Where Can I Go To Be a Real Teacher?

By Michele Arnold

In 1988, George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis were duking it out for the presidency, Rain Man was in the theaters, shoulder pads poofed women’s shirts and jackets, and Bobby McFerrin was on the radio singing Don’t Worry, Be Happy. Among Texas teachers, however, there was both worry and unhappiness. Standardized testing had just been instituted, and the top echelon of teachers felt that their students and curriculums were being subordinated to political agendas.

In the Model Science Lab, students learn to think like curious, creative, and tenacious scientists. In their midst, teachers from various HISD schools are mastering teaching techniques.

Frustrated with the constraints of teaching to high-stakes accountability tests and tired of battling the uneven quality of school funding, many of the top teachers in the Houston Independent School District (HISD) began asking, “Why aren’t schools hospitable to my best work? Where can I go to be a real teacher?” Some of these frustrated but dedicated teachers found their way to Rice’s Linda McNeil and Ronald Sass.

McNeil had left a faculty position at Harvard University to come to Rice and put into practice what she had discovered from her research on teaching and learning, and it was natural that she would collaborate with Sass, who had decades of experience working to improve science instruction. The two believed the problems of public schools could be overcome, and the key lay in empowering teachers through increased knowledge and a stronger professional voice.

The cumulation of their experience and optimism was the idea for Rice’s Center for Education, which became a reality thanks to the farsightedness of the Brown Foundation, Inc., and Maconda Brown O’Connor, a trustee of the Brown Foundation who has a PhD in social work and many years of professional experience improving the lives of children. “Maconda Brown O’Connor responded immediately to our ideas based on the soundness of our approach and her genuine affection for children in need,” says Sass. “Beyond seed money, Maconda, personally and through the Brown Foundation, Inc., has supported the center’s efforts financially and through hands-on involvement. Dr. O’Connor was the founding president of the Center for Education’s advisory board, serving in that capacity until very recently, and she continues to inspire the center’s focus on children.”

McNeil and her original team of researchers used Rice’s status as a small, private institution, out of the state’s control, to the advantage of the Center for Education. Their goal was to be a catalyst for educational change rather than an entity that would muscle its way as a reformer into HISD, the country’s seventh-largest school district. In the 17 years since it began operations, the center has maintained that diplomatic role, engaging the wider community through volunteers, financial support, and partnering institutions to identify educational problems and formulate solutions.

“Small often works well for Rice,” says Ed Segner ’76, the center’s new national advisory board chair. “Rice doesn’t have huge departments in any discipline, and yet each one is excellent. I think it’s worth noting that Rice started out in 1912 by focusing on science and engineering, because those were the needs of the community. In time, its humanities programs grew and flourished. Such is the path of the Center for Education.”

A year into the endeavor, a perceptive principal at Lanier Middle School agreed to house the Center for Education’s first project: the Model Science Lab. Rice neurophysiologist Elnora Harcombe is its director. “Though the design of the lab was brilliant in its flexibility to accommodate different teaching styles and cooperative student learning,” Harcombe says, “the real genius of the project was its focus on teachers. When a teacher’s knowledge base is strong, children acquire a real understanding of a subject, and it sticks with them in the next grade and beyond.”

Each year, approximately eight science teachers from various HISD middle schools work as residents at Lanier to refine their teaching skills. But there is more to it than just teaching. They also strengthen their content knowledge through hands-on experiences, such as spending a day with scientists at a chemical company, seeing in vitro fertilization at a hospital, visiting a water treatment plant, and studying coastal erosion with oil and gas executives. The field trips encourage teachers to bring all kinds of community resources into the classrooms when they are back in their home schools.

All Model Science Lab teachers are expected to serve as mentors in their home schools and to share all that they’ve learned with their colleagues. Graduates of the Model Science Lab program thus become vital resources to residents and other teachers who want to improve their students’ connections to science. In fact, their classrooms actually become crucial field trip destinations for colleagues across HISD. In this way, the program is growing, with approximately 65,000 HISD students benefiting directly from the program each school year.

