morey and Diane

Murphy. Williams also utilizes references on instructional strategies

and classroom management, notably work by Harry Wong. Additionally, Williams pulls useful

information from any promising

piece of research or tool she can get

her hands on. This includes books,

journal articles, Web sites, and even

the odd movie classic when the situation calls for it. 

“In training, I talk a lot about

the qualities of a peer coach, the

qualities of being a good mentor,”

Williams says. In short, she tells

mentors to follow in the path of

one wrinkly space gnome named

Yoda. “Yoda doesn’t tell,” she counsels veteran teachers, reminding

them of the wisdom exhibited by

the Star Wars character. “He just

asks questions and guides. Yoda

doesn’t see himself as superior. He

doesn’t come with all the march

music and the regalia and the fanfare. He comes in the mud, with

questions. He pulls it out of Luke

Skywalker. He says, ‘It’s in you. You

have the ability to do this,’ and he

helps Luke pull it out. And he’s always there in Luke’s head—his

words echo. That concept works for

me. The people who were my mentors—their words echo in my head.

And you can’t get rid of those, the

little gems of advice.” 

Training also addresses how

mentors can avoid common communication barriers with those

under their tutelage. Most find it

obvious that they should avoid criticizing, preaching at, or threatening

their wards. But some are surprised

to learn that general praise, reassurance, or diversion can shut down

communication. “Too much praise

can shut down a teacher from asking questions,” Williams observes.

“They’ll say, ‘Well, I’m supposed to

be really good at this,’ and so they

don’t ask questions.”

District Elementary Science Coordinator Peggy Willcuts reflects on

her first-year assignment, many

years ago, as a fifth-grade teacher

teamed with two very experienced

male instructors. “I didn’t want

them to think I was this stupid,

young, inexperienced little thing.

So I kept to myself.” Willcuts had

questions about basic procedures

for lunch and recess and how to

deal with behavioral issues, but she

kept quiet. “You know, sometimes,

it’s the really dumb questions that

you need to ask. But you don’t have

anybody who’s supposed to answer

those, so you decide you’re not

going to ask and you hope, somehow, you’re going to assimilate the

information just by observing.” 

Many veteran teachers remember contracting strains of Emperor’s

New Clothes Syndrome, where they

felt they couldn’t let others see what

they didn’t know. That’s why

Williams provides tutorials for new

teachers, including curriculum

scavenger hunts and how-to lists

for basic procedures. It’s also why,

at a training session with administrators and mentors, she promotes

discussion of the “unwritten rules”

of each school’s environment and

encourages mentors to share these

insider tips with new arrivals. 

LEARNING TO JOUST

Cindy Nass, a veteran at Prospect

Point Elementary, says Williams

“put us empathetically back in the

shoes of being a first-year teacher

again.” 

32

NW EDUCATION / Winter 2001
NEW TEACHERS

efore a new doctor ever

touches a scalpel, she

watches at the elbow of an experienced surgeon. Before a

rookie lawyer argues his first

case, he typically sits “second

chair,” assisting a more seasoned colleague. Even a rookie

baseball player usually has to

work his way up through the

minors to debut in The Show.

But new teachers? They’re expected to shoulder all the responsibilities of classroom

veterans, starting on day one.

Worse, rookies often inherit the

most challenging assignments

in schools where teachers

come and go as if by revolving

door. Words of encouragement

or advice from a veteran colleague can make a huge difference as rookies grapple with

classroom management, lesson

plans, and school procedures.

But in the hectic first weeks of

school, “it can be easy to overlook new teachers or assume

that somebody else is keeping

an eye out for them,” acknowledge Cori Brewster and Jennifer Railsback, authors of

Supporting Beginning Teachers: How Administrators,

Teachers, and Policymakers

Can Help New Teachers Succeed, a new publication in

NWREL’s By Request series.

Supporting Beginning Teachers

outlines strategies that promise

to improve the induction of new

teachers so that they—and

their students—get off to a better start. The authors outline

three models that are finding

more widespread use: formal

induction programs, teacher

mentoring programs, and

school-university collaborations. Any of the models can

be developed within a single

school, across a district, or at

the state level. But all of them

require planning and the commitment of resources and time.

Formal teacher induction programs seek to introduce beginners to teaching methods and

school policies, as well as to

the “culture of teaching,” the

authors explain. Elements may

include orientation; individual

plans for growth and development; ongoing seminars; regular opportunities to observe

and be observed by other

teachers; opportunities to team

teach with a more experienced

colleague; action research;

modified teaching schedules

in which newcomers receive

smaller loads, fewer preps, less

difficult classes than teachers

with more experience, or release time for professional

development.

Teacher mentoring programs

pair a novice teacher with a

veteran or a team of veterans.

Well-designed mentoring goes

far beyond pep talks, and aims

at maximizing the new

teacher’s effectiveness in the

classroom. Supporting New

Teachers underscores the importance of training mentors in

order for such programs to be

effective. Good programs take

care to match new teachers

with mentors who share such

bonds as similar subject areas,

grade levels, or teaching

philosophies. In addition, the

booklet points out, mentoring

should not be tied to evaluation, and mentors should not

be seen as “stand-ins” for principals. Regular times for mentors and mentorees to meet

should be built into the school

schedule. 

School-university collaborations

bring together the worlds of

classroom practice and educational theory. Although models

vary widely, such programs may

involve university staff in leading seminars, training mentors,

or facilitating discussion groups

for new teachers. Although such

partnerships are most likely to

occur near college campuses,

proximity is not essential. Technologies such as videoconferencing, e-mail, and electronic

bulletin boards are making it

easier for programs to be effective across long distances.

The booklet describes several

programs in the Northwest

region that provide hopeful

examples of support for beginning teachers. As the authors

conclude, “Schools that provide high levels of support for

beginners will not only retain

more teachers, but better

teachers—and students will

reap the rewards of a more

positive and effective learning

environment overall.”

Copies of Supporting Beginning Teachers can be ordered

at no charge by calling (503)

275-0666.

BUILDING A BETTER SUPPORT SYSTEM

B
Those shoes cover some rough

terrain. According to the research of

Ellen Moir, first-year teachers move

through a predictable cycle. They

slide from anticipation to survival

and then disillusionment in the

first half of the year. They go on to

experience rejuvenation, reflection,

and renewed anticipation by year’s

end. By understanding this cycle,

mentors can gauge how best to

support new teachers through the

inevitable peaks and valleys.

When Lance Longmire came to

the district two years ago, he was

fresh out of grad school and starry

eyed. “I was very idealistic,” he

says. “I thought I was going to hop

in school, change the world. Everything was just going to go my way.

