Bowling Green, Ohio is a small town of about 30,000 people just over an hour south of Detroit, Michigan and about 40 minutes from Toledo. It’s first pride and joy might be Scott Hamilton, the 1984 Olympic gold medalist in men’s figure skating. But a close second is Bowling Green State University, a public university educating about 15,000 students. The school’s biggest undergraduate program is its education school—BGSU is the biggest teacher prep program in the state, graduating several hundred licensed teachers every year.
I spent the first part of the week in Bowling Green (which I’ll be writing about for FutureEd and in my forthcoming book on tutoring!), and I left with a few takeaways.
Get out of DC.
For national policy folks, it’s hard sometimes to leave DC. Even when we travel to conferences in San Diego or Oklahoma City, we are mostly surrounded by the same people. We have the privileged position to analyze and assess trends and outcomes in education from across the country, but we rarely see what that looks like in real life. The travel I’ve been fortunate to do for my tutoring research has taken me to places like Bowling Green, Odessa, Texas, and Jackson, Louisiana, and the truth is that it’s much more difficult to criticize leadership decisions or implementation when you sit in the context in which those choices were made. Sit in the principal’s office at the poorest elementary school in Bowling Green City, watch him interrupt the eleven meetings he has that day to respond to a seven-year-old child in crisis outside his door, listen to him talk about how to support a student who returned this year after 18 months somewhere else, with no information from the family about whether that child even went to school last year at all, observe as he juggles classroom staffing when three separate teachers announce they have to leave early for various unscheduled health issues (mostly their own sick children). He’s happy that the PTO at his son’s school in the same district raised almost $50,000 last year, but he knows that the scant $3,000 his school raised is already insufficient to meet the serious needs of a community where 89% of students live at or below the federal poverty level. Imagine this, and then imagine telling him directly, not in a think piece, what you think he’s doing wrong. It’s humbling, is all.
Pre-service teachers is a fancy term for kids.
We talk a lot about teacher prep, teacher recruitment, teacher pipelines, teacher quality. I was reminded this week, spending the afternoon in two different education courses at BGSU, that our future teachers are actually just college kids. They are young, and often not totally sure what they want out of life. They say things like, “What worked when we were younger definitely doesn’t work anymore! We will bring all the new knowledge and practices into the classroom!” (One student, the rare male education major, did in fact say this to me. It’s a classic maxim of youth, that new is better. But the following day, when I watched him work on literacy with a 5th-grade student who reads at a 2nd-grade level, and he was patient, looked her in the eye, found a way to repeatedly engage her in the work, that he also takes this seriously. Being young doesn’t always mean you’re wrong.). Education majors have been told a thousand times how hard it is to be a teacher, and they want to do it anyway. I’m not saying they should get a pass, and certainly not all ed schools are the same, and we owe it both to these college kids and our K-12 students to get the best-prepared teachers in the classroom that we can. BGSU’s program offers twice the required amount of field placement in part, according to Dean Dawn Shinew, so that students have ample opportunities to make sure they really want to pursue this career.
It’s possible that as we think about teacher professional development, we might want to keep in mind just how young our novice teachers are. Lawyers, doctors, and other professions will still have years of school ahead when teachers are finishing their first or second year in the classroom. Early career teachers likely need more training, more support, and better frameworks for processing their professional experiences in these early years.
America is full of great people.
There’s not a ton of national pride and patriotism in some of my circles these days, but you can’t visit a place like Bowling Green, or really any community, and not come across so many people who care. From Nancy, the server at Bob Evans in Bowling Green who greets her regulars by name and makes sure the new customers (me!) order the banana nut bread with a to-go box to snack on later, to the multiple BGSU faculty members I met who are either retired or on sabbatical, yet somehow on campus, working, teaching, attending meetings. I met almost 50 education students, and all of them care deeply about helping kids. One graduate assistant, completing her master’s to become a reading specialist, shared what she’s most worried about when she enters the classroom: “I’m scared I won’t be able to find the right supports for each and every one of students to learn. I want to be able to give all my kids what they need. I know I’ll be able to do it for most of them, and I know a lot of times it’s normal that there are some kids a teacher just can’t figure out how to help, but if I can’t help all my kids learn, I won’t feel like I’ve succeeded.” Ava’s future students are lucky. Maybe we’re all lucky.
When I handed the secretary at one elementary school my photo ID, she said, “Maryland?! Is this a prank?” I said, “No, I’m from Maryland!” She said, “You came all the way here for this?” I told her yes, I did come here for this. But the truth is I got a lot more out of it than I came for.