The students chosen to participate in the Model Science Lab are from the regular academic program, not the advanced or gifted and talented track.Several of them from the previous year gathered last September to talk about what they’d learned. Their teachers were thrilled to hear that the young scientists remembered the name of the water flea (Daphnia) that they’d soaked with alcohol and nicotine, and they were gratified that the students remembered why those substances are harmful to humans.

Children excited about science are but one measure of the center’s success. The program administrators have received an abundance of accolades from teachers who have stated unequivocally that they would not still be teaching in an urban school if the Center for Education had not come along to give them new opportunities to learn and to stand by them in perfecting pedagogy.

“Principals giving feedback can be intimidating and irrelevant,” says one teacher, “but watching master teachers in their classrooms and hearing feedback from peers are valuable.” Resident teachers also participate in local, state, and national science workshops, further bolstering their knowledge and confidence levels. “I treasure the time I’ve been given to increase my knowledge of science outside my specialty and to reflect on my performance in the classroom,” says a 2005–06 resident. Another adds, “This kind of professional development is what teachers need. The old model of one-day in-service retreats with canned material was a total waste of time.”

“Every teacher,” Sass says, “can learn to be a better teacher and, thereby, have better students. The center’s leaders started with that truth and devised grassroots programs, always based in classrooms, that stemmed from what they had learned in their research. People marvel at how dedicated center researchers are, often spending far more time with teachers than funds allow, but they don’t think like that. These are their ideas coming to life with positive results. They’re thrilled about it all.”

Researcher Wallace Dominey is one of those exuberant researchers who went far beyond HISD to train elementary science teachers in outlying districts on how to improve their instruction. Adhering to the center’s winning formula, he extensively trained one science teacher in each school who was then able to train his or her peers over time.

Other programs followed the Model Science Lab—the School Writing Project, School Literacy and Culture, Asia Outreach and Global Education, the Latino Family School Connection, and the School Science and Technology Project—each cultivating an important area.

Marv Hoffman, for example, creatively tackled reading at the high school level with the concept that teachers should be writing along with their students and even having students read the teacher’s work. It’s a novel concept, but it’s working. Student writing in this program is memorialized in a publication called Impressions. Patsy Cooper’s School Literacy and Culture Project targets children too young to know how to write. Her ego-boosting idea was for children to verbally tell their stories to teachers, who write them down and then recruit the other children in the class to perform the story. The results blow Dick and Jane out of the water. School Literacy and Culture Project teachers gather at Rice each spring to read from their own writing journals and to share teaching triumphs. For many, it’s their first time to visit a world-class research university.

It’s clear that teachers created Center for Education programs; one of their thoughtful gestures was to leave the door open so that graduates can call on the researchers if they have questions in the future. And there is no expiration date on those helping hands. Such long-term relationships have translated into higher teacher retention, much to HISD’s satisfaction. The district’s fiscal support of the center’s programs is an indication it approves of the strategy not to pursue small studies and quick fixes but, rather, to develop knowledge that can assist decision makers who are shaping priorities of whole schools. New ideas are needed with a student population as culturally diverse as HISD—2004–05 demographics show that 59 percent of HISD students are Hispanic, 29 percent are African American, and 8.9 percent are white.

The Center for Education is one of many of Rice’s K–12 professional development contributions to Houston-area teachers. The Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology offers integrated physics and chemistry training for teachers, and Technology in Teaching and Learning houses the National Endowment for Humanities’ Communities in History, the Electronic Community of Teachers, and a program that helps teachers master the use of technology in the classroom. Rice’s School of Continuing Studies always has a big response to its Advanced Placement Institute and digital library courses as well as to its International Baccalaureate (IB) Workshop, where teachers hone their techniques for effectively teaching IB courses. The Departments of Earth Science, Mathematics, and Physics and Astronomy offer teacher development courses, and the Rice University School Mathematics Project has been a bridge between Rice’s math research community and Houston-area math teachers for the last 18 years.

Having decades of experience in public school systems, first as a teacher and now as a researcher, Linda McNeil wonders, “How can Houston be so creative in medicine, the arts, and space exploration but not show the same creativity with K–12 education? I’d like to see this city take a leadership position in making urban public schools a priority.”