Students are often both teachers and learners in the School of Education, presenting unique opportunities for education within the school and the larger community. By combining the efforts of pre-service teachers at Hope Academy, a faith-based charter school for at-risk students, with those of doctoral students learning to mentor new teachers, two School of Education professors created an active research environment benefitting students at every level.
This past fall, in the Specialized Education Services (SES) department, Dr. Pamela Williamson collaborated with the Link-2-Lead Scholars program in the School of Education to provide pre-service students with coaches for one-on-one tutoring sessions at Hope Academy. The coaches, four doctoral students in SES, teamed up with the pre-service education students in Williamson's Reading Instruction for Learners with Disabilities class, mentoring them during and after their weekly tutoring sessions with kids at Hope Academy in Greensboro.
The program came out of a conversation between Williamson and Marcia Rock, the project director for the Link-2-Lead Scholars. After a year of observing the difficulty pre-service students had in finding tutoring opportunities appropriate for her literacy class, Williamson and Rock arranged for the pre-service students to tutor at Hope Academy, with Link-2-Lead Scholars coaching and mentoring through the weekly sessions. "I feel like they learn so much more when we do it in the field," Williamson says.
Personalized instruction
Pre-service education students learned to personalize their instruction sessions, how to give assessments, and how to develop intervention plans built around the weaknesses and strengths of their students. Meanwhile, Link-2-Lead Scholars learned to supervise pre-service teachers and encourage them to develop interventions and strategies for their instruction."In our debriefing sessions, we talked a lot about engagement and motivation, really making sure the texts they were using engaged the child," doctoral student Jennie Jones says. "I think a lot of them felt a little bit safer than they did in their classroom placements where there's a lot of kids."
"The goal from the beginning is to help develop their instructional decision-making skills as teachers," Williamson says, "because what we know from the research, it's not until their third year in the field that these teachers actually start to really feel like they can make some good decisions," she says. "So we all got on board with the idea that we're trying to help them look like they're not first year teachers; we're trying to help them develop the capacity and the sophistication to make instructional decisions using their data."
Elbow coaching
For Jones, who taught for 10 years before pursuing her doctorate, the experience "gave me a chance to practice how I'm going to supervise and coach," she says. "We were able to talk as a group about what was going well with us as coaches and supervisors, or how to tweak if we were having trouble with something.""What was unique about this situation is as her skills developed, she could actually do what we call elbow coaching," Williamson says. "She could intervene and give them some suggestions, and step in and model if the need was great." "The trick is to not take away the power of the person doing the tutoring in the eyes of the child, so there's a lot of finesse that's required," she says.
Looking back on her own early experiences as a teacher, "What I do remember is I don't think I got a whole lot of feedback as a pre-service teacher, and I sure didn't get a whole lot of feedback as an in-service teacher," Jones says. "You're on your own, and so what I began to realize is how important what I'm giving them is."
Gradual release
Williamson saw some excellent outcomes from the program: "One of the hallmarks of an expert teacher is when they get this thing that we call ‘gradual release’ down, where they model, then they do it with the student, and then they allow the student to do it independently." "We had some elegant examples of that," she says."If you think about it, there's a lot of support at all levels," Williamson says. While pre-service students are supporting the Hope Academy students with one-on-one reading help, Link-2-Lead scholars are supporting the pre-service students, as well as supporting each other. And Rock and Williamson were supporting the scholars and the students; leading to coaching at all levels. Williamson and Jones are currently teaching a Master's course with a smaller group of students where they are using a similar support network for literacy instruction, further supporting the education of many individuals in the School of Education.
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