New Teachers Get a Crash Course

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By SARA LIPKA

Oakland, Calif.

Late one afternoon at Westlake Middle School, two math-and-science teachers sit in an empty sixth-grade classroom, anxiously discussing the progress they want their students to make before summer vacation.

Monica Rother and Roddy Theobald are part of Teach for America, the organization that dispatches college graduates to underserved schools. Both are working 60-hour weeks, trying to meet the program's goal that students make "significant gains," or one-and-a-half grade levels of progress a year. But it is almost May, and the teachers are grasping for good strategies.

Like many of their fellow teaching-corps members, Ms. Rother and Mr. Theobald are earnest and driven, but they are also novices. They need help. They get some from evening teacher-certification classes and monthly meetings with fellow Teach for America instructors. The program also assigns them a supervisor who visits several times a year. But up in front of their classes each day, they are on their own.

And so they are hungry for all the advice they can get from Sarah Cuff Koegler, a former member of the corps who now advises a group of 40. She has arrived to meet with the Westlake teachers this afternoon.

The three sit facing each other with their laptops open. Ms. Rother leans a hand on her spiral-ring calendar, the inside edge of her palm stained with blue marker. The graduate of Willamette University flips through and counts the number of instructional days left in the school year: 13.

"What do my kids really need to be successful in seventh-grade math and science?" she asks.

They toss out ideas — mathematical order of operations, addition and subtraction of negative numbers — and try to come up with lesson plans for each.

At one point, Mr. Theobald, a graduate of Carleton College, pounds his fists on the table in frustration. "You're not supposed to leave sixth grade without knowing how to do fractions!" he says.

"You're not supposed to leave fifth grade that way," Ms. Rother replies, sighing.

Ms. Koegler offers encouragement: "But they're not going to leave sixth grade that way."

Both teachers must evaluate their students' performance on various benchmarks as part of the process teachers use to report achievement to Teach for America. But they both seem less concerned with test scores than with their students' grasp of concepts. As they discuss possible class activities, Mr. Theobald closes his laptop halfway and rests his chin on the top of the screen.

"It's so hard this late in the year to deliver a traditional lesson," Ms. Rother says. She proposes having students work in groups to present various concepts to the whole class. Ms. Koegler, whose experience is in special education, is skeptical: "That is probably not going to meet individual student needs."

Along with Ms. Koegler, the teachers finally come up with a plan that excites them: to have students analyze common errors on a test.

Ms. Koegler is not finished. She locks a wireless Internet card into her computer and e-mails the teachers some resources, including video clips of lessons collected by a Teach for America staff member who is touring the country to observe successful math and science teachers.

Before she wraps up the meeting, Ms. Koegler pauses and looks intently at the two teachers. "Are you guys OK?" she asks. She is eager for them to tell her what else she can do.