Melissa Bailey Photo
Teacher facilitator Gretchen Gurr.
In two years, 300 teacher “facilitators” will help their peers improve their craft, reaching every teacher in the city — according to a new plan backed by one of the world’s largest philanthropic foundations.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has chipped in $990,000 towards a new program called Empowered Effective Educators (E^3), which aims to spread new teacher-to-teacher professional learning groups throughout the city’s 47 schools, officials announced at a press conference Tuesday at Barnard Environmental Studies Magnet School.
The program began this summer, when 64 teachers attended a leadership boot camp. This fall, the new teacher facilitators have been meeting with small groups of their peers, helping them with classroom management and new math and reading curricula.
The Gates Foundation will pay to continue that work — and help prepare to expand it in coming years — officials announced Tuesday. The money supplements a $53 million Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) grant New Haven received to improve the way it grades, supports, rewards and develops educators.
The E^3 program aims to “intensify our focus on teacher professionalism” by creating new forums for teachers to support each other, as well as a new pathway for teachers to lead without leaving the classroom, said schools Superintendent Garth Harries.
Teachers union President Dave Cicarella said the program aims to keep talented teachers in the classroom. In the past, “very often we were forced to lose the best among us” as they took jobs elsewhere, he said.
Teacher facilitators Jamie Coady of John Martinez School and Cara Campo of Bishop Woods.
The plan starts out with 52 “teacher facilitators” paid an extra stipend this school year to run small professional development groups on a topic of their own choice. Next year, New Haven plans to train another 100 facilitators, and another 150 the following year. That means in the 2015 – 16 school year, there would be 300 facilitators each leading five other teachers, covering all 1,640 teachers in the district.
The Gates money would jump-start the program through a one-year grant, with an option to renew in coming years. In Year One, the grant is paying for three main services: To train teacher facilitators to help their peers; to audit how schools are allocating time, in effort to include more professional learning time during the day; and to bring in new technology.
To that end, New Haven plans to use the Gates money to create three new administrative positions and hire various consultants to train teachers and give strategic advice.
Click here, here and here to read the district’s grant application.
Enter Gates
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An EdWeek analysis of the two billion dollars Gates has spent on education.
The award represents the first major donation to New Haven schools from the nation’s largest philanthropic foundation. The $38 billion foundation has invested $2 billion on U.S. education since 2008, including $700 million on its teacher-quality agenda, according to an analysis by EdWeek. (Click here to see a chart tracking where the money went.)
While the foundation is new for New Haven schools, it isn’t new to its superintendent. As a top adviser to then-Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, Harries designed a Gates-backed effort to create small high schools in New York City. The Gates Foundation backed away from the effort after it faltered nationally; Harries has contended the effort in was successful in New York.
After Harries arrived in New Haven in 2009 to design the city’s nascent school reform effort as an assistant superintendent, the Gates Foundation approached New Haven about working together on a new plan to make professional development more meaningful for teachers.
Gates issued New Haven a planning grant in January of 2013, and invited the district to apply for a full million.
New Haven came up with a plan, to be launched in the fall of 2013.
The plan calls for the creation of three new administrative positions to oversee the program:
• E^3 Program Associate. Salary: $100,000. She/he will help the city’s HR director “organize how to make the work plan come to life.”
• E^3 Program Assistant. Salary: $80,000. This person will “assist with gathering the information necessary to build the systems progressively.”
• Account Clerk. Salary: $47,000. This person will manage the bank account associated with the Gates grant.
The new hires will be overseen by Donna Aiello, the city’s acting HR director, as well as the yet-to-be-hired director of the city’s new “Talent Office,” which is being paid for by the $53 million TIF grant.
The grant will also pay for $10,000 stipends for educators on the “E^3 Team,” which oversees the program, according to the grant application. The group currently consists of five teachers and three administrators. The team members meet monthly with all teacher facilitators and support them along the way.
After New Haven came up with this plan, the Gates Foundation stalled on delivering the money until after Harries had taken office. Harries took over the school system in July. The Gates Foundation didn’t announce the grant until last week. As it awaited word from Gates, New Haven used federal TIF money to get the program going. That included paying each of 64 teachers $1,000 to attend a summer training with the National Academy of Advanced Teacher Education (NAATE).
Of the initial group of 64 teachers, 12 dropped out of the program after the school year started because of other work commitments, according to Justin Boucher (pictured), one of five teachers who designed the E^3 program. The remaining 52 have returned to their schools and set up groups of half a dozen teachers who meet around different topics on which they want support, such as how to implement new standards in math and reading.
The teacher facilitators are receiving a $5,000 stipend to support their work in leading their peers, paid for with federal money. The teachers they are working with are doing so voluntarily.
Several facilitators were on hand Tuesday to share the work they’ve been doing so far.
Tim Shortt, a 2nd-grade teacher at Worthington Hooker School, said he is meeting with seven teachers and helping them adjust to a new K‑2 curriculum brought about by the Common Core State Standards. The group meets for 90 minutes every other week, he said. Teachers also pop in on each other’s classrooms to see certain teaching methods in action, he said.
Gretchen Gurr (pictured at the top of this story) is leading a group at Career High School, where she teaches history. She said her six-person group has started out workshopping problems teachers are facing in class. For example, one teacher was wrestling with a class where kids just weren’t getting along. Gurr and her peers helped craft a behavior management team.
Gurr said the group is a mix of new and veteran teachers. One of the biggest challenges so far has been finding time to meet. Gurr came up with a creative solution: She’s using her stipend to take her teachers out to a late lunch at Mamoun’s Falafel Restaurant, where they discuss their work after school twice a month.
Harries said the Gates Foundation has pushed New Haven to identify time when teachers can meet during the school day. The foundation will offer a consultant to audit how teachers are using their time across all 47 schools, then come up with some sample schedules schools can use next year to incorporate more teacher meeting time.
The labor contract teachers approved last week will make this easier: The new contract, which takes effect July 1, changes teachers’ schedules to include an extra half an hour of time where they could be collaborating.
Meanwhile, Gurr’s group will continue to find times to meet. After first establishing trust, they plan to start visiting each other’s classrooms to offer constructive criticism, she said.
“It’s not evaluative, not assessed,” she said. The goal is for teachers to feel comfortable helping each other and to see the school as a larger teaching community.
“The walls are coming down,” she said.
Gurr, who’s 30, of Hamden, is the kind of teacher New Haven is trying to hold onto. She said she has considered getting a phD, or teaching at the college level, but has stuck with public-school teaching for eight years. She said she enjoys working with teachers and does not want to leave the classroom to become an administrator.
“This is a great avenue for me,” she said. “The incentive to stay is there.”