Responding to a national shortage of high school mathematics and science teachers, the University of Chicago Urban Education Institute will expand its teacher preparation program in 2009 to ready secondary math and biology teachers for urban classrooms.
University officials announced Monday that the Urban Teacher Education Program at the Urban Education Institute would admit its first class of prospective high school teachers into its master's degree program in spring 2009. John Boyer, Dean of the College, announced the new high school program at a celebration marking the five-year anniversary of the Urban Teacher Education Program's launch.
Boyer said the commitment to prepare high school teachers brings the University full circle to its early days, when a considerable number of its graduates went into elementary and secondary teaching.
"The University recognizes that a central part of its mission as an institution of higher learning in Chicago is to help train educators at all levels," Boyer said.
The original secondary school teaching class will be admitted from current University of Chicago students or graduates of the College with majors in mathematics or biology or their equivalents. The teaching program currently prepares elementary school teachers.
"Training the next generation of secondary mathematics and science teachers is not just the right thing to do, it is essential to the improvement of urban schooling," said Timothy Knowles, the Lewis-Sebring Director of the University's Urban Education Institute. "We are thrilled to initiate this work with the College and distinguished faculty from biology and mathematics."
The Urban Education Institute brings the intellectual resources of the University together with expert practitioners, who work with children every day to develop schools, people and knowledge that can inform the nation on how to produce excellent schooling for children in urban America. This collaborative effort between UTEP and the University biology and mathematics faculty represents UEI's unique approach to the problems facing urban education.
"There has been intense interest in secondary school teaching among some of our students in biology, and many of them have gone on to Teach for America, for instance. Now they can pursue a teacher certification program on campus," said Michael LaBarbera, Professor in Organismal Biology and Anatomy. He helped design the secondary teaching program for undergraduates pursuing degrees in biology.
"We want to offer a high quality program so that our graduates can be exceptional high school teachers," LaBarbera said.
Paul Sally, Professor in Mathematics, said the mathematics teachers program will be available to students who major or minor in mathematics. "We may have students in Economics or Physics enrolled in the program. We want them all to be well-grounded in content, however.
"The important thing is that the students really understand the material so that they can offer students at least three different ways to solve a problem," he said.
Prospective UTEP students may obtain more information or apply online by April 18, 2009 at http://utep.uchicago.edu/apply/application.shtml. The elementary and secondary programs use the same application process.
One of the unique aspects of UTEP is that University of Chicago students may apply for the program while as undergraduates and complete the first year of the two-year master's program as seniors. Upon successful completion of the program, students receive a Master's of Arts in Teaching from the University of Chicago Graham School and are licensed to teach in Illinois classrooms.
While the initial eight to 10 secondary candidates in both mathematics and biology will be University students or graduates, Kavita Kapadia, Director of UTEP, said she expects the program to admit students from other quality universities.
"We expect it to mirror UTEP's elementary program in fundamental ways, not only in key design features, but also in its expansion plans," Kapadia said.
While the elementary program also was limited to University students and graduates when it began five years ago, it also has grown to admit graduates from outside the University. Today, 33 UTEP graduates are teaching in urban classrooms across the nation; 27 are in Chicago public schools.
Another 16 UTEP students are completing internships in Chicago schools, where they each work closely with a veteran teacher who also serves as a UTEP clinical instructor. This yearlong experience, along with other opportunities to work with students, means that UTEP graduates have more than twice the classroom experience than those in other teacher education programs.
The graduates also receive support during their first two years in the classroom from a UTEP coach who is a veteran teacher. Teachers leaving Chicago receive online support, as UTEP tries to battle national statistics that have found that at least a third of new teachers leave their first job within three years and half leave within five.
In contrast to the national retention figures, about 90 percent of UTEP's teachers have remained in the classroom, Kapadia said.
"We are trying to create a community of support for our novices that will encourage them to remain in classroom teaching while helping them find their voices as school-based leaders," Kapadia said.
UTEP graduates said their extensive work with students, coupled with rigorous intellectual course work, better prepares them for the realities of urban classrooms than traditional education programs. Those programs often only offer a semester or less of student teaching and no coaching for new graduates.
The unique support system for UTEP graduates is evident this year at Clara Barton Elementary School on Chicago's South Side, where five UTEP graduates are teachers and other UTEP students are interns.
"It really helps to have a group of like-minded people around you who want to make a difference in urban education. It challenges you," said Sonia Wang, a UTEP graduate teaching eighth-graders at Barton.
She said UTEP prepared her for the unique issues facing urban youth. She pointed to a table of projects on students' communities that included poems written about their neighborhoods with titles such as "Outside of Me" and "Where I'm From."
One student wrote of a home with a china cabinet containing antique glasses while another in the same neighborhood wrote of "boys with guns and young girls having babies."
"Some of my students come from hard places. Others are from more middle-class families. You can't be a teacher unless you recognize who you are teaching," Wang said.
"You have to know how to push and challenge students. To do that, your teaching must be culturally relevant," she said. "That is one of the biggest lessons I took from UTEP, and I use it every day."
—Prof. Kunle Odunsi
