October 23, 2007
SETH receives nearly $2 million to train and support new D.C. teachers
AU’s School of Education, Teaching and Health (SETH) has won a five-year, $1.85 million grant to train new teachers in key content areas, and to support them through their challenging first years so they will be effective and stay in teaching.
Part of the grant is a continuation of SETH’s successful Transition to Teaching project and will continue the effort to recruit new people into the teaching profession. A total of 180 new teachers will be recruited. They may be recent college graduates who didn’t major in education, or professionals who are switching careers. Either way, they are energetic, dedicated, and interesting in teaching, and AU will be helping to support them through teacher training and ongoing support.
The new teachers become part of AU’s teacher preparation program and will work towards a graduate certificate or master’s degree. They’ll also be supported through an innovative mentoring process called Learning Circles, in which experienced teachers work with small groups of new teachers who specialize in the same subject areas, such as high school science or middle school math.
For example, a Learning Circle in chemistry might include four or five new teachers and a master teacher. They’d meet monthly in one of the teachers’ classrooms, to talk about content, teaching strategies, and the challenges they’re facing.
For instance, if the group finds that chemistry teaching is being hampered by students’ limited reading skills, the Learning Circle could discuss alternative ways to communicate the required material to those students.
“It’s an opportunity to develop a small-scale, peer-to-peer collaborative network,” said SETH dean Sarah Irvine Belson. “The supervisors are also there to support the emotional side of teaching.”
Additionally, the circle might also help the new teacher adjust emotionally to the challenges of teaching in a urban school whose students live in poverty, as do so many Washington, D.C., schoolchildren.
Dubbed Capital Gains, the program is a collaboration between D.C. Public Schools (DCPS); the D.C. Teaching Fellows, an organization that recruits teachers from outside the teaching profession for DCPS; and three D.C. public charter schools, D.C. Preparatory Academy in Northeast, Thurgood Marshall Academy in Southeast, and E.L. Haynes in Columbia Heights.
