Teach for America: Training new teachers in real time
By Ellen Lathrop, Associate Program and Communications Officer at the Koret Foundation
Back-to-school season is upon us—for students, parents, and teachers alike. This year, nearly 100 recent college graduates will be stepping into their very first teaching assignment as new corps members for Teach for America (TFA) in the Bay Area.
This July, I was fortunate to be invited to attend the summer teacher training institute, or Practicum, to see how TFA prepares these newly minted educators to anticipate and adapt to the challenges of a new school year. I visited elementary and middle school classrooms, observing teachers-in-training, known at TFA as incoming corps members, leading instruction for the first time in front of students at VOICES Academy, a bilingual K–8 charter school in East San Jose. VOICES partners with TFA to have their full-time staff mentor new corps members in their summer school, providing them with valuable feedback on lesson planning, classroom management, and relationship building.
TFA has worked in the Bay Area for 35 years, recruiting, developing, and placing new teachers in K–12 classrooms, with the goal of making a positive difference for students who are often woefully below grade level. More broadly, it hopes to spark a love of education that will persist beyond TFA’s two-year teaching commitment. TFA Bay Area Executive Director Bea Viramontes speaks to the organization’s success in this respect, noting that TFA Bay Area has “over 535 alumni teachers and 317 education/system leaders, including school board members, principals, deans, and department chairs, reaching almost half a million students in our community.”
By one measurement, TFA is indeed succeeding: each year, they recruit hundreds of high-achieving college graduates—who might otherwise not consider a career in teaching— to spend two years working in high-need schools. However, its ambitious goal for improving reading levels is made even more daunting by the effects of the pandemic, which still ripple through schools (and society) today. Only 40% of California students are proficient in reading by the end of 3rd grade, and that number dips for Latinx and English Language Learning students. For students in East San Jose, where I observed corps members this summer, the number of 3rd graders proficient in reading is a startling 17%. Such gaps in early literacy have dire consequences for students’ futures: research suggests that low-income students who are not meeting literacy benchmarks in 3rd grade are six times less likely to graduate high school.
Statistics like these inform TFA’s mission to close opportunity gaps for the most vulnerable students. It seeks to bring diverse and energetic young people into the classroom as teachers, providing them with skills and tools to be effective educators from day one. Corps members spend three weeks in a virtual academy, learning pedagogy and building community, before heading to school sites like VOICES for the final three weeks of the institute, where they will teach in real classrooms under the watchful eyes of experienced mentor teachers.
In one classroom I visited, cheery prompts from the corps member at the front of the room failed to entice a group of lively Kindergartners to sit on the rug for instruction. The supervising teacher intervened and, in a firm voice, restated the expectations that all students be sitting on the rug. Small but critical interventions like this provide corps members with real examples of how veteran educators manage behavior, check for understanding, and juggle the multiple responsibilities of a busy classroom. Picking up tips and cues from mentor teachers, these new educators gain confidence for the school year ahead.
In a field where news coverage is often negative, it is encouraging to see a program where young, eager professionals are working hard to make a difference in our local Bay Area schools. In one middle school classroom, I observed a special moment that embodies the TFA ethos. As a closing activity after instruction, the corps member asked students to share a rose (something positive) and a thorn (something negative) from their weekend. No hands went up. Then, the corps member shared details of her own weekend, including playing with her roommate’s dog and being anxious about her upcoming move. This willingness to share sparked something in the class; immediately hands began to pop up and multiple students proceeded to tell about their own weekends until time ran out.
This is what TFA corps members will bring to their classrooms this year: energy, humility, and an enthusiasm for building positive relationships with their students. These new teachers are eager to create an environment where students grow, learn, and feel safe to try new things. Students who feel they belong at school and see school as an empowering place are academically more successful. TFA’s expertise in recruiting and training young, diverse teachers helps create spaces where students can thrive.
