A New Investment in Teachers as Students

Michelle Jarrett is a Los Angeles elementary school teacher on summer break. But there she was in a Marina del Rey classroom one recent morning, fingering her necklace, biting her pencil and bearing down on an algebra problem involving a camping trip, bears and filched meals.

“This is a good problem,” said Jarrett, the gentle music in her voice giving away her Caribbean roots. “This would consume my class. I’d give them a week to mull it over and they wouldn’t want to move on until they had it.”

When Jarrett had arrived at 8:30 a.m. Monday for the week of training, she was more than dubious. Hostile is more like it. By Wednesday, she had changed her mind.

“This has been awesome,” the Marvin Avenue School instructor said of the sessions, planned and led by accomplished Los Angeles Unified School District teachers.

Hers is an atypical reaction to programs known as “professional development.”

Teachers typically sneer at such training, which often involves some highly paid “expert” barnstorming across the state, lecturing about the latest fad to hundreds of teachers at a pop.

New models, which involve more training time and smaller classes, may change that image.

A lot is riding on their success.

Beginning in 2004, students will have to pass a state exam, which will include basic algebra, to graduate. Schools are to be judged on how students meet exacting, grade-by-grade math standards. New textbooks that reflect those standards will be in schools for the first time this fall.

None of that matters, however, if the teachers aren’t able to teach--or, worse, don’t understand--the math in those books.

That’s why the state hopes to train 16,500 teachers, at a cost of more than $30 million, over the next year. Districts are tacking on millions more. L.A. Unified, for example, is spending $7 million on the math program Jarrett attended and an additional $21.5 million on 285 math coaches to help improve teaching.

Together with a similar push on reading, it adds up to the most aggressive such investment in state history.

Whether that investment will pay off is an open question. Skeptics note that there’s little evidence that professional development in the past has had any impact.

That may be why the sessions Jarrett attended at the Westside Leadership Magnet School have not been even close to full. There’s still room for about 900 more teachers this summer, said Barbara Ledbetter, the program organizer. Participants are paid $500 for the week, and session instructors are paid nearly triple that.

Ledbetter said she’s well aware of the sour taste that professional development tends to leave with teachers. To sweeten the deal, the Cordon Bleu-trained chef booked space near Santa Monica Bay, close to a strip of good restaurants.

Those perks have proved distracting, however. So she began a daily raffle that teachers can enter by, among other things, getting back from lunch on time.

Ledbetter also lined up publishers to donate about $120 worth of resource books for each participant, who include administrators and a few parents as well as teachers. But her most important strategy was to make sure the training was designed and taught by “the greatest teachers you’ve ever met.”

People like Dana Fadler, a math teacher at Fairfax High, and Connie Vandergriff, who teaches at Mark Twain Middle School.

Fadler exuded the enthusiasm of a teenager for a fast car as he demonstrated a clever method of solving for X in the “bear” problem. “The interesting thing about math is that it’s so deep and so enriching,” he said.

Fadler and Vandergriff paired up to cover functions and working with negative and positive integers, two tricky elements of algebra. For each topic, they shared activities aimed at broadening the participants’ teaching repertoire.

Vandergriff demonstrated how she uses colored chips--black for positive numbers and red for negatives--to help children grasp the concepts. She also suggested that teachers draw math examples from their students’ lives.

With fifth-graders, for example, they can talk about the allowance students receive (positive numbers) and the debts they owe (negative numbers).

The atmosphere is friendly as the casually dressed “students” take notes and ask questions. They share their own stories, talking about where children get hung up and confused.

Jarrett, who has four years of experience, appreciated the tips. She said she was sure she’d be able to use the lessons on graphing, functions, subtracting negative numbers and all the rest with her fifth-graders.

“How do you bring algebra down to a fifth-grade level? That’s what I needed more than anything else,” she said.

One high school teacher confessed that, like Jarrett, his expectations were low.

“I figured lunch would be at the nearest bar and grill with the emphasis not on the grill,” he wrote in an evaluation at week’s end.

He said he did learn “a little about math and strands and games and puzzles.” More important to him, though, was what he said was the “overdose of nice, friendly, warm and caring people.” That, he said, “revitalized my pride in terms of who we are and what we do.”

Ledbetter proudly showed the evaluation to a reporter. To her, it was evidence that she had achieved a key goal: to create a “community of support” for good math teaching.

But the true bottom line, for Los Angeles and the state, will be whether more training produces more learning. Ledbetter said she will gather student test scores to see if she can make that case.

State officials acknowledge that their investment in professional development is a gamble. But it’s a bet that Los Angeles Supt. Roy Romer is willing to take.

“If we do not produce more expert teaching, everything else we do is irrelevant,” he said.