CSUN at Head of Teacher Training Class

Last week’s overhaul of teacher training programs in the CSU system places Cal State Northridge at the vanguard of a movement expected to produce the unprecedented number of qualified teachers needed to educate the state’s exploding student population.

As details of the program are being hammered out at CSUN and other Cal State campuses, officials promise a multifaceted approach that will offer both help for the thousands of untrained teachers working with emergency credentials, and a top-to-bottom curriculum overhaul for undergraduates aspiring to be teachers.

Reorganization of the programs has been in the works for more than a year, but the system’s formal recommitment to training teachers--and more of them--was approved by the CSU trustees last week.

At their regular monthly meeting in Long Beach, the trustees endorsed a new report recommending the changes expected to begin next semester. CSUN, for example, is receiving more than $400,000 in state funds to begin training 150 teachers now working without credentials. Systemwide, CSU’s 23 campuses are getting about $4.5 million for the task.

The new emphasis on teacher training was prompted by several factors, including the sudden need for thousands of teachers to implement Gov. Pete Wilson’s class-size reduction program and the recognition in current research that a well-trained teacher is the key ingredient in student success.

“The CSU system is being flooded with people who need these skills,” said Bill Wilson, director of teacher preparation for the university system.

Additionally, educators now believe that the growing number of schoolchildren from poor backgrounds requires different strategies than those that have been emphasized in existing curricula.

“The needs have changed dramatically in the last 20 years,” said Julie Korenstein, a member of the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education. “For a person not prepared to go into a classroom, there is a culture shock.”

At the vortex of the teacher-training revolution is CSUN’s Carolyn Ellner, who is chairwoman of the state commission on teacher credentialing as well as dean of the School of Education on the Northridge campus.

Last week’s announcement is “just a reflection of a tidal wave that started a year or two ago. . . . We were just not producing enough teachers,” Ellner said.

The CSU system had gone from supplying 70% of the state’s teachers to 57% because of budget cuts that limited the number of available classes, Ellner said. In its regular undergraduate education programs, CSUN turned out only about 550 credentialed teachers between 1994 and 1997, she said.

But the state needed a whopping 20,000 new teachers just last year to implement class-size reduction in the lower grades. And an estimated 300,000 new teachers must be trained for the next century to accommodate the anticipated increase in the school-age population.

One component of CSUN’s effort involves setting up a program, to start in January, for 150 of the 1,600 teachers who are working with emergency credentials in schools in the San Fernando Valley and surrounding areas, including Ventura. That means hiring the equivalent of six or seven full-time faculty members.

CSUN will deploy its education instructors in the field, rather than requiring the teachers-in-training to come to the Northridge campus. For example, several novice elementary school teachers could remain after school to take their required course.

The system will be set up to offer first things first, which for teachers means classroom management and survival skills. “You can’t teach anybody until you learn how to run a classroom,” Ellner said.

Emergency teachers who are new to the classroom often find themselves without the skills to turn chaos into order, leading them to drop out of the profession in droves. And teacher retention is one of education’s biggest problems.

CSU’s Wilson said up to half of teachers quit within three years--before they have mastered the job.

‘We’re very concerned about that,” Wilson said. “What can we do to prevent it?”

Veteran teacher Becki Robinson, now a United Teachers of Los Angeles vice president, recalled how rough the first years of teaching can be--despite, in her case, training that included a lot of time in the classroom.

“I cried my whole first year,” Robinson said.

Robinson pointed to the district’s intern program, which has a low teacher dropout rate, as a model that the CSU campuses should emulate. It takes new teachers and uses experienced teachers to support them while they earn a credential through the district.

To be successful, university programs need to make more use of teachers already in the trenches, rather than rely on theoretical approaches taught in the traditional college classroom setting, Robinson said.

The education professionals at the CSU campuses agree, Wilson said, and a major shift in methodology is part of their plan.

A key to change is forming partnerships between schools of education and school districts for teacher training.

“No longer can we operate as separate entities going on on our own,” Ellner said.

CSUN already is working closely with LAUSD schools in the East Valley to develop a new teacher preparation project, Ellner said.

The campuses are also upending their approach to educating teachers. The schools hope to keep budding teachers on an academic track while integrating teacher training as students move through their college years.

As an example, a student taking college biology might also be enrolled in a lab that would teach him or her how to do biology experiments for children, Wilson said.

The plan is also to give college students more hands-on training in the classrooms plus support in the first difficult years.

“The whole university is committed to working on this,” Ellner said. “It’s exciting.”