Contact: Carmen Ramos Chandler,
(818) 677-2130
carmen.chandler@csun.edu

CSUN Teams With Local Schools to Train Teachers

The new program started this month with its first 63 students who will undergo an intense, one-year credentialling program that combines course work with in-the-field training at Polytechnic High School in Sun Valley.

"Our fundamental goal is to improve student achievement," said Nancy Burnstein, a special education professor at Cal State Northridge and one of the coordinators of the Accelerated Collaborative Teacher-preparation program. "Our assumption is that the quality of the teacher is the important factor. So we've got to provide well-prepared teachers."

To that end, several CSUN professors met during the past year with teachers and administrators from Polytechnic High School and the 10 elementary schools, two middle schools and one alternative high school that feed into it.

They wanted to design a program that would prepare future teachers for the complexity of the classroom in the shortest time possible. What they came up with is a one-year intensive program that involves both course work and in-the-field training.

Burnstein pointed out that with the current teacher shortage, schools are turning to people who have bachelor's degrees but no training in education to fill teaching vacancies.

"Our children are being taught by people who are not trained as teachers," Burnstein said. "We want to do something about that."

Carolyn Burch, principal at Polytechnic High School, said what makes the program particularly effective is that future elementary, secondary and special education teachers are in classes together, "learning what instruction students get before they come to them, and will get after they leave them."

Burch said one of the positive aspects of the ACT program is that the classes are taught by teams made up of CSUN professors and teachers in the Polytechnic High complex.

"It ties the theoretical and the practical," she said. "Our model is planned so that not only do they get all the requirements they need to meet professional standards, but they can continue to grow and get feedback."

Burch said that while the new program may seem like a logical way to educate teachers, in many ways its revolutionary.

"We're making changes in major pieces of major institutions," she said. "These things don't happen over night. There's been a great deal of collaboration to get to this point. Not all of it has been easy, but we're committed to it."

A total of four California State University campuses are working with local school districts under a $8.2 million grant from the Weingart Foundations to reassess teacher preparation and improve student achievement.

"What the grant said is that you are charged with redesigning teacher-training programs, we took that literally," said Phyllis Gudoski, a former special education teacher who is overseeing the project at Polytechnic High School. "We went with a blank sheet of paper and asked teachers, administrators and parents what they felt constituted a good teacher. With that as a framework, we designed our program."

Gudoski said the response to the program so far has been positive.

"Finally, the practitioners in the field feel that there is hope in what we're doing to prepare teachers," she said.