Things didn’t go as smoothly as I

expected.”

Like many new teachers, Longmire was given an especially tough

first assignment. The latest in a

string of bodies meant to fill a

revolving-door position, Longmire

became the Lead Special Education

Teacher at Green Park Elementary.

Charged with developing Individualized Education Plans (IEPs) for

30 kids, he had his hands full. 

Longmire says Williams and

Nass, his mentor, “saved my life.”

Nass walked him through initial

IEPs and parent conferences, and

shared invaluable techniques for

classroom management and basic

survival. 

And, Longmire says, Williams

shared one gem of advice that got

him through the rough spots: Expect train wrecks. 

“She told me that sometimes,

when you’re a first-year teacher, it’s

like a train wreck coming through.

Sometimes things just get messed

up and, the next day, you have to

pick it up, put it back on the tracks

and just keep on going. And I’d say

that I derailed a few times. It was

humbling. But it was good to know

that was normal and that it’s OK

to make a mistake, and then pick

things up and move on.” 

This concept of “failing forward” is an important lesson

Williams attempts to impart. She

says it is imperative that teachers

are given license to try things that

might not work as they attempt to

improve learning in the classroom,

and it is essential that the education

environment allow failure not to be

fatal. “Trying new things is essential to growth and achieving,” she

says. “Bret Boone of the Mariners

wouldn’t hit home runs if he wasn’t

making good attempts and striking

out sometimes. You have to take the

chance that you’re going to make

mistakes, and then learn from those

mistakes. And know that, even in

failure, we find things that improve

performance.” Williams says this is

especially important in the culture

34

NW EDUCATION / Winter 2001
of first-year teachers where mistakes

will be made. “If veteran staff don’t

criticize them as much, things will

get better for those new teachers

faster.”

Throughout the year, new

teachers meet with their mentors,

usually on a daily basis, for troubleshooting and guidance. “The

first few months, it’s like being on

call,” says Nass. “Then as the year

rolls on, there are fewer and fewer

questions and more conversations

about how things are going instead

of what fire is burning at the moment and needs to be put out.” 

Additionally, mentors and new

teachers engage in assigned observation-feedback cycles, tied to their

stipends. To further support teachers through that crucial first year,

neophytes attend monthly workshops covering a range of topics,

including such things as how to

conduct parent conferences and

prepare substitute plans. 

GAINING GROUND 

Teachers who have been through

Walla Walla’s mentoring program

have nothing but praise for it.

Kenny Singer, who joined the

eighth-grade staff at Pioneer Middle

School last year, says, “I don’t think

anything prepared me better for

teaching than working in this mentor program. I mean, being able to

collaborate on curriculum, being

able to talk about classroom management, being able to talk about

how the day went or how this kid

was so hard or, you know, wow, that

class was really intense. Or a parent

called me and was not happy, or

even—woohoo!—a parent was so

happy ... Just being able to talk

about the emotional roller coaster

that is teaching was great.”

Lisa Firehammer, Singer’s mentor, says she also benefited from the

experience. “The nice thing about

the program,” she says, “is that it’s

not all Ken asking me things. It becomes more of a collaborative relationship. It’s not one teacher always

getting help from another teacher.

It’s just teachers working together. It

fosters that—the give-and-take that

you really would like to have happen. Everybody’s used to working

together and talking things over,

and we’re just all really comfortable

with collaborating. I think the fact

that it’s established around our district makes everyone more open.” 

Williams gives a Yoda-like nod.

“We’re trying to build a culture of

collegiality,” she says. “We don’t

expect teachers to teach in isolation. We want them to be models

for students. We want them to be

continual learners.” 

For the district, the mentoring

program has become a good recruitment tool. Judy Reault, assistant superintendent, says that with

the current teacher shortage, “we’re

in a sellers’ market. For teachers deciding between Walla Walla and another district, this may give us the

edge.” Certainly, Reault notes, “it

has given our district the ability to

maintain quality teachers.” 

Evidently so. While new teachers

fall in droves around the country,

those in Walla Walla stand steadfast

and tall. 

Now in his second year of teaching at Walla Walla, Singer shares a

story about a fallen comrade: “I

was at a wedding this weekend and

met a woman who graduated with

honors from Stanford, then got her

master’s in teaching. She taught for

one year in California schools and

she’ll never teach again. I asked

her, what was her year like? She

didn’t have a staff that she could

talk to; she didn’t work with anyone

all year on anything; she had contact with her principal or vice principal only once or twice;

neighboring teachers didn’t talk to

each other. It was completely isolating. And she was miserable because

she had to do everything and she

had no one to talk to about, you

know, the problems or the good

things. She had no support.

“And I told her if she had

taught her first year in Walla Walla,

she would still be teaching.” ■

35

NEW TEACHERS

MARK PAUL, A FIRST-YEAR TEACHER

AT PROSPECT POINT ELEMENTARY,

TEACHES HIS KINDERGARTNERS 

TO WALK IN A LINE AND FOLLOW 

DIRECTIONS.

LANCE LONGMIRE WORKS ONE-TOONE WITH A STUDENT AT PROSPECT

POINT ELEMENTARY.
up all night, surfing the Internet

for materials he can use to teach

about volcanoes. But over the following weeks, as he invents a

hands-on earth science curriculum

one day at a time (and with the

help of a Web site called Core

Knowledge, at www.coreknowledge.

org), he has no regrets. He watches

students build their understanding

by making clay models of Earth.

They start with the core then build

out, using a different color for each

layer. When the tennis-ball sized

planets are complete, he slices into

them with a guitar string, revealing

the geologic layers within.

Next he assigns a team project.

Table groups build models of volcanoes using papier-mâché and cardboard tubes. He enlists his students

as fellow researchers. With resources

they find at home and online, they

assemble a class library on volcanoes. Meanwhile, Fisher gets the

idea of weaving together science, social studies, and writing. While the

completed volcano models sit “dormant” on a window ledge, he assigns students to write their own

myths, in the style of the Native

American story that describes the

long-ago eruption of Mount

Mazama and creation of Crater

Lake. After the students read their

myths aloud, they will imagine their

own volcanoes erupting. To connect

the volcano projects to the real

world, they begin planning their

first field trip: a full-day outing to

the observatory at Mount St. Helens.

Six parents have volunteered to

drive, keeping costs to a minimum. 

