Experience Is the Best Teacher : Poway Program to Help Incoming Instructors Enters a New Phase

No one expects doctors fresh out of medical school to perform complex surgery right away, but somehow the public does expect teachers to virtually waltz straight from college and instantly take command of a classroom.

Realizing it’s not that simple, the Poway Unified School District five years ago began a bold experiment in teacher competence. The district took some of the power to mold, evaluate and hire or fire new teachers away from principals and gave it to the true experts: other teachers.

Now, the seemingly radical program, which has won both devout followers and hard-core skeptics, is entering a new phase. Veteran teachers who are having problems also will be evaluated by their peers.

The Professional Assistance Program began with a notion.

Don Raczka, a Poway Unified teacher-consultant and the main force behind the program, noted that “medical school graduates become interns, law school graduates can be law clerks--even pipe fitters have an apprenticeship, for goodness sakes.”

Although teachers do have student-teaching experience, that’s not the same as total immersion in the rough reality of the classroom, educators say.

“This is the only profession where you go straight from no experience to total responsibility,” teacher-consultant Arlene Lochridge said. “It’s scary.”

Although the consultants have been coaching just new teachers, now they will also help tenured instructors with serious problems, namely those who receive two “unsatisfactory” evaluations from their principals.

If the teachers’ efforts to improve an experienced colleague’s work are unsuccessful, the district can then start dismissal proceedings. So far, no tenured instructors in Poway have reached the point where teacher-experts have had to step in.

The program continues to be praised by newcomers such as Janet Barnett.

This school year was already three weeks old when she was hired to teach eighth-graders at Twin Peaks Middle School.

“It was like trying to catch a moving train,” Barnett said with a sigh.

There was no time to plan lessons, no time to decorate the classroom--in fact, Barnett didn’t even have a regular classroom.

Sandwiched between the stoves and the sewing machines in a home economics area, she began her teaching career with 32 angry kids who resented the mid-quarter disruption, blamed it on her, and were eager to see how far she could be pushed.

Many of the students refused to cooperate. One wandered around the room, ignoring commands to be seated. Some spoke out of turn, occasionally uttering profanities.

It’s a common scene, and, in most school districts, Barnett would have been largely on her own. Principals do what they can to guide new teachers, but demands on their time are great and rarely can they afford to spend more than a few hours in one classroom over the school year.

But Barnett was fortunate. In Poway, all teachers with less than three years of experience are eased into their new careers like apprentices.

Every day under the program, the four consultants travel from school to school with their well-assembled bags of teaching tricks, answering questions and sharing tips, making sure that this year’s 55 new teachers learn to survive each classroom crisis.

Barnett needed help with classroom management--the most common cry among newcomers--and Lochridge was there. Together they established a firm set of classroom rules and the consequences for breaking them, then practiced applying them with consistency.

By the time the year is out, Lochridge will have spent more than 40 hours working with Barnett. Lochridge writes down her observations in a friendly, chatty journal that is left in Barnett’s classroom for study.

When Barnett speaks now, her students are amazingly quiet.

“Without this program, new teachers would survive,” she said. “But it’s the difference between surviving and doing something that’s real quality.”

The supporters of Poway’s program believe that, if broadly applied, it could help stem California’s tide of teacher dropouts. Now, up to a third of all new teachers leave the classroom within five years.

In the first four years of Poway’s program, only 12 of 242 new teachers haven’t been offered permanent contracts, Raczka said. This year, the budget for the four teacher-consultants is about $140,000.

“It gives first-year teachers the chance to get skills that might otherwise take them three or four years to get--and the bottom line is that’s better for kids,” said Kevin Ogden, principal at Painted Rock Elementary.

But many teachers outside Poway are wary of the concept of peer review, fearing that teacher-evaluators could play favorites, resulting in ruthlessness and competition.

The South Bay School District’s teacher union president is adamantly against the idea, for example, and the San Diego Unified School District is approaching it gingerly. However, Southeast San Diego’s King Elementary School has leaped ahead of the pack with a limited and voluntary “peer coaching” project.

“There is always some suspicion when you try something like this,” said Bill Crawford, president of the Poway Federation of Teachers, which has worked closely with the district in developing the program.

“In the beginning, one of the greatest obstacles we had wasn’t with teachers but with administrators,” Crawford said. “They weren’t at all sure they wanted to give up the review of first-year teachers. They thought the teacher-consultants wouldn’t be rigorous enough in their evaluations.

“But, over time, they came to see the process is much more thorough than they were able to do, primarily because it’s the consultant’s full-time job,” he said.

In addition to evaluating new and troubled experienced teachers, Poway’s program has another new element. It lets teachers undergo a more rigorous evaluation than that required by state law.

About 20 years ago, a bill was introduced in the Legislature aimed at ensuring teacher accountability. It was vigorously opposed by the California Teachers Assn., and a watered-down version was eventually approved.

The law requires principals to evaluate tenured teachers every two years. In the fall, teachers pick three or four specific, measurable goals to reach by year’s end. The principal visits several times to check on progress, and, in the spring, the parties meet to see if the teacher has met the goals.

“It’s just paperwork, a form. It doesn’t make you grow or do anything differently,” said Dian Self, a fifth-grade teacher at Painted Rock.

Self and first-grade teacher Terri Schroeder are among about 250 tenured teachers who have gone beyond the original proposed legislation in favor of allowing teachers to explore new approaches and then be evaluated on the merits of those efforts.

Since research shows that children learn a great deal by teaching--and are often more receptive when taught by other children rather than by adults, the two instructors are experimenting with “cross-age tutoring.”

Self’s at-risk fifth-graders help Schroeder’s first-graders with basic skills, thus reinforcing their own.

“Super-macho kids who are always acting up suddenly become very mature and responsible,” Schroeder said. “They take on leadership roles, and it makes them feel really good about themselves.”

The principal, in close cooperation with the teachers being evaluated, keeps an attentive eye on the process, and the teachers’ abilities are judged based on an activities log and samples of student work.

“This beats the heck out of the standard ‘zero percent of my students will learn fractions’ goal, and is better for everyone,” Schroeder said.

“I’ll never go back to the old way,” she said. “Never.”