A Summer for Learning : Pupils Helping Teachers Learn New Lessons

The kids at Adams Elementary don’t know it, but this summer they’re helping more than 100 San Diego city schools teachers to improve in the classroom.

While first-graders in Jannette Miller’s room learn new ways to read and write as they gingerly handle storybooks about frogs and hippos, the two dozen or so teachers rotating weekly through the class watch and take notes on the way the children interact with Miller.

The Normal Heights students are getting a six-week enriched dose of language instruction from 10 specially selected teachers like Miller. It’s a novel move to provide needed remediation without resorting to repetitive drills that have been the traditional staple of summer school curriculum.

At the same time, 100 or so elementary teachers districtwide have a chance to get more comfortable with the district’s controversial 3-year-old reading program by spending an entire week watching crackerjack mentors.

They’ll be able to go back to their schools with a new bag of instructional tricks to encourage students to better read and write--in a way so that the students enjoy learning more, and so that the teachers enjoy teaching more.

The double-barreled effort is the brainchild of language arts resource teachers Lois Jacobs and Meijean Chan, which they based on an innovative program in the South Bay school district that has improved student achievement as well as teacher preparation in California’s new elementary reading curriculum.

“Many teachers remain uncomfortable” with the new reading program, Jacobs said. “This is a wonderful way both to have summer school and to get more teachers comfortable with the idea that students can learn” without being tied to their desks doing work-sheet drills.

The new reading program, known as “whole-language,” did away with Dick-and-Jane-type, controlled-vocabulary books--which many students found dull and unchallenging--in favor of real children’s books and stories.

It also relies on teachers leading children to write their own stories, to explore variations of a story through one or more “activity centers” and to teach phonics and other reading skills within the context of a story--not as separate drill.

The changes have washed across the San Diego district like a tsunami, dashing away the confidence of many teachers old and new, especially in their ability to maintain discipline as they allow students to move about the room to write on computers, to design storyboards, to draw art based on a book, and to read aloud with a partner.

And while the school district has sponsored one-day workshops and provided books on the theory of whole-language instruction, the limited staff development efforts have left many teachers and parents, as well as several school board members, less than enthralled with the implementation.

At a “gripe” meeting that Jacobs called in February with 120 teachers around the district, a 12-page laundry list of complaints emerged, ranging from lack of confidence in the program to a lack of ideas how to make it work beyond the basic teacher’s manual.

Jacobs, having read about the South Bay program to combine teacher training within a “lab school” setting, persuaded district administrator Carol Leighty to squirrel away some scarce federal discretionary money for the summer program.

“We need to move in the direction of mini-lab schools as much as we can,” Leighty said, “to get teachers watching and talking to other teachers, to find out what can work, to borrow ideas, and then to support each other back in their own classrooms.”

Jacobs then persuaded some of the best teachers in the district not only to write brand-new curriculum for the summer session but to model it for colleagues who signed up for one of four-week observation/discussion slots.

“This is great,” said Kathy Fazekas, a third-grader teacher observing last week from Wegeforth Elementary. “Just seeing the teachers working with children and being able to see how they move students from activity to activity” and keep discipline in check is very helpful.

Many of the observing teachers said they have come away with a much better sense of how to keep a classroom that buzzes with excited children from deteriorating into one of chaotic kids.

“One teacher uses music, another uses little rewards--it’s really good to spend time seeing all of it in action,” Diane Waddell, a first-grade teacher from Holmes Elementary, agreed.

Another teacher praised Miller for integrating her student writing with contemporary issues, such as having the children write letters to Gov. Bill Clinton telling him about the homeless people in San Diego.

Several cited demonstration teacher Julie Heimburge from Benchley-Weinberger Elementary for the way she got students to think about “wishes” after reading a story about students and their hopes.

Each student received a three-by-five index card with a big red dot on one side. If the students really press the dot hard, the wish they will later write on the other side “could very well come true,” Heimburge told her fourth-grade students.

Therefore, the students must really think about what they want to come true before writing their own “wish essay” on the card’s reverse side, and that encourages them to be as creative as possible.

Others talked about learning little things such as a more creative way to teach homonyms so that students will remember them past the time of a test. Instead of work sheets, students draw a “pair of pears” inside which they list a homonym, such as “aunt” and “ant,” and then two short sentences showing that they know how to use the words correctly.

The 10 “master” teachers stress to their colleagues that changes must be made gradually; that many things they have been doing are still valuable and that a wholesale “overnight” switch will only cause more confusion.

“I think that things can become overwhelming for many teachers,” said Sylvia McGrade, a kindergarten/first grade teacher at Fremont Elementary. “That’s why these teachers want the nitty-gritty, like if you make baskets for an activity, where do you get them, how do you use them exactly, etc.

“We all admire them for being willing to come in and learn.”

Added second-grade teacher Alice Babbitt from Green Elementary: “There needs to be a lot of support among teachers, so that they encourage each other” and don’t feel alone. While that philosophy has been espoused by top district administrators for years, teachers across the city say it is often ignored by individual principals, who do little or nothing to mold teaching staffs into a unified group that is willing to take risks and try new ideas.

“What distinguishes all of us (master teachers) is that we are risk-takers,” said Jannette Miller, from Angier Elementary. “We don’t sit around waiting for a manual to tell us everything to do . . . I would like these (observing) teachers to feel that they don’t have to be so restricted.”

Even the master teachers, however, confess to learning new things this summer.

“I’m going to try giving my students free choice, to let them have some time each day to decide if they want to use” the computer, or work on storyboards, or paint, or try math manipulatives, kindergarten teacher Chris Evans of Vista Grande Elementary said.

These teachers have also been surprised--but pleased--by the positive reaction they have gotten from Adams students and parents.

“One of the parents came in and asked whether I was going to be her son’s teacher this fall,” said Greg Collamer, a first-grade teacher from Hage Elementary. Collamer was sporting a crayon-colored heart pinned to his shirt last week, courtesy of one of his students who said that Collamer “makes learning fun.”