It’s an ambitious plan, to be

sure. But so far, Fisher’s energy

shows no signs of flagging. Shucking that dull science text was one of

his smartest moves, even though it’s

meant more work for him. “I felt

high for a week,” he reflects later,

“like a weight had lifted.” The experience reminds him of something

he learned from Nancy Nagel, a

professor of education at Lewis &

Clark. “She taught us that to tackle

the hard work of problem solving,

we need to be interested and involved. That’s true for both teacher

and student—we all find it hard to

try new things. We have to struggle

to break out of what’s comfortable.” 

Even as he gains confidence to

try new approaches in the classroom, Fisher worries about the pace

of teaching. “How much should I

try to do? And what’s fair to expect

of my kids?” 

Those would be good questions

to discuss with the two other

fourth-grade teachers in the building, but he seldom bumps into

them. Fisher’s room sits between

the music room and an exit to the

blacktop, across the building from

his grade-level colleagues. He

makes a note to check in with a

fifth-grade teacher who looped with

her fourth-graders from last year.

He recalls hearing about a program

in California, where new teachers

are matched with mentors for two

years. There’s no time for feeling

envious; he has a million details to

take care of before that field trip.

* * *

Twenty minutes before school begins, half a dozen kids have put

away their backpacks and are

dancing to the music that spills out

of Mr. Fisher’s boom box. A couple

others play computer games. One

girl relaxes with a book on the sofa

that Fisher picked up at a garage

sale. These are the precious moments that make the classroom

feel like a community.

With a ring of a handbell (the

same one his grandmother used in

a one-room schoolhouse and his

mother used in her high school

classes), Fisher signals that it’s time

for students to take their desks. But

not everyone’s quite ready to settle

in for the day. One boy realizes he

left his backpack on the bus. Another has forgotten his glasses.

Fisher sends them off to take care

of business while he steers the rest

of the class toward a math assignment. About every six seconds,

someone else begins a question

with, “Mr. Fisher...?” He makes

the rounds as fast as he can. He’s in

such constant motion, he might as

well be on roller skates.

Peter*, a quiet boy with dark

hair and big brown eyes, tries to

focus on the assignment on his

desk. But he’s easily distracted. He

chews his fingers, writes on his

hand, builds little sculptures out of

masking tape. He’s one of nine students in the class identified as having special learning needs, which

range from attention deficit disorder to giftedness. His needs are the

result of fetal alcohol syndrome.

Fisher has been meeting with

Peter’s foster parents to learn more

about the syndrome and how it affects learning. Usually, the boy is

pulled out to work with an aide

during math. It’s a subject he understands well, despite his struggle

to concentrate. Today is an experiment, to see if Peter can stay on

track within the larger class setting.

Fisher keeps circling past his desk,

calling the boy’s attention back to

the task at hand with a soft word or

deliberate arch of his eyebrows. 

Without warning, Fisher stops in

his tracks and claps his hands together. Conversation halts. “I just

heard a scream,” he says. “There’s

no reason ever to scream during

math. Math isn’t scary.” The noise

level plummets and he’s off again,

36

NW EDUCATION / Winter 2001

FISHER

Continued from Page 23

* Names of students have been changed.
answering the next ‘Mr.

Fisher ... ?” question. With five

minutes left in math period, Peter

picks up his pencil and tackles the

math problem.

So far, class management

hasn’t taken up too much time.

“These are great kids, and most

days the class takes care of itself,”

Fisher says. “But,” he adds, “so

much more is going on here besides academics.” Three times a

day, for instance, a timer on his

belt goes off and he gives a hand

signal for a certain boy to head to

the office for his medication. He

uses motivators with a couple kids

who struggle to keep their behavior

under control. He’s grateful that

fourth-graders will extend themselves for a reward as humble as

a Pokemon pencil. 

Fisher has been reading aloud

Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing.

He draws on his drama background, throwing in funny voices

that the kids seem to like to underscore the wise humor of author

Judy Blume. His acting skills come

in handy for crowd control, as well.

“You don’t want to see Mean Mr.

Fisher make an appearance,” he

warns when the noise level starts to

escalate. Even at his silliest—when

he’s using Monty Python accents

during a math lesson—Fisher is

careful not to seem too loose. “I

dance on that fine line all the

time,” he admits, “between having

fun and keeping things under control. I figure if the kids are happy to

be here every day, that’s not a bad

place to start. And I make an effort

to stay consistent so they know

what to expect from me.”

When it’s time for morning recess, 24 pairs of shoes hit the floor,

ready to dash for the outdoors.

Fisher motions for a boy named

Jeremy to stay behind. He balks, but

Fisher reminds him, “It’s the consequence of not doing your homework last night. Have to do it now.”

He doesn’t back down when Jeremy

tries whining. He tries not to let

Jeremy see him smile when the boy

makes a crack that, truth be told,

is pretty funny. But when Jeremy

turns in his homework, Fisher

is quick to offer praise. And he

stretches out recess for an extra five

minutes so the boy can enjoy some

time outside.

* * *

Grace perches on the sofa, signaling

that she has a story ready for conference during writers’ workshop.

Mr. Fisher leans in to hear her read

a tale about two girls on a quest to

find a golden diamond. When she

finishes, he compliments her effort.

But he has questions. So many

questions: Why did the girls sneak

out of the house? Why do they need

the golden diamond? Why is it important? How did it feel when they

walked through the spider web?

Grace’s eyes seem to get bigger

with each question. She nods when

he reminds of her an earlier class

discussion, when they talked about

how reading is like mountain

climbing. “Every detail the author

gives is something the reader has to

put into his backpack,” Fisher tells

her. “The reader has to carry that

backpack to the top of the mountain. If a detail is not important,

then why ask the reader to carry it?”

She takes back her paper and

makes a beeline for her desk.

Karen plunks onto the sofa next

with a story about a horse race and

three girlfriends. “This is so much

better than the first draft!” her

teacher says. She beams. He goes

on, “Now it’s time to edit. You don’t

need to add anything more to the

story. Check the spelling of these

words,” he suggests, circling several

spots on the page. “And use quotation marks to let the reader know

when someone is talking. Remember how?” She does. 

Karen is barely off the sofa when

Grace returns. She has added more

details. But Mr. Fisher has even

more questions for her. She rolls her

eyes on her way back to her desk.

The girl who’s next in line for a

conference reminds her, “Don’t

make that backpack too heavy!”

Writers’ workshop has moved

into first place as Fisher’s favorite

part of the week. His students seem

to concur. Last week, because of an

assembly, the class had only half

the usual time for writing. Students

groaned their disappointment. “I

was thrilled,” Fisher says. He also

has begun to appreciate the benefits of having a smaller class for the

part of the day when eight students

are pulled out for tutoring or other

help. “That leaves me with only 16

kids for writers’ workshop,” he says,

“and I can give them so much

more attention.”

