It was 6 p.m. on a Tuesday, and 15 men and women were sitting at tables in Room 156 of McLennan Hall, Trinity International University, Deerfield, and talking about burying plastic dinosaurs in trays of uncooked rice.
The participants had all come from their day jobs — one man is a manager at a McDonald’s and two of the women have high-level positions at a cell phone company, for example — to spend four intense hours preparing to become teachers.
Teachers?
Linda Alf, 43, of Waukegan, a real estate specialist for the communications company, said, “My husband and parents don’t understand why I’d want to leave a good paying job to earn half as much in a classroom. But at my age, you start to look at what you’ve done and whether you’ve had an impact. I believe affecting children’s lives will have more of an impact than building cellular towers.”
Five years ago Trinity started Reach to Teach, an alternative teacher-certification program that admits only adults with college degrees in other disciplines who want to change careers to become teachers. The program for elementary teachers, which Alf and her Tuesday night companions joined last August, compresses four years’ worth of education classes into three semesters of evening classes and ends with a semester of full-time student teaching. The secondary-level program, to train adults to be high school teachers, is even shorter. Both schedules are so rigorous — heavy-duty textbooks must be digested in a week, and papers are often due the first night of a class — that some of the 30 adults who enroll each year drop out quickly. But those who stay form a tight bond with the faculty and each other and, most important, find teaching jobs once they finish.
Alternative certification programs like Reach to Teach are multiplying. The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education’s Directory of Postbaccalaureate Programs lists 328 such programs around the country. Those include ones at nearby Chicago State, Loyola, Roosevelt and National-Louis Universities.
Schools like Trinity that have started such programs on their own are ahead of the curve. On Dec. 4 the Illinois General Assembly passed a law formally establishing alternative routes to certification and licensing for teachers and school administrators. Prior to this, people going through the new program were certified under the traditional rules.
Under the new law, a person who has graduated from an accredited college or university and who has at least five years of relevant work experience will be eligible to enroll in one of the approved programs now being set up in the education departments of state teacher-training institutions. Initial four-year teaching certificates will be issued to the graduates of these intensive programs who also pass rigorous tests of knowledge and instructional skills.
One reason behind alternative certification is sheer numbers. The state will need 80,000 new teachers in the next 10 years, and there is no way traditional teacher colleges can keep up with that demand. But the more compelling reasons are educational.
Tom Hernandez, a spokesman for the Illinois State Board of Education, said, “Public schools have become cloistered. One way to help them connect to the real world is to bring in people from the outside who have had real-life working experience. And we know that students, especially in the early grades, look to their teachers to fill every need. There’s a real value if these teachers have a broader life experience to share with them.”
Another Tuesday night student, Tom Schesvold, 42, of Bensenville, can serve up a big helping of both: He has a long career with McDonald’s and has helped raise three children. “After I put my wife through school here at Trinity and saw how happy she was teaching school, I started to think that I wanted my own life determined by more than a profit-and-loss statement,” he said. “I love working with kids and think I could give them a level of maturity and insight that younger teachers can’t provide.”
Schesvold is one of four men in the class, made up mostly of women in their 30s who became interested in teaching when their own children reached school age. “Now I realize how important good teachers are,” said Debbie Burmeister, 34, a Grayslake mother of two whose college degree is in business management.
“I was discouraged from being a teacher when I was in college,” said Melina Kline, 32, an engineer, who also is from Grayslake. “Teachers were overworked and underpaid — you know the story. Besides, I grew up on the West Side of Chicago, where the quality of education was so bad. After our daughter was born, I thought, `There has to be a better way.’ I came here so I could teach junior high math and science in Chicago myself.”
Although the older Reach to Teach students may have an edge in the experience department, during this Tuesday night one of the class’ youngest members, Rich Viviano, 27, of Highwood commanded most of the attention. Viviano, a former seminary student, now has a job in the field, as a kindergarten aide in Greenbriar School in Northbrook, and everyone wanted to hear what he has to say about teaching that involves students in a subject by using a variety of types of activities.
“We’re doing a unit on dinosaurs now,” Viviano said, “and the teacher has set up various stations around the room. While some kids work through a dinosaur story on the computer, for instance, others are little paleontologists, digging through rice to find tiny dinosaurs we’ve buried there.”
