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Teaching in Detroit: Educate & Learn-Our Master of Arts with Certification
It is Friday afternoon, and Monica Williams is sitting in a circle with her second-grade pupils at Detroit’s Harms Elementary School.
It is time for the class meeting, a weekly session during which students
bring forth any issues that are concerning them, such as conflict with a classmate.
Other students suggest solutions, and the person who raised the concern chooses
a course of action.
“Remember,” Williams says when two youngsters offer conflicting versions of an incident. “Everyone has to be honest if we are going to solve our problems.”
It is an approach that teaches collaboration, honesty, and decision-making. But Williams might never have found herself at the helm of a class if not for the Master of Arts with Certification program, an equally innovative effort at the University of Michigan School of Education.
MAC is designed for people who earned bachelor’s degrees in other areas and now want to become teachers. The program allows people to earn a master’s degree in education and obtain certification to teach in an intensive, summer-to-summer year of course work and field experience. New cohorts of 25-28 students enter each June. Students may earn degrees in elementary or secondary education.
While graduates are qualified to teach in public schools throughout Michigan,
MAC focuses on preparing them to work in urban settings. Nationwide, more than
20 percent of new teachers leave the ed
ucation
profession within three years. The problem is even more acute in urban districts.
“It is obvious that there is difficulty in recruiting and retaining teachers among large urban districts across the country,” said Stuart Rankin, an adjunct professor and coordinator of the Elementary Masters and Certification, or EL MAC, program. “Our students finish the program having had success teaching these students.”
In order to be admitted to the MAC program, students must have good academic records, strong test scores and excellent letters of recommendation. Rankin also wants to know why they are interested in this program, how much exposure they have had to diverse people, and what they see as the value of education to society. The program attracts both people who have recently finished their undergraduate degrees and people who have had careers in business, engineering and other areas. Typically, by the time they decide to make the sacrifice of spending a year in this program and beginning a new career, they are pretty sure they want to teach.
“When things go wrong in the teaching situation, they are not so likely to blame the society, or the culture, or the school, or the children,” said Rankin, who was a teacher and administrator for 37 years in Detroit schools before he retired in 1990. “They look to themselves first to see what they can do.”
Debi Khasnabis, who teaches fourth- and fifth-grade bilingual students at
Harms, graduated along with
Williams
in the first cohort of students to complete the MAC elementary program. “My
childhood ambition had always been to be a teacher,” Khasnabis said. “I
had fought it all through college and had ignored the voices in my head.” She
majored in Spanish and Economics at Michigan, and then found herself hating
a dream business internship the summer before her senior year. She attended
a meeting about the formation of the MAC elementary program and decided to
apply. Once admitted, she quickly bonded with others in the program.
That is one of the keys to the program’s success, Rankin said. Participants provide support to one another and share ideas about different approaches. “We think that in a cohort-based program you add a lot of strength because they live in each other’s pockets for a year,” he said.
The success of the program has led Patricia Diaz, principal at Harms, to re-evaluate the way she thinks about teacher training. A 31-year veteran of the Detroit school district, she has formed collaborative efforts with Michigan’s School of Social Work and the College of Architecture and Urban Planning. But she was skeptical about the potential for a one-year program to adequately prepare people to teach.
The graduates have proven her doubts misplaced. This fall, Diaz hired a third graduate of the EL MAC program, Janice Lorkowski, who now teaches third grade students. In addition, seven MAC students are working with Harms teachers for their classroom experiences this school year.
“Because of the kinds of experiences they are given through this program, I would hire an EL MAC graduate over a bachelor’s degree student from somewhere else,” Diaz said. “It’s kind of a win-win situation and I’m just proud to be part of it.”
-Published Winter 2004
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