To his surprise, students were

slow to warm up to writing fiction.

“They all wanted to write about

their dogs, or what they did last

summer.” Then, inspired perhaps by

the approach of Halloween, one boy

tried his hand at a ghost story.

Fisher invited him to read it aloud.

Suddenly, everyone was writing

ghost stories. As part of the school’s

Halloween festivities, the fourthgraders will share their scary tales

with the first-graders. Knowing that

they will soon have an audience is

adding energy to the writing process.

When he sees his students so excited about learning, Fisher feels

exhilarated. “I can’t wait to come

to work in the morning,” he says. 

At other moments, however, he

looks around the room at the miscellaneous activity and asks himself, “We’re busy, but have I really

taught them anything yet?” 

37

NEW TEACHERS
Reading, for example, has been

a frustration. Although his students

are all nine or 10 years old, they

read at levels ranging from second

to seventh grade, perhaps even

higher. Fisher has tried splitting the

class into literacy groups but struggles to find the right reading materials. His training gave him a solid

understanding of literacy theory,

but what he needs now are practical tips to help him teach struggling readers. “We talked in grad

school about how to form meaning, but not how to form words.

That’s where I feel weakest right

now,” he admits. It doesn’t help

that he has no class sets of books

for students who read below the

fourth-grade level. He’s tried having one group read How to Eat

Fried Worms, a personal favorite,

but the girls don’t seem to appreciate the book’s humor. Meanwhile,

his most proficient readers want to

tackle The Sword and the Stone.

Fisher worries that it will prove too

challenging, but he doesn’t want to

get in the way of their ambition. 

In a few weeks he’ll have to

issue his first report cards, assessing

not only reading and math, but

also skills such as spelling, public

speaking, and handwriting that

they haven’t given much attention

yet. Assessments will have to show

students’ progress toward meeting

the state requirements for the certificate of initial mastery. He makes

a mental note to design a template

so he can write report cards on his

laptop. But where’s he supposed to

find the time to work with these

kids on their handwriting? 

* * *

Winter has spilled indoors, dusting

the halls of River Mill Elementary

with cut-outs of penguins and

paper snowflakes. Fisher has

decked his room with an evergreen

he harvested from his own property.

The kids made paper chains to decorate it. He has rearranged the

classroom furniture, too. “I like

change,” he says with a shrug. His

once-shaved pate is sprouting a

fresh growth of brown hair. But he’s

still wearing those tie-dyed socks.

Fisher introduces a guest who’s

guaranteed to hold the students’

interest, even with the start of the

winter holidays just two days away.

Elwin Shibley, Fisher’s uncle and a

retired principal, arrives wearing a

plaid shirt and jeans with a big

buckle. With his white beard and

that twinkle in his eyes, he’d make

a great Santa. “Did you know,” he

asks the class, “that you’re sitting

right on the Oregon Trail?” Before

they can answer, he’s tossing handfuls of pennies onto each table.

“Whose picture is on those pennies?” “Lincoln!” the kids answer.

“Right, and that’s who was president when Mr. Fisher’s family came

across the Oregon Trail.” History

has come to life in Room 16, and

Shibley draws everyone into it.

“You’re all part of this story,” he

says. “Wherever you’ve come from,

you’re Oregonians now.”

Although Fisher grew up amid

the landmarks of the Oregon Trail

and has a family tree loaded with

ancestors who made the trek West,

he dragged his feet when it came

time to teach the subject to his

fourth-graders. The social studies

textbook devoted only three pages

to the Oregon Trail. Fisher knew

the rich subject matter deserved

better treatment, but he wasn’t

sure how to tackle it.

When he decided to stop relying

on the canned material in the textbook, he began to envision new

possibilities. “I had to psych myself

up,” he admits, “but when I got excited, the lesson plans started coming together, just as they did with

the volcano project.” Using resources he found at a Portland

bookstore, he has turned his classroom into a caravan, with each

table group playing the role of a

family aboard a covered wagon. In

this simulation, they are now 500

miles into the 2,000-mile trek.

Today’s task: Write a letter home,

telling the highlights of your journey so far. 

As he explains the assignment to

his students, Fisher reminds them

to make use of the writing devices

they’ve been studying. They began

to get acquainted with similes and

metaphors on a recent day when

the principal stopped in for a formal observation. Adamson was

pleased to see the students excited

and actively participating in the

lesson, and equally impressed by

Fisher’s animated use of body language, voice inflection, and facial

expressions to keep the pace upbeat.

“Students were required to think a

great deal in this lesson,” Adamson

noted in his written observation,

“but I doubt they realized it.” 

At times, Fisher can make

learning seem as easy as breathing

for his students. Behind the scenes,

though, he drives himself like a

taskmaster. He arrives at school by

7:30 a.m., and seldom goes home

empty-handed. Lunch is an orange,

which he eats on the run. He constantly pushes himself to stay organized, to plan ahead, to get papers

graded and returned quickly.

“Where’s my clipboard?” he mutters now, looking for the checklist

he uses to keep track of where students are with their various writing

projects. He starts each day with a

clean desk, but by noon it’s buried

in papers. 

What the students want most

from him, of course, is his undivided attention. He does his best to

spread it evenly among the 24 ex38

NW EDUCATION / Winter 2001
pectant faces. When he listens to

a boy read his journal entry for

today’s Oregon Trail assignment,

Fisher catches certain words as if

they were treasures. “I like a word

you used there—you said tumbled.” Or, “I loved how you said

‘something tragic’ was about to

happen. That got my interest.”

When he hears an ending he likes

in another story, he tells the girl

who wrote it, “That’s beautiful,”

and mimes wiping away a tear.

When a quiet, bespectacled student named Lydia volunteers to

read her passage to the whole class,

he tells her, “Pretend your great

grandmother is sitting in the back

of the class, and she really wants to

hear you.” Lydia amazes him by

booming out her story. “Awesome!”

he says at the end, clapping and

grinning. “We could hear you and

understand you! Fantastic!” Another girl, for whom speaking up is

no challenge, is next to share. She

cranks up the volume in imitation

of Lydia, making herself giggle.

Soon the whole class—including

Mr. Fisher—is giggling, too. But

she manages to work in two similes, which her teacher catches with

delight. 

* * *

By the time parent conferences roll

around in March, the year feels as

if it’s shifted into hyperspeed. The

calendar has taken on added importance since Fisher learned that

in May, he’ll become a father. He’s

planning to take a week off when

the baby arrives, which means he’ll

be mapping out his lesson plans

even further in advance.