“When you have so much going on at the same time, how do you know whether you’re challenging the children or just frustrating them?” asked a woman in a sweatshirt decorated with a big red apple.
“When they cry,” another woman said with a laugh.
“There has to be a way to set up evaluations during a project,” Alf said, “so you can be sure each child is getting something out of it.” The discussion of how to keep students focused during hands-on activities, such as the dinosaur project, continued for some time before the adult students’ own teacher, Suzanne Tressel, 51, of Northbrook, admitted, “This is a challenge you will face every day. And it will be different from class to class. Your best resource is often other teachers.”
The Reach to Teach program follows that approach as well and calls in practicing teachers to share their experiences. Tracy Witt, 35, of Mundelein, a former advertising executive who graduated from the program last year, said that many adults arrive at Reach to Teach with idealistic visions of what they can accomplish. “The teachers who talked to us were realistic,” said Witt, who now teaches 2nd grade at Woodland School in Gages Lake.
Witt said she thinks she’ll be a better teacher because of the course and her previous experience, and she credits the program with helping her to get her job. She sent out five resumes and was hired by the first district that called her.
Witt noted, though, that teachers who come from such programs are a good bargain for school districts too. “Remember, the district is getting me at my experience level — I have a B.A. in social work and I’m 35 years old — but they’re still paying me at the rate of a first-year teacher.”
One very real subject all Reach to Teach students must face is money. The total cost of the program is almost $15,000. Few Reach to Teach students are eligible for scholarships — by the time they arrive at Trinity, most own homes and have working spouses. But many do obtain student loans that they have to pay back out of a beginning teacher’s wages.
Although participants can keep their full-time jobs during the first three semesters, they must work full time as unpaid student teachers for the last five months. “The only reason we can afford this is because my parents are helping us,” said Marilyn Nelson, 27, of Arlington Heights, who had worked in a doctor’s office before enrolling and now is student teaching 6th-grade social studies in Prospect Heights.
“Knowing I’d be earning no money during student teaching was the scariest part,” said Yolanda Van Rite, 33, who left a high-paying job in the regulatory affairs department at Abbott Laboratories and now teaches 4th grade in Kenosha. “It helped that I was assigned to a school close to home, in Zion,” she said.
The other hardship is time. “We are the house of study,” said Marti Valasek, 42, of Elmhurst, a Reach to Teach student whose husband Michael, 42, is enrolled in another Trinity program designed to help adults finish their undergraduate degrees. “Many evenings, one or two of our three children will sit at the dining room table with us, and we all do homework,” she said. “It took a lot of adjustment.”
Hiring a teacher from such a situation is very different from hiring one off a college campus, observed Joyce Zeiss, 55, of Evanston, a former junior high teacher who is part of the Reach to Teach faculty. “That’s one of the reasons we have almost a 100 percent placement rate. When someone has to go through so much to get a teaching certificate, you know they’re highly motivated.”
Judy Lafferty, 53, principal of Greenwood Elementary School in Waukegan, said she bypassed a long list of other applicants last year and hired Reach to Teach graduate Jeffrey Becker to teach 5th grade at her school. “A lot of young people go into teaching because it’s a safe career choice or because they don’t know what else to do. It’s refreshing to see someone who’s tried other fields, then chosen to work with children,” Lafferty said.
“An older person brings poise and interpersonal skills to this job. I feel really secure when Jeff deals with parents,” Lafferty said. “And the experience he brings to our children is really fabulous.”
Becker, 33, who lives in Waukegan, earned a college degree in communications and broadcasting, worked for radio stations in Florida and spent three years in Australia, helping to start churches in Brisbane. Although his primary involvement in Australia was with children, he never thought of teaching school until a coworker mentioned it.
“When I returned to the States, I heard about Reach to Teach,” Becker said. “I was a substitute teacher during the day and a student at night. It was hard at first, because I wasn’t used to sitting so long, and the workload came in waves. It could seem overwhelming.
“But it was a good decision,” Becker says. “Teaching is probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It’s also the most rewarding. When I see my students around town and they greet me warmly, it’s very fulfilling. I don’t think I could find a better profession.”
