FROM THEORY TO REALITY
New teachers discover training gap

Virginia Anderson, Diane R. Stepp, Staff

SECTION: News; Pg. 1A

LENGTH: 1213 words

Are Georgia teachers leaving colleges of education with the training they need to teach our children? Not entirely. Your child's instructor may have had only one college course on teaching a particular subject or had little training in handling disruptive students.

It was in part his love of the poetry of John Donne and Nikki Giovanni that lured Tavares Stephens into teaching English.

The magical words of the 16th century preacher and the contemporary poet touched Stephens as a high schooler, instilling in him a desire to share the beauty of their writing. And from his mother, a former second grade teacher in Dawson, he learned that teaching is a calling not to be spurned.

But as a first-year language arts teacher of eighth graders this school year, the 24-year-old Stephens found himself more dusted with chalk than touched by angels.

In the fall, he ponderously drew lines to mark subjects, predicates, direct objects and prepositional phrases in the age-old process of diagramming sentences. In the winter, he was talking in his soft, measured voice in hallways to wound-up eighth graders who couldn't make sense of their hairstyles, much less the spirituality of Giovanni. In the spring, he found himself overseeing Iowa Test of Basic Skills testing for kids who were eyeing each other and spring break at least as intently as the test at hand.

The differences between what Stephens learned in education school and what his life is really like as a teacher are emblematic of what new teachers are experiencing across metro Atlanta and the nation.

About one-third of Georgia's teachers will leave the field within the first five years, according to a 1998 report of the Georgia P-16 Council, which brings together business leaders and educators to look at how to prepare students at lower grade levels for what they will face in higher education, vocational training or the job market.

Another study released by the state Board of Regents found that a whopping 32 percent of Georgia teachers are dissatisfied with their jobs, compared with 18 percent nationwide. Among the frequently cited reasons in Georgia: dissatisfaction with decisions made regarding teaching and school staffing, such as being assigned to teach subjects or grades for which they are not trained.

Stephens is not one of those who is letting the problems drive him off.

"I find there's a spiritual side to everything," he said. "And if I can teach them better ways to use the building blocks of language, then they can better express themselves and their spirituality."

It was that commitment and fire that Stephens' professors treasured in him when he arrived at the University of Georgia in 1993. He graduated last June as one of College of Education's top English education majors. But his impressive credentials are no guarantee of success in today's schools.

"The issues are so immense," said Sally Hudson Ross, director of the English education department at UGA and one of Stephens' professors. She took a year away from teaching college students how to teach to go into a high school to learn what teachers really face.

"You are one tiny entity, and you feel helpless," Hudson Ross said. "I remember writing in my journal, 'I feel like a punching bag.' "

While Stephens' first-year experience has been generally positive, the bumps along the way are evidence of how difficult it is to prepare even the sharpest education majors for a real-life teacher's job with fire drills, students who don't care and disengaged parents.

Here are some of the most crucial issues that must be addressed by colleges of education, school districts and the state, according to recent reports by the P-16 Council, the nonprofit opinion-research group Public Agenda and The National Commission on Teaching and America's Future:

Education majors aren't necessarily assigned to classes they were trained to teach, a disparity allowed by state licensing classifications and taken advantage of by school officials burdened with scheduling pressures. Stephens, for example, was an English education major trained to teach high school literature. He hasn't diagrammed sentences since he was in middle school. Cobb County first-year teacher Susan Blackwell was a middle grades education major with course concentrations in math and science at Kennesaw State University. She teaches science, social studies and reading at Garrett Middle School in Austell, even though she had only one course in reading and adolescent literature, and one in geography.

Classroom management --- being able to control restless, disruptive or unprepared students --- is not strongly emphasized in colleges of education, even though teachers consistently cite discipline as the biggest challenge they face and the biggest usurper of their instruction time. With today's students forced to deal with such things as violent behavior and bomb threats, many teachers and counselors believe teachers need more training in how to help students sort through it all and deal with their emotions.

UGA folds aspects of classroom management into several required classes, but for an issue the public identifies as so important, the state's largest education school has one course in classroom management. KSU used to have a required course on classroom management but now combines it with another course.

Education majors don't get enough supervised time in a classroom before they're on their own. At KSU, for example, student teaching lasts 15 weeks.

There is not enough interaction between colleges of education and public schools to strengthen the connection between courses taught in schools of education and the real world. For example, three of Stephens' colleagues at Stephenson, with 50 years' combined experience, said they've never been asked by education professors or legislators what kind of training they think education majors need.

At Kennesaw, some education professors visit student teachers in the field, but spend no concentrated time in public schools learning and talking with teachers, kids or parents about what is needed at the college level to make schools more effective.

Education majors don't enter the classroom with a strong understanding of time-consuming duties such as parent-teacher conferences, bus duty, lunchroom detail, and dealing with classroom disruptions and students' emotional problems.

These matters are often the most taxing for teachers --- and are why many teachers leave the field, burned out from incessant demands that they fix what is wrong not only with schools but with society.

Some educators think schools of education must be part of the solution.

UGA's Hudson Ross left the ivory towers of the university five years ago to teach at Cedar Shoals High School in Athens for a year so she could help redesign the English education program and offer more real-life experiences to education majors.

She and others believe that getting education majors into classrooms regularly, beginning as early as their sophomore years, is one way to do that.

"There's been this thinking that the university gives them the theory and then the school gives them the reality," Hudson Ross said. "That's an absurd way to think about life."