The class has recently wrapped

up a four-week unit on electricity.

Fisher introduced the subject with a

hands-on project. Giving students

batteries, light bulbs, and wires, he

asked them to see what they could

figure out. Principal Adamson happened to stop by just as several kids

were discovering how to wire up the

components to shock themselves.

“I’d never try that again,” Fisher

admits, “at least not when I’m

being observed.” 

Although they’re now focusing

their science studies on the human

body, Fisher’s students have no

trouble recalling key concepts about

electricity when he calls out random questions. If they get stumped,

they can refresh their memory with

the words to the song they wrote as

a class. “We brainstormed the lyrics,

which include all the major concepts I wanted them to remember—atoms, conductors, closed

circuits, insulators,” he says. Coming up with a tune meant acceding

to his students’ musical tastes. But

he seems to have struck gold with

the catchy number “Whoops! I Got

Shocked Again,” set to the tune of

the Britney Spears single “Whoops!

I Did It Again.” (Fisher rolls his

eyes, admitting he had to listen to

the pop star’s music for a week to

get inspired. “The sacrifices you

make as a teacher!”)

Out on the playground, when

Fisher overhears his kids belting out

the song or teaching it to others, he

knows it was worth the effort. And

he’s amazed, looking back, that he

was terrified to try songwriting with

his kids, even though he’s been performing music for most of his life.

“Writing songs together was a goal

I had, but I kept putting it off. Then

one day the school counselor visited

our class, and she brought her guitar. She made it look so easy! So I

brought in my electric bass when

we were studying the Oregon Trail.

We wrote a song called ‘The Oregon

Trail Blues’ (set to the tune of

‘Heartbreak Hotel’). One of my best

experiences as a teacher was having

my kids ask me if we could write a

song about electricity, too. Wow!”

During parent conferences,

the mother of a boy who has been

mouthing off and missing assignments lately mentions that she and

her husband are splitting up. That

helps explain the boy’s change in

attitude. The toughest session,

though, is with parents whose

daughter is one of four in the class

identified as gifted. They want to

know if Fisher is doing enough to

keep her challenged. Is he pushing

her hard enough? 

The silver lining of the week: a

rare Friday holiday—no lessons to

plan, no homework to grade, nobody calling out a question that

begins, “Mr. Fisher...?” 

* * *

When the calendar reaches May,

Fisher has mapped out his lesson

plans two weeks in advance. The

baby is not due until mid-month,

but he wants to be ready to hand off

his responsibilities at the first labor

pain. Plus, he’s promised the class

a beach trip to end the year, and

that will take some organizing. 

He’s not the only one looking

ahead. The principal will have to

make some hard decisions next

year because of a district budget

squeeze, exacerbated by declining

enrollment. Would Fisher be willing

to loop up to fifth grade with his

current students, plus a few more? 

Meanwhile, Fisher has been

struggling with Jeremy over missing assignments, bad attitude. He

begins wondering whether he wasn’t firm enough earlier in the year.

“Did I let him get away with too

much? Laugh too easily at his

jokes?” Such are the questions that

keep the new teacher awake at

night. “At times I’ve questioned my

ability to teach him,” he admits,

“but not to be a teacher.”

There have been more high

points than lows, however. A girl

39

NEW TEACHERS
who never seemed to catch on to

multiplication has had a breakthrough in understanding. When

Fisher showed her how to group

numbers, she could see that four

groups of five means the same as

four times five. “The lights went

on! And she just took off.” A favorite moment: calling her mother

to share that the girl had won a

math award.

Another high point: Watching a

reading group decide to tackle Call

of the Wild. One boy in the group

had seemed unmotivated all year

during literature circles. “But he

liked that book, and he kept up.”

The group had to work hard to understand the book’s symbolism, and

Fisher warned them that it would

be difficult. “I told them, if it’s too

hard, they can stop and move on to

a new book. They saw me do that

earlier in the year when I closed the

science book and tried something

else. We’ve all found out it’s OK to

struggle.” They did struggle at times

with Jack London, but they plowed

ahead. “When they were done, they

felt fantastic.” And so did he.

And another: A boy’s story about

brain-sucking aliens. “He’s a really

quiet, shy boy, and this was just hilarious. And he went on for five

pages, longer than anything he’s

ever written before. Amazing!

That’s what it’s all about—

moments like that.”

In late May, two weeks behind

schedule, Kenneth Steele Fisher is

born. The substitute for Room 16

arrives to find a week’s worth of lesson plans ready and waiting.

* * *

Between the new baby’s arrival and

the end-of-the-year assemblies and

the day trip to the beach, the last

days of school fly by in a blur. A

week after the final bell, Fisher is

taking a well-earned moment to

catch his breath on the deck overlooking his garden of roses and

raspberries. He and his wife Robin

have just finished a leisurely, late

breakfast. Baby Kenneth is napping

in his cradle. The horses are

munching new grass. The sun is

shining over Estacada. An entire

summer stretches before him—a

gift to be opened one day at a time.

Time for quiet reflection is rare

in the life of a teacher, especially a

new one. “If I have any advice to

offer other new teachers,” he says,

“it’s this: Make time and effort to

go talk to your peers, because they

probably won’t have time to come

find you. Make an effort to hang out

in the staff room. I didn’t do that

early enough or often enough.” Not

once did he have an opportunity to

watch another teacher at work in

the classroom, or to be observed by a

peer. Late in the year, he was worrying aloud in the faculty lounge that

he might not get all the way

through the math textbook because

some students needed more time to

cement their understanding of division. Some veterans exploded in

laughter. “I was beating myself up,

but they reassured me that nobody

finishes the textbook!” 

He suspects he also spent too

much time inventing materials that

other teachers would have been

willing to share. “Good teachers

collect ideas. They have files full of

stuff. The major weakness of being

a new teacher is that you don’t have

five years of stuff to pull from.”

Every day, for instance, he invented

math challenges for the kids who

breezed through their homework.

“Then I had a great substitute who

gave me a book of ready-made

math challenges. Sometimes,”

he admits, “I work too hard.” 

As for next year, he’s agreed to

loop up to fifth grade, a benchmark

year. Because of budget cuts, class

sizes will be larger. He expects to

have 31 or 32 students, 22 of them

returnees. Jeremy, the boy with

whom he found himself butting

heads by spring semester, will be

assigned to another room. So will

the TAG girl whose parents worried

about keeping her challenged. But

Fisher and the other fifth-grade

teacher have agreed to work as a

team. For the first time in his

school career, he’ll have a colleague with whom he can brainstorm and share resources. 

