Today’s Student ~ Tomorrow’s Teacher Program Evaluation
December 1, 2008
Recruitment
We launched our recruitment efforts on March 16, 2008 with our Today’s Student ~ Tomorrow’s Teacher (TSTT) Project Kick-off Community Event held at the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center in the heart of Seattle’s central area. A broad range of guests from the greater Seattle community involved in education, community service, and politics attended our kick-off event. Our program featured NYU Professor of Education, Dr. Pedro Noguera, UW Professor of Education, Dr. Frances Contreras, Washington State Representative Sharon Tomiko-Santos, and others expressing their support for our project and calling on members of the community to get involved.
We followed up our Project Kick-off, with distribution of our brochure and student application packets to schools and community centers throughout the greater Seattle area, with a greater focus in communities serving higher percentages of our target population. Our community based organization and Seattle School District (SSD) personnel project partners came through with getting most of our early completed applications in, but we received no completed applications from other SSD personnel to whom we had sent outreach information who were not directly involved in our Project. We reorganized to increase our pool of applicants, using the administrative assistant support we brought on board in the spring to primarily focus on recruitment. We found our greatest recruitment success in having our TSTT Project administrative assistant target specific Seattle School District teachers and community organizations and members known for their commitment to and relationship with our target population.
Since the beginning of the school year, our recruitment efforts have been assisted by the students who went through our Summer Academy. We expect our students to be powerful voices in our future recruitment efforts.
Partnerships
As the lead organization, North Seattle Community College (NSCC) has provided the institutional support without which we would have been very hard-pressed to operate as a project at all. NSCC has allowed for the release time for our Project Director to be granted (though paid for from Project funds), served as our fiscal agent, and provided the space for our Summer Academy and other Project events as needed. In addition, NSCC mathematics instructor and TSTT Project Director, Paul Kurose contributed to the teaching of the Summer Academy and will conduct workshops during the year focused on mathematics test preparation and general college-level mathematics readiness. In addition, Tracy Woodman, NSCC Grants Manager, who has been involved from the beginning of the development of our initial proposal, is contributing in a leadership capacity in project management and planning.
Western Washington University Professor of Education, Dr. Dina Benedetti, has been an active and committed member of our Project Leadership team, and also contributed to our Summer Academy, leading two days of instruction focused on the teaching profession and teacher education for our students.
Seattle Urban Academy (a south Seattle alternative high school) Principal Sharon Okamoto and her staff have participated in TSTT Project leadership and recruitment from the outset, and is also currently supporting students Project students attending SUA with mentoring support. Three key Seattle School District personnel have contributed greatly to our Project, including being involved as leaders from the initial design and development of our Project. Sealth High School counselor Kory Kumasaka has contributed in recruitment, counseling, and leading workshops. SSD high school Language Arts program teacher leader and former Milken National Educator Award winner Kathleen Vasquez developed and taught the core curriculum for our four-week Summer Academy and continues to provide academic support to our students. And SSD leader of professional development on issues of race and equity, Ray Williams, has led discussions and conducted workshops for our students.
Our community-based organization connections, Campaña Quetzal and the YMCA Black Achievers involved from the outset, with the addition of the City of Seattle’s Seattle Youth Employment Program and our connections to the community in general, have served us well in our efforts recruit and support our students. The Seattle Youth Employment Program assisted with recruitment, and hosted our November 15 Saturday workshop on the college application process. We have also developed a partnership with the Franklin High School PTSA and King County Councilmember Larry Gossett’s office enabling our students to be paid for serving as tutors at various SSD sites around the city, including Salmon Bay School (K-8 alternative school), Aki Kurose Middle School, and Roxhill Elementary School.
Summer Academy
We had fifteen students commit to participate, thirteen students actually participate at some level, and ten students complete our Summer Academy which began on July 7 and ran daily Monday through Friday from 9am to 1pm through July 31. The central curricular focus of our Summer Academy was on issues in urban education with an emphasis on developing the college preparatory reading and writing skills of our students. The Summer Academy classes were held on the North Seattle Community College campus.
Extra-curricular activities included guest speakers, including Dr. Eddie Moore, Jr., Bush School Director of Diversity, Pioneer SSD African American educators, Roscoe Bass and Virginia Galloway, King County Councilmember Larry Gossett, and Washington State Representative, Sharon Tomiko-Santos; a hands-on teaching experience at the Meadowbrook Pond and Wetland with instruction from WWU College of Education faculty and The Homewaters Project - an innovative environmental education organization; and field trips to the Wing Luke Asian Museum and the Northwest African American Museum.
The academy also includes preparation for a hands-on teaching experience with instruction from WWU College of Education faculty and The Homewaters Project - an innovative environmental education organization.
Academic Year Program
We are currently serving sixteen students in our academic year program. We have students placed at various SSD elementary and middle school sites tutoring and/or mentoring youth two days a week. We are holding monthly Saturday workshops lasting on average for three hours. Our workshops will be held at the SYEP office unless there is a purpose in holding them elsewhere.
We have taken students to the 2008 Washington State Association of Multi-Cultural Education Fall Conference held at Seattle University on October 25, 2008, and are planning to take them to another conference in the spring. We are also currently working on scheduling a gathering of veteran and/or retired educators of color for our students to meet and have the opportunity to hear of their experiences
During our Saturday workshops, we are doing ongoing assessment of our students’ college readiness. The field experience in which we have the students engaged is focused on underserved student populations, and we are following up on an introduction to the Washington State Code of Professional Conduct in our training and supervision of our students in their roles as tutors and/or mentors.
