Academics

 

 

Linking Learning Communities:
               New Teacher Leadership Project

Because we are now involved in both new teacher induction activities and an effective preservice internship program, Waukegan Public Schools now view us as a partner in their reform efforts.   Administrators are now turning to us for resources and advice.  All of this adds up to a more effective junior-year internship program for Lake Forest College students.  See full story below.

As many of you know, we have developed a longstanding relationship with Waukegan Public Schools and now place all of our junior-year interns in Waukegan.  At the elementary level, we place at the K-2 grade levels, and, at the secondary level, we place in the middle schools.  During the past three years, we joined with the Associated Colleges of Illinois and the Center for Success in High Needs Schools to develop two new initiatives to further enhance this internship experience.

The first initiative is to engage faculty members from departments across campus to help us prepare our internship course in Waukegan elementary and middle schools. We have had faculty members from the Math Department, Chemistry Department, and History Department work with us to redesign two features of that internship--(1) the orientation to Waukegan schools and (2) the  community-based resources for the "total teach" aspect of the internship.  One major critique of teacher education nationally is that teacher educators often work in isolation from their colleagues in the arts and science departments.  One goal of national teacher education reform is to find better ways to establish meaningful collaborations across campus to support the development of a more consistent, coherent and supportive program of study for preservice teachers.  In our conceptual framework, we speak to this goal when we state that it takes a whole college to educate a teacher and that we consider our colleagues in our double-major program to be teacher educators as well.  This new initiative, where we consult directly with colleagues from the arts and sciences in developing our Waukegan internship experience, has been the most meaningful outcome of our relationship-building efforts over the last few years.  Our interns now spend two weeks orienting themselves to Waukegan as a community--its history and resources--led by research efforts of Lake Forest College professors and their students.  We study immigration patterns and citizenship issues, economic trends, and environmental changes associated with an industrialized community that is going through deindustrialization.  We then segue into the responsibilities of the Waukegan teacher and the ways in which this knowledge of the community can make for more sensitive and engaging instructional practice.  Our interns then invent ways to take this knowledge and make it meaningful to their students. 

We are just concluding our fourth year of the project and believe that our interns are much better prepared to enter their internship, are better supported to have success with Waukegan kids, and are well-equipped to engage their students in meaningful literacy development activities.  But the best result is that we feel as if our Department has grown.  We feel more connected to the Lake Forest College community and our colleagues in other departments. They understand the intellectual processes and expectations of teaching, and we are more knowledgeable about the role that community inquiry can play in teacher development.

The second initiative is a summer institute and academic year support project for new teachers in Waukegan schools.  Working with building principals, we identify twenty "new teacher leaders" and work with them in a summer institute doing community inquiry and working on instructional design projects.  Throughout the academic year, we meet in small study groups to support project implementation and reform of practices.  We learn as much from these new teachers as they learn from us.  This knowledge is then fed back into our internship courses and helps us to provide better-prepared cooperating teacher mentors.  Our interns have the opportunity to learn alongside optimistic, forward-thinking new teachers who are simultaneously examining and reforming their practices. What better role models for learning to teach in high needs schools!