Already, he has a zillion ideas

percolating. He’s making a mental

list of things he’ll do differently

next year. But on this perfect summer morning, Fisher can imagine

no better job than the one that

takes place in the classroom. “I

love how fast the day goes. I’m

never bored. It’s so different from

the world of cubicles and clock

watching. I can see myself doing

this,” he says, “for another 20

years—at least.” ■

40

NW EDUCATION / Winter 2001
portunity for veterans.” Some of

her fellow veterans, she admits,

“were on the verge of leaving the

profession. This allows them to

continue to build their careers.”

One came out of retirement to

work as an adviser, “and she said

she’s never felt more fulfilled as a

teacher,” says Villarreal-Carman.

The collegial relationship between

new teacher and veteran “opens

the doors to reflective practice,”

she explains. “This is purely positive for our profession.”

Once veteran teachers have

mentored novices, their own classroom skills tend to expand in unexpected ways. “When they return

to classroom teaching, it’s almost

like they’ve had a sabbatical in

terms of their professional

growth,” Moir observes. Some advisers have gone into school administration, using their newly

honed skills as instructional leaders. “This builds capacity within

the profession,” says Moir. “It’s a

critical role—being a teacher of

other teachers.”

Although programs such as the

New Teacher Center can provide

curriculum materials, research,

and technical assistance to make

induction more effective, Moir

considers it essential for local districts to “own this work” of developing the skills of their new

teachers. 

By “growing their own” induction programs, districts can make

adjustments to fit their specific population needs or unique geography. Montana, for example, uses

e-mail to connect new science and

math teachers with mentors and

overcome the isolation of working

far from subject-area colleagues.

In urban Seattle, a teachers’ association is playing an increasing role

in professional development for

new teachers. Anchorage taps the

wisdom of retired teachers, recruiting them to mentor novices.

In communities located near universities, new partnerships between

researchers and classroom teachers are paving smoother pathways

into teaching. 

No matter what the setting, providing for the growth of new teachers “should be organic—right at

the heart of the district,” Moir argues. “It’s really about building

the profession. This is such hopeful work. And it’s the cheapest

money districts can spend to improve education. Ambitious

teacher development goes right to

supporting student learning.” ■

41

NEW TEACHERS

FACING

THE

FUTURE

Continued from Page 9
EDUCATING ESMÉ: DIARY OF

A TEACHER’S FIRST YEAR 

by Esmé Raji Codell (Algonquin

Books of Chapel Hill, 2001)

Madame Esmé, as she asks to be

called, greets her fifth-graders at

the start of each school day holding a big green “trouble basket.”

She invites her 31 children to unburden themselves of their home

worries so they can concentrate

on learning. But as this first-year

teacher quickly learns, real-life

woes aren’t so easily dismissed.

Some children have parents who

beat them on a predictable schedule. Others ache to have someone

even notice them. One girl starts

each day curled in a fetal position

under her desk. A boy who has recently been homeless and hungry

eats himself sick on cafeteria leftovers. 

Into this harsh world comes

Madame Esmé, the product of

inner-city schools not unlike the

one her students attend. She

brings a 24-year-old’s hope and

a fierce determination that can be

mistaken for pig-headedness. The

diary of her rookie year reads like

a daring adventure story. She

must steer clear of the meanspirited principal and sidestep 

bureaucratic red tape; maintain

classroom decorum while nurturing joy and laughter; bring literature to life for children who

struggle to read; teach kindness

to those who seldom witness it.

Throughout the chronicle, one

question looms large: Will our

heroine abandon her gifted, joyful,

creative approach to teaching before the journey’s end? 

Codell pulls no punches in this

fast-paced book that has proved

popular with both novices and

more experienced educators. Her

frustrations and fears help explain

why new teachers flee the field in

such startling numbers. She notices bullet holes in her classroom

window and begins to worry that

her tough-love discipline style

might get her shot. She pours her

soul into creative lesson plans

only to have a curriculum specialist tell her, “You can’t possibly

teach all you say you can teach.”

She butts heads with the administration over an issue she considers important only to have her

fellow teachers accuse her of

being confrontational. In a midyear entry she confesses: “I’ve

been up in the middle of the night,

wondering, Why do I care? Am I

crazy? A little, maybe.”

But her classroom victories

keep her passion burning bright.

Readers will feel like celebrating

with Esmé when her students get

excited about the cardboard “time

machine,” in which history comes

alive. Or when she teaches the

cha-cha to make sense of multiplication. Or on the January day

when she watches her students

concentrate on their reading “so

intently, I could hear my own

breathing.” She writes: “I’ve worked

so hard to get them to this place,

harder than I’ve ever worked in my

life, and now it seems they have

arrived. ... It’s that I try and they’re

trying, that’s the bottom line.”

SURVIVAL GUIDE FOR NEW

TEACHERS and WHAT TO EXPECT YOUR FIRST YEAR OF

TEACHING, both by Amy DePaul

for the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement

These two popular books bring

new teachers advice from those

who have walked in their shoes—

and recently, too. Both books 

feature comments from awardwinning rookie teachers, winners

of the Sallie Mae First Class

Teacher Award recognizing the nation’s outstanding new educators.

As author Amy DePaul explains,

she lets “teachers speak for themselves” because “no one can

match the clarity and veracity

of their voices.”

Survival Guide for New Teachers, published in 2000, acknowledges that many first-year

teachers continue to draw the

most challenging assignments.

Many new teachers launch into

their careers with little more than

a quick orientation on school policies and procedures, which

DePaul calls a “sink-or-swim

approach to induction.”

Survival Guide highlights

promising initiatives, such as online discussion groups for new

teachers facilitated by education

professors from the University of

North Carolina; school district

programs that include mentoring,

peer assistance, and other forms

of support; and regular staff meetings—for newcomers as well as

veterans—with discussions focused on best teaching practices.

DePaul organizes new teachers’

observations to help other novices

gain ideas for working with veterans, parents, principals, and college and university professors.

What to Expect Your First Year

of Teaching (1998) is loaded with

more tips and strategies for

novices. Among the suggestions

DePaul has gathered:

• Be consistent—do what you

say you are going to do

• Model a love for learning

• Maintain a sense of humor

• Keep an open door to parents

• Maintain respect

• Plan relentlessly

• Set high expectations

• Be flexible and ready for 

surprises

42

NW Education / Winter 2001
• Take care of yourself physically

and spiritually

• Use innovations in teaching,

technology, and rewards

Principals and other administrators can help new teachers

overcome the isolation that can

break even an enthusiastic rookie’s

spirit. Among the strategies for

administrators: assigning new

teachers mentors; making sure

they have regular opportunities to

talk with other first-year teachers;

encouraging first-year teachers to

team teach with veterans, or at

least work together on planning

teams; fostering a collaborative

atmosphere within the building. 