Program Evaluation
We are extremely impressed with the students with whom we are working. The potential we see in these youth goes far beyond our expectations. Overall, we feel very good about what we have been able to accomplish with our students, though we certainly will expect to be able to do more if we are fortunate enough to have the opportunity to take advantage of all we have developed and the lessons from the mistakes we have made, including targeting primarily those completing their junior year in high school. I would be great to reach out to these youth earlier to have more time to give to supporting them in their efforts to prepare for college.
At our end of Summer Academy Celebration, we shared the following passage with our students and all of the celebration attendees after hearing from Virginia Galloway, a 93 year-young pioneer Seattle educator of color.
"(I was) placed on this mountain with the rare chance to see dreams once envisioned by folks much braver than me.
And since their lives got me to the middle of a mountain, I can't stop and give up on them.
'Cause their lights that shine on inspire me to climb on from all of the places we've been."
We explained to our students that this is what we see our project to be all about, i.e., passing the torch to them to continue the work begun by Ms. Galloway and many others who got us to where we are today. At the end of the academic year, we will hold another celebration bringing veteran educators and members of our communities together to recognize the students for their achievements and to send them off to make the difference they have committed themselves to.
Other Information-Soon to be submitted
Addendum
North Seattle Community College TSTT Evaluation Report
RESPONSE TO QUESTIONS AND REQUESTS FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
FROM THE DECEMBER 11TH 2008 PESB MEETING WITH RWT GRANTEES
STUDENT ENROLLMENT STRENGHTS AND CHALLENGES:
The TSTT program is designed around an intensive and challenging summer academy experience. We ask students to commit to four weeks of attendance—five days per week x 4 hours per day—which is vastly different from the other academy models. This time together allows for a variety of instructional experiences, including the chance to work with local kids through a science outreach program. The time also allows students to bond as a strong cohort. Through the Academy’s reading and writing workshop, they are continually challenged to consider the qualities of effective teaching, to study the impacts of education policies on student success, reflect on their personal experiences with “good” or “bad” teachers and consider the impacts they will be able to make in their own careers. We feel this intensive time is vital to our student’s success in supporting them as future educators. Throughout this experience, we also aim to address college-preparation skills in the fundamental areas of math, reading and writing. Our program stresses that TSTT students shall be equally inspired and prepared to become high quality teachers and for many of our students the need to address skills gaps is imperative. Our numbers may have been fewer than we hoped (15 committed to the Academy and 10 completed) but those who persisted produced incredible work over the course of the four weeks.
Ø In 2009, we intend to begin recruitment outreach earlier to help students negotiate any challenges they may face in committing such a large chunk of their summer to our program (such as help finding employment which fits around the academy schedule rather than the other way around).
Ø Since fall 2008, we have expanded our academic-year program to over 16 students. While the new attendees did not benefit from the summer experience, they are active participants in the school-year tutoring program and Saturday workshops.
Ø If we have the opportunity to support another summer academy, we would again plan to expand enrollment during the school year for those who can not participate during the summer. We are also considering ways for students to engage with the summer academy even if they can not participate to the entire four weeks. This could include broadening attendance during guest speaker days and/or for other discrete activities.
Our ability to do as much robust outreach and recruitment for the summer academy was definitely affected by the extensive first-year start-up work which needed attending to at the same time. During this first year, our commitment to recruitment from communities and neighborhoods across the city could also have impacted our ability to get the numbers we had hoped for (goal was 20 students). While we may have been stretched thin during this first year, in the long run, we feel the benefits of a broad recruitment approach outweigh the limitations. We had students participate who lived in South, Central, North and West Seattle. We had over 5 different ethnic communities and 4 native languages represented in our TSTT summer cohort. This richly diverse group, we feel, outweighs the fact that our numbers were lower than originally hoped. By casting a wide net, we were not only able to find students from all different backgrounds but we were able to attract students who, to the individual, were deeply committed to the goals of the program and their personal dreams of becoming an educator some day. We could offer little in exchange for their participation outside the higher-level rewards of an intensive learning experience and the possibility of high school credit (which we successfully negotiated with the Seattle School District). For better or worse, this reality resulted in attracting a highly committed group of future teachers – while our group may have been smaller than others – we have no regrets about quality of student we were able to attract. Our students, however, were awed to hear that other programs offered laptops as incentives to participate -- we will never hear the end of it!
Ø If we have the opportunity to support another cohort in 2009, we plan to further focus our recruitment through our community partners. We have partners who have geographic and cultural/community representation from across the city. Increasing our partners’ active recruitment even more will help reduce some of the logistical barriers we encountered working across such a broad base for the first time.
Ø We are also exploring ways we can modify our budget to incorporate a program completion incentive that goes beyond what we were able to offer this year.
The location of our summer academy—determined at the time of the grant proposal—proved a barrier to some students’ participation. Two of the students who left the academy early did so due to their daily lengthy commutes from far in west Seattle to North Seattle Community College. We provided yellow bus transportation in the mornings but students had to take Metro home each afternoon. For some, this was too much to negotiate into their schedules and lives.
Ø If we have the opportunity to support another cohort in 2009, we are exploring options with our community partners to secure a more central location to hold the majority of classes during the next summer academy. We will still provide students with an experience on the college campus but it will no longer be the location of the daily academy workshops.
Some students from the populations we are serving in this program have significant personal and family barriers to long-term planning. These factors seem to account for the remaining three students we lost during the summer Academy. Two of them never even began the program, although they signed all the paperwork. Family situations changed and despite intensive outreach by our Program Director, they were not able to meet their commitments to participate. The remaining student completed 3 weeks of the program before having to leave due to a change in her work hours. Unfortunately, she needed the income and despite our efforts to retain her, she was not in able to work out a schedule to remain involved.