by Maya McFadden The New Haven independent
Mentor Willems and fellow Rowland check in with each other during Thursday’s class.
In Metropolitan Business Academy’s library, special education resource student-teacher Selena Malaterra worked one on one with a multilingual student who needed help improving his reading comprehension skills.
At the same time, science student-teacher Dom Rowland tasked their ninth grade students with explaining how a puddle of water can “disappear” abruptly on a sunny day.
That was the scene in two separate classrooms Thursday morning at the 115 Water St. school building where two aspiring educators are learning the ropes of teaching as participants in the inaugural cohort of the Yale Teaching Fellowship program.
That’s a partnership among Yale, New Haven Public Schools (NHPS), Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU), and New Haven Promise that has brought together an inaugural cohort of 23 fellows dispersed across 17 NHPS school buildings. (Click here to read a recent story about fellows at Clinton Avenue School.)
In Metro’s second-floor library Thursday, Malaterra worked with a student who is a native Pashto speaker. That student was in need of extra support with his classwork in his foundations of reading course. The two focused specifically on his comprehension of a reading passage about the Reconstruction era of U.S. history.
“You really see the impact for a student because we’re there to help them to be more confident in what they’re handing in for their classes,” Malaterra said after Thursday’s class dismissed at around 10:30 a.m.
Malaterra works in Metro’s resource room with 9-12th graders alongside her assigned teaching mentor, Sean Benak, a veteran special education teacher. She aspires to work in special education after years of teaching as a part time drama teacher at Worthington Hooker and being a substitute teacher.
In the school’s resource space, Malaterra and Benak work with students in all grades to help them prepare plans for after high school, succeed academically with additional support and intervention, and learn strategies for thriving in high school.
Malaterra is a 2017 Cooperative Arts High School graduate who focused in theatre. She also works with the Shubert Theatre Arts Camp as a musical director. Because of her history as a part-time teacher, Malaterra said becoming a certified teacher is the next step in her education-employment dream.
While in the library around 10:20 a.m Thursday, Malaterra and her student worked through spelling out words like “movement” when reviewing the student’s history assignment. As the student worked to read a passage about the Reconstruction era, Malaterra helped to highlight specific parts of the passage that told the students key information. “Does anything in the sentence help you to answer the second question?” Malaterra asked.
Selena Malaterra and Sean Benak.
Benak is the head teacher-mentor for Malaterra, though he noted he’s been learning from her since the start of the school year. Benak said that, since working with a student-teacher in the classroom, they’ve incorporated more engaging technology into the class and learned about specific tools that support lesson making.
Benak said throughout the school year he’s working to show Malaterra foundational skills needed for teaching which include effectively utilizing prep periods for things like lesson planning and maintaining IEP and 504 plan compliance.
Dom Rowland, also known as “Teacher Rowland,” is working toward becoming a science educator. Rowland is working with teacher-mentor Chris Willems in teaching a ninth grade integrated science course. They developed the course together throughout the summer to specifically focus on bicycling and energy. Rowland previously was a researcher at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station before learning about the teaching fellowship and deciding to pursue education.
So far, Rowland said they enjoy being seen as an “equal partner” with Willems, who is Rowland’s paired mentor and who also told this reporter he has been learning from Rowland along the way. “It’s really unique to this experience to feel like an equal part while learning so much,” Rowland said.
The mentors both mentioned they each focus on talking the student-teachers through their daily classroom actions. “A lot of what you do as an educator isn’t random, from leaving a student alone to problem solve to how you set up your classroom,” Benak said.
Benak added that when he’s hosted student teachers in the past, other programs typically allot only a few weeks to field work, making it so “by the time you see fruits of your labor they’re gone,” he said.
Rowland said they are often applying what they learn in SCSU classes, like science methods, to their NHPS classroom. “I try to incorporate what I learn about lesson design right away to trial and error it,” they said.
Rowland checks in with ninth graders Thursday.
At around 9:40 a.m., Willems and Rowland talked with their students to review states of matter. After Willems led part of the lesson on states of matter during a water cycle and broke down the elements that make up H2O, Rowland took over to challenge students with a word problem that asked students to explain why a puddle of water in a park was gone two hours later on a sunny day.
Rowland and Willems teach a new integrated science course at Metro, which will have a mid-year pivot to teaching students about the physics of simple machines to incorporate and teach real life skills for biking.
Willems and Rowland have frequent ongoing conversations about their classroom planning and decision making. “Rather than me saying this is x and y, I say, ‘this is why I’m doing this’ or ‘this is a result of this particular sequence of events,’” Willems said.
A walk through of daily steps and designs is necessary, Willems said, because “there’s so many moving parts to this profession.”
Willems described the New Haven teaching fellow model as “brilliant” because it allows incoming teachers to see educators’ summer preparation, engage in district professional development, and see how a school building’s staff manage throughout an entire year.
Willems is a 30-year-teaching veteran and New Haven native. He’s taught in several capacities in New Haven and Massachusetts and for educational nonprofits.
With the fellowship’s gradual release model, Rowland and Malaterra in the spring will solely take on a few of their class sections.
Willems said that there is a daily exchange of information and ideas between the fellows and mentor teachers. “They see my mistakes and missteps and that helps us both to be better,” he said.
He said that explaining his instructional moves is a lot of work but helpful to “remind me of why I do what I do.”
Willems concluded that one of the biggest frustrations in education currently is staff turnover because “when we lose staff it’s more than just losing a person, but now everything they contributed to the school goes with them.” He hopes that the teaching fellowship’s focus on truly preparing educators who see through field work daily what the job entails will help bring prepared educators to the district. Hopefully, he said, those educators will want to stay because they are receiving support and a fuller understanding of the job. More intentional supports like the teaching fellowship, Willems said, need to be offered to properly fund public education.
The fellowship program does require its participants to work with NHPS for at least three years once certified.
The fellowship, Willems said, “is putting a spot light on a real crisis.”
Willems shows difference between solid and liquid movements during state of matter lesson.