Both books are available online

and can be downloaded at no cost.

For a copy of What to Expect Your

First Year of Teaching, go to www.

ed.gov/pubs/FirstYear.

For Survival Guide for New

Teachers, go to www.ed.gov/

pubs/survivalguide.

THE COURAGE TO TEACH: EXPLORING THE INNER LANDSCAPE OF A TEACHER’S LIFE

by Parker J. Palmer (Jossey-Bass,

1998)

When Parker Palmer conducts

workshops on teaching and learning, he often invites participants to

examine their classroom practice

through what he calls “the lens of

paradox.” As he explains in The

Courage to Teach: “I ask each

teacher to write brief descriptions

of two recent moments in teaching: a moment when things were

going so well that you knew you

were born to teach, and a moment

when things were going so poorly

that you wished you had never

been born.”

Novice teachers as well as

classroom veterans can gain insights from the exercise. As

Palmer points out, “Remembering

such moments is the first step in

exploring one of the true paradoxes of teaching: The same person who teaches brilliantly one

day can be an utter flop the next!”

The Courage to Teach encourages an ongoing examination of

the inner life of the teacher. It’s a

valuable activity, Palmer argues,

because “knowing myself is as

crucial to good teaching as knowing my students and my subject.”

Teaching, he asserts, is about

making connections. Good teachers “are able to weave a complex

web of connections among themselves, their subjects, and their

students so that students can learn

to weave a world for themselves.” 

Parker offers no quick answers

for improving teaching—only

deep thinking. The author doesn’t

hesitate to put himself through the

self-examination he asks of his

readers. For example, he explores

why he gets uneasy if a classroom

discussion happens to stall:

“As the seconds tick by and the

silence deepens, my belief in the

value of silence goes on trial. ...

Like most people I am conditioned

to interpret silence as a symptom

of something gone wrong ... I am

duty-bound to supply conversational CPR.” But then Parker examines other possibilities. He

writes: “Suppose my students are

neither dumbfounded nor dismissive, but digging deep; suppose

that they are not ignorant or cynical but wise enough to know that

this moment calls for thought;

suppose that they are not wasting

time but doing a more reflective

form of learning.”

Teachers will improve their

craft, Parker suggests, when they

have opportunities to engage in

honest dialogue about the moments that puzzle or challenge

them—what he calls “good talk

about good teaching.” 

For teachers prepared to enter

into such dialogues, Parker suggests three elements essential to

informed, productive conversations:

• Topics that take us beyond

technique and into the fundamental issues of teaching

• Ground rules that keep us from

defeating ourselves before the talk

can go very deep

• Leaders who expect and invite

us to join the conversation

THE FIRST DAYS OF SCHOOL:

HOW TO BE AN EFFECTIVE

TEACHER by Harry K. Wong and

Rosemary T. Wong (Harry K. Wong

Publishers, 1998)

This practical guide to classroom

management weaves research with

practical wisdom to guide new

teachers through the first days of

school. It’s a critical period that

“can make or break you” for the

rest of the year, the authors assert.

Yet most teachers enter the profession with “no training and no

experience in what to do on the

first day of school.”

Written in the style of an

owner’s manual, this popular paperback aims to troubleshoot the

problems that plague rookies and

help struggling teachers regain

their footing. The First Days of

School offers the kind of common-sense help teachers need to

enhance their performance and

devote more of their school day to

enhancing student learning. The

authors cover everything from arranging the desks to introducing a

discipline plan to structuring assignments in order to “teach for

accomplishment.” 

Wong and Wong, both experienced teachers, are strong advocates of formal training programs

for new teachers—so much so

that they discourage teachers from

joining districts that do not offer

induction programs. They also encourage the more informal learning

that happens when teachers work

in a collegial manner; learn from

positive mentors; join professional

organizations; and continue to

learn through workshops, classes,

inservice training sessions, reading, and other forms of research.

If there’s an agenda that goes

deeper than these important basics, it’s to develop a new generation of effective teachers who have

positive expectations for student

success, are good classroom

managers, and know how to design lessons for student mastery.

Anticipated turnover in the ranks

of today’s teachers offers an opportunity, the authors suggest, “to

change the culture of a new generation of teachers.”

—Suzie Boss

43

NEW TEACHERS
FREEDOM, FRIENDSHIPS

TOP TEACHER’S WISH LIST

By Kendall Beaudry

The first day of school is just as

nerve wracking for the teacher as

for the students. I was reminded of

that fact last summer when I, a

white young doe from the woodsy

Northwest, prepared to enter an

inner-city classroom of gifted seventh-graders in Louisville, Kentucky. 

As soon as I received the job

offer from Summerbridge, a national nonprofit service learning

organization, I hung up the phone

and rushed to my atlas to locate

the lost state of Kentucky. My assignment was to instruct writing to

middle schoolers—students at the

most awkward stage of puberty.

Three days before departure, my

fellow Oregonians and I entertained all the tactless stereotypes

of my new destination. Humidity

and whiskey came to mind. However, my friends couldn’t muster

up any actual ideas of Derbyland

because they were preoccupied

with the thought of me teaching.

I ignored their taunts to calm my

nerves. But seventh grade kept

flashing across my reverie—

haunting me with memories of

training bras, scoliosis testing,

slow dances, and sex ed. 

Then the first day arrived, and

there was no more time for reverie. 

“Is it true that in Orygun, they

can’t even pump their own gas?”

That was the first question fired at

my perspiring back. So much for

classroom introductions. I was

different, and it stood out.

“Didn’t it hurt, getting yo’ nose

pierced?”

Day one: Prepare for humiliation.

“How many of you enjoy writing?” I asked, trying to sound

hopeful.

“I hate writing,” said Telicia,

one who later grew fond of the

pen-on-paper ritual. The rest

groaned in chorus.

Despite my fresh degrees in

journalism and political science,

despite the nerve-wracking rituals

of the first day of school, I find

myself drawn to education. If I

were to blindly pick a country on

a spinning globe, I could envision

teaching there. It is an intrinsic

pull because teaching is an exchange of knowledge. Within this

altruistic exchange, learning is reciprocated between two genres,

crossing classes and ethnicities

and cultures as different as those

found in Oregon and Kentucky.

I have had the pleasure of

teaching and learning from 70

inspiring children from the

Louisville area. These students

were chosen out of a teacher-recommended pool of 400. They are

academically motivated but economically set back.

