Aptly-Named Student Teachers Instruct and Learn at Pio Pico

Student teacher Bruce Hall admits he was nervous when he walked into the first-grade classroom at Pio Pico School two months ago. More accustomed to working with older children, Hall doubted his abilities to communicate with a group of 6-year-olds--especially when all the children spoke Spanish and he spoke only English.

But Hall’s fears evaporated during his first day on the job when his boss, Amalia Villaran, a veteran teacher, asked him to prepare a lesson plan about the ocean.

Villaran couldn’t have picked a better assignment. Hall, an avid diver and underwater photographer, took to his task with enthusiasm. After all, it was the ocean that inspired Hall to become a teacher in the first place.

In 1984, while working as a manager of an electronics store, Hall, 39, put together an educational program featuring his underwater slides. He took his show on the road, visiting schools all over Orange County. “It just sort of mushroomed,” he says. “And I enjoyed working with children.”

Hall enjoyed it so much that in 1986, he gave up a job as manager of an electronics store to enroll in college to become a teacher. “I went from about $40,000 a year (income) to $10,000,” he recalls. “It will take me five or six years as a schoolteacher to make what I made in my old job.”

But Hall, who will receive his teaching credential this month from UC Irvine, is not complaining. In fact, he says he couldn’t be happier about his decision to change careers.

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Villaran says she’s happy about that decision too. “Before Bruce came, I was in this classroom by myself with 39 children,” she says. “I begged for a student teacher.”

When Villaran learned that Hall was being assigned to her, she knew he was nervous. That’s why she greeted him that first day with the oceanography assignment. “I knew he was a photographer and that he dived, and I thought this was the perfect thing,” she says. “When Bruce came into the classroom, he was scared. He thought he couldn’t do it. Now he is conducting lessons all by himself,” she adds proudly.

Hall is even using some of his college Spanish and was surprised to discover that, between his basic Spanish and the kids’ limited English, he can communicate better than he expected.

The match between Hall and Villaran was made through an innovative program involving UCI and Pio Pico, a professional development school that helps train student teachers.

Judith Magsaysay, principal at Pio Pico, says the partnership came about because “UCI wanted to rethink how they trained their teachers, and we wanted to rethink how we educate our kids.”

Susan Meyers, intern program coordinator at UCI, says that the university wanted to show its students that there is a definite connection between education research and classroom practice. “Students are excited to see real classroom environments and that everything we study we see working in a real school.”

Last year Pio Pico, which is in one of Santa Ana’s poorest communities, became a pilot site for a program called the Professional Development School Model. “The whole concept is that these schools will become model schools in a variety of ways,” Meyers says. “We place many, many student teachers and pre-student teachers there.”

This year 30 student teachers, including Hall, have been assigned to Pio Pico, where all 11 teachers at the 330-pupil school are involved in the student-teacher evaluation process. And at Pio Pico, student teachers are also involved in the operation of the school.

“The bottom line is that nobody plans in isolation,” Magsaysay says. “So everybody is a part (of the school) from the get-go. The student teachers get a sense right away that they are part of the planning team.”

Some of that planning, she says, includes thematic units such as the oceanography program in Villaran’s classroom. The ocean theme, she says, will be used to teach everything from reading to science.

Hall and Villaran worked together to ensure the program’s success. First, they transformed one corner of the combination kindergarten and first-grade classroom into an “underwater” laboratory, complete with a giant blue whale of construction paper. The undersea scene also includes a kelp forest made from strips of colored paper hanging from the ceiling. The slightest breeze sets the strips to swaying.

To add an even more realistic touch, Hall went diving one weekend and bought back a 26-foot long piece of kelp. He also brought in dozens of his underwater photos, which are on display throughout the room.

And recently, Villaran stopped at a seafood market and bought some fish and an octopus so kids could get a close-up look at some inhabitants of the sea.

Pio Pico pupils used the sea creatures to learn the words for various body parts in both English and Spanish. Such hands-on lessons help the children to remember what they are taught, according to principal Magsaysay.

“I think so many times we underestimate kids and what they can grasp conceptually,” she says. “But by focusing on one area, these kids make more and better connections with the real world.”

Student teachers such as Hall also serve as part of that real-world connection by being role models for Pio Pico children, who live in what Magsaysay calls a port-of-entry neighborhood for recently arrived families from all over Latin America. Spanish is the primary language of 98% of Pio Pico pupils.

Most of the children’s parents have fewer than four years of schooling. That’s one reason, Hall says, that it is essential to emphasize the importance of education.

“One of the things I do is explain why education is important,” he says. “The point is they can do or be anything they want to be. It’s important for the teacher to say, ‘If I can do this, you can do this.’ ”

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But Hall admits that in the beginning he wasn’t sure he was college material himself. “At UCI they told me I needed all A’s at a community college in order to get in,” he says. Hall enrolled at Orange Coast College, earning his A.A. degree, then transferring to UCI.

Thanks in part to the excellent training he’s received at UCI, Hall says he’s already had two job offers.

He’s been collecting materials for his own classroom for the past few years, and many of those things relate to the sea. His dream is to combine his love for the ocean with his love for teaching. “There’s an elementary school in Avalon,” he says wistfully. “My goal is to get a job there one day and live on Catalina Island.”