by Felicia Fonseca
Daily Lobo
UNM students in elementary and secondary education programs will be hit with changes in the fall.
Supervisors will lose their jobs, and first-year and student teachers might be supervised by graduate assistants, many of whom have never taught in a classroom.
"I think there is probably a measure of concern with students about who will supervise them and who will be responsible for their work," said Kathryn Watkins, associate professor in the College of Education.
Viola Florez, dean of the College of Education, has proposed first-year teachers and student teachers be supervised by retired teachers but mainly by graduate assistants.
She said hiring graduate assistants will help the assistants financially, give them an opportunity to learn new things and experience teaching.
But a program coordinator within the partnership, who didn't want to be named, said using graduate assistants to oversee first-year and new teachers is one of the weakest supervision models in the nation.
About 60 to 70 secondary education students and three times that many elementary education students will begin student teaching in the fall.
Student teachers receive support from about four or five clinical supervisors through the program as well as some retired teachers and graduate assistants. The supervisors work with teachers at APS to give each student teacher a grade and are required to visit with students teachers.
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What's the difference?
Graduate assistants would barely know more than the student teacher, education student Heather Sharp said.
Sharp, who finished student teaching last year, said she is frustrated because without having connections in the school district, graduate assistants cannot adequately match student teachers with teachers in the district. While she was student teaching, she was removed from her original classroom by her supervisor and placed with a teacher who was a better fit for her.
"They (graduate assistants) don't know a whole lot of people in the school, and they don't have a lot of respect yet," Sharp said.
Davina Turner, who will begin student teaching in the fall, said UNM students have not been well informed about the changes. She said she doesn't want a supervisor who has never taught in the classroom, because it will be hard to respect a person with no experience.
"I'll feel like, 'if you haven't been in the classroom and I have, who would have the best advice?'" she said.
The success of the proposal depends on the graduate students' experience, the clinical supervisor said.
"I don't think it will work all that great, but I don't know," she said. "These graduate students haven't been in the classroom. They are not teachers. They don't know what it's like. They don't know the ins and outs of working with a principal and working with the whole system. I'm sure that some of them will be good, and some of them won't."
Losing services
Teachers who were employed under the Resident Teacher Program, Teacher Enhancement Program and Cooperative Educational Administrative Intern Program will lose their jobs at the end of June.
"It's been emotionally hard for them because they're very committed to their work and the students at UNM," the program coordinator said.
The programs are a partnership between Albuquerque Public Schools, the Albuquerque Teachers Federation and the College of Education and were designed as an exchange of services.
Under the programs, APS teachers are released to the University to supervise first-year and student teachers in the district. In exchange, they get to take professional development courses at UNM.
Florez said the programs were affected by the state's three-tier licensure system.
The licensure system is a state-government effort to improve teacher's salaries. Under the system, teachers have to be paid a minimum salary and be in an APS district classroom full-time. Because APS can no longer release teachers who give up a part of their salaries, the programs had to be cut, Florez said.
The coordinator said she is certain there are other reasons for the loss of the programs, but everyone is hearing a different story.
Many program participants did not find out about the cuts until the end of February - a long time after the college knew, the coordinator said.
"This entire situation was handled very badly," she said.
Creating a plan
Florez has created a "revisioning" committee to plan how to fill the hole left by the three programs that are ending. The committee has an Oct. 1 deadline for a plan that will be implemented Oct. 1, 2006, she said.
The problem is that nobody is sure what is supposed to be revised, the coordinator said.
"It seems what we're revisioning is how to do this job with no resources," she said.
APS funded the programs leaving no cost to UNM. With the program losses, any supervisors hired will have to come out of the College of Education's budget.
During the spring semester, supervisors normally would be out scouting classrooms and interviewing teachers in APS to find a match for the student teachers at UNM, but they are reluctant to do so because they do not have any information about next fall, the clinical supervisor said.
The budget for the College of Education will not be finished until around the middle of May, Florez said. And there is not a lot of wiggle room, she said. But she said she will find money to hire retired teachers and graduate students to replace clinical supervisors.
Florez looks at the situation as a gamble but also as an opportunity for change.
"Someone created these a long time ago, and it was a wonderful idea," she said. "So now we see how creative we are."
The coordinator said it will be hard to put the needs of student teachers first because one of the last priorities in colleges of education is supervision of students. What is high on the list, she said, is research and presentation of projects - things that will bring money to the college.
"We've taken away all of the support system for all of our new and first-year teachers," the clinical supervisor said. "It doesn't make sense."