Since 1978, Summerbridge has

coordinated summer workshops at

sites all over the country. It is intended to enhance learning creatively with the guidance of young

mentors. At the same time, it gives

college students a taste of the

teaching profession. Summerbridge selects young college students for these challenging

classroom assignments because

of a belief in their vitality and

freshness for the job. No fancy

technology is used, and the

agenda is impromptu. 

My training was not confined to

concerns over tests, techniques,

and courses, because this thinking

is considered too linear. Instead,

we fellow teachers shared ideas on

how to captivate the imagination. 

In the English department, my

advisor helped us prepare by making up outlines and formatting

them into weekly and monthly

planners. I would have an objective to follow each week, such as

fiction writing with lessons on indirect and direct objects. The approach to delivering the objective

then was in each teacher’s hands. 

Although the middle of the

week could pose challenges to

keep integrating all learning abilities, the freedom given me was

central to my growth in the classroom. Even during my failing moments, my self-esteem rarely

waned because I felt comfortable

asking for tips from my fellow

staff members. Equally as important, I listened to the suggestions

of my respectfully honest students who had the wherewithal to

fold their arms tightly across their

chest and blurt out, “I still don’t

get it!” 

When I talk with my peers about

what they will look for in a permanent teaching job, the biggest appeal is freedom. Summerbridge

allowed me to use my own themes

and approaches to teaching rather

than insisting on harboring anyone else’s methodology. My English teachers and advisor would

meet frequently during the school

week to bounce off ideas and

problem solve repeated frustrations. The support I received from

staff and students served as the

motivation central to maintaining

health and charisma. And

charisma may be the most important attribute to exude because it

will ensure a supply of teachers

for subsequent generations. 

Statistics tell us that many of

today’s children do not aspire to

teach because of the obvious setbacks of salary, abating budgets,

and burnout. These visible burdens are often voiced or whispered among staff members.

Admonition can scarcely get by

any perceptive student. But a

teacher’s pessimism resonates

doubt within all students’ purpose

to attend class.

I can still name almost every

teacher I learned from. Although I

cannot even hope to remember a

lesson, I can distinctly recall who

these mentors, pedagogues, parents, and role models were and

what made their blood pulse. They

remain my sources of inspiration. 

We are all aware of teacher

shortages across the country. As a

young adult preparing for my next

career move, I know how to play

the poker game of counter-offers. I

can feel the desperation in a handshake from an administration that

is just looking for warm bodies.

The typical indices to measure a

school’s performance based on

class size, salary, and test results

contribute only a paucity to my

final decision. 

More important to me is the

staff’s familiarity with each other.

Friendships, humility, and perseverance to stretch the elasticity of

perfunctory standards cannot be

packaged for a P.R. visit. I know I

will need a mentor beyond the initial two months of laying out a secure foundation. I want to work in

a setting where teachers can interact and share differences on a

philosophical and practical standpoint in order to grow. This collaboration is what empowers

teachers, by pushing the intellect

above standards and setbacks. 

After graduating from the 

University of Montana in May,

Kendall Beaudry spent the

summer teaching emotionally

disturbed children and developmentally disabled adults in Homer,

Alaska. Next: an editorial internship

at Mother Jones magazine in

San Francisco. But she adds, “I

don’t doubt that I will soon be

teaching and learning again.”

VOICES

44

NW Education / Winter 2001
NORTHWEST EDUCATION

Quarterly magazine of the 

Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory

Chief Executive Officer:

Dr. Carol F. Thomas 

Editor:

Lee Sherman

Associate Editor:

Suzie Boss

Issue Editor:

Suzie Boss

Contributing Writer:

Joyce Riha Linik

Graphic Production:

Denise Crabtree

Graphic Design:

Dan Stephens

Technical Editing:

Eugenia Cooper Potter

NORTHWEST EDUCATION

can be accessed on NWREL’s Web site:

www.nwrel.org/nwedu/

This publication is based on work sponsored wholly or in part by the U.S. Department of

Education under contract number ED-01-CO-0013. The content of this publication does

not necessarily reflect the views of the department or any other agency of the U.S. government. This publication was not printed with government funds. Articles and information

in this publication are in the public domain and may be reproduced and disseminated

without permission. Please acknowledge NWREL as the source.

PRINTED ON RECYCLED PAPER

Joyce Benjamin

Representative of Oregon Superintendent 

of Public Instruction

Dr. Teresa Bergeson

Washington State Superintendent 

of Public Instruction

Mike Bernazzani

Businessman

Vancouver (WA)

Sally A. Brownfield

Teacher

Hood Canal School District (WA)

Jerry Colonna

Superintendent

Redmond School District (OR)

Dr. John Davis

Superintendent

Bering Strait School District (AK)

Dennis Haverlandt

Teacher

Great Falls School District (MT)

Dr. Shirley Holloway

Alaska Commissioner of Education 

and Early Development

Dr. Marilyn Howard

Idaho State Superintendent of Public 

Instruction

Steven Jacquier

Teacher

Southwest Region School District (AK)

Nancy Larsen

Elementary Teacher

Coeur D’Alene School District (ID)

Richard Mauer

School Board Member

Delta-Greely School District (AK)

Rey A. Mayoral

(Secretary-Treasurer)

High School Principal

Salem-Keizer School District (OR)

Linda McCulloch

Montana State Superintendent 

of Public Instruction

Dr. Elmer Myers

Superintendent

Lolo Elementary School District (MT)

Sharon D. Parry

School Board Member

Idaho Falls School District

Ted Popplewell

Principal

Oregon Trail Elementary School 

Twin Falls (ID)

John Pugh

Chancellor

University of Alaska Southeast 

Kay Purcell

Principal

St. Rose Parish School 

Longview (WA)

Lawrence Rigby

Superintendent

Soda Springs School District (ID)

Dr. Donald Robson 

(Immediate Past Chairperson)

Dean, School of Education

University of Montana

Roger G. Wheeler

Businessman

Pocatello (ID)

Estella Zamora

District Court Interpreter/Coordinator

Caldwell (ID)

Dr. Michael Jaeger 

(Chairperson)

Dean, School of Education and Business

Eastern Oregon University

Henry Beauchamp 

(Vice Chairperson)

Executive Director/CEO

Yakima Valley Opportunities 

Industrialization Center (WA)

NWREL BOARD OF DIRECTORS

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2001 FINALIST
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Watch for coming issues

Spring issue

Project-Based Learning: Putting It All Together

Summer issue

Beyond the Bell: Extending Opportunities for Learning 

Fall issue

The Great Divide: How Can Schools Close the Achievement Gap?