Innovator Vol. 35 No. 3 - Spring 05: Learning Partnerships
Return to contents Alumni Profile: Jason Margolis
In the third year of his doctoral
program at UM, Jason Margolis
(PhD, 2003) entered an internship
consisting of two parts: two
days a week onsite at Detroit’s
University Preparatory Academy
(UPA) engaging in the professional
development of teachers; studying
the school’s experience with a
reform effort, and two days a week
assisting Dr. Laura Roop, the SOE’s
Director of Outreach, in outreach
tasks, from interviewing faculty, to
exploring potential projects with
district leaders, to writing accounts
of university-school collaboration
for a lay audience.
When Margolis began the internship, he intended to conduct his dissertation study at UPA on a small subset of the teachers—those invol
ved in the Action Research Group. Within a short time, however, he observed the “chaos” that reform efforts engendered in the school and switched his study to include the whole faculty. “I decided I needed to study the teachers’ lived experience of such development,” he said. This resulted in his dissertation: Teachers Living and Learning Change: A Case Study of One Urban Charter School.
It was Margolis’s own initiative that landed him the internship. He met with Dean Wixson and explained his interest in working with UPA, with whom he already had a relationship. He was also eager to assist Roop in her outreach efforts. Luckily, Wixson and Roop had been hoping to pilot just such an internship, and Roop took on the role of guide/mentor for the project.
“his dissertation bridged theory and reality in an appealing way.” |
“The messiness bothered Jason at first,” Roop commented. “He struggled as his initial dissertation idea headed down the drain, but he became really valuable to the school’s leaders and faculty because he realized he could be a listener, assisting at various points, and that the real story was the messiness. He also came to realize that his proposed professional development intervention was a concept that had merit, but it would have to be balanced with the actual context and conditions all in the charter school were facing.”
The experience not only was good for UPA and UM SOE, it was also good for Margolis as he interviewed for jobs. Having served in an urban charter school, and having worked with school leaders across Michigan on various projects, he had the “where the rubber hits the road” kind of experience increasingly sought by schools of education. Plus his dissertation bridged theory and reality in an appealing way. “Schools of education across the country are looking more and more at ways to connect with area school districts,” says Margolis. “And doctoral internships certainly help with that. It’s a win-win situation for everybody, and I can’t imagine anyone graduating from a doctoral program in teacher education or ed admin without such experience.”
“Schools of education across the country are looking more and more at ways to connect with area school districts.” |
Now an assistant professor of teacher education and field partnerships at Washington State University, Vancouver, Margolis teaches in the secondary program (content area literacy, improvement of instruction). And in keeping with his internship training at UM, he also has administrative tasks supervising fi eld experiences and placements for student teachers, coordinating with school districts, and overseeing partnerships with schools.
