Dan Rhoad's Interview with a First Grade Teacher

Duke Ellington Elementary School (pseudonym), where I am completing my student teaching experience, originally opened its doors in 1952 in this quiet coastal California community. The school enrolls 496 kindergarten through fifth graders and is on a traditional calendar year.

To provide a little background, I will outline a few details that help to define the school. Of the 496 enrolled students 92% come from households that qualify for the free or reduced-price meal subsidy. This means that 92% of the students are coming from homes who report making less than $38,203 per year for a family of four. According to the most recently available School Accountability Report Card, 76% of the students are English language learners and 24% are classified as English language proficient students. The ethnicity of the school is composed of 2% African American 4% Asian American/Pacific Islander, 9% White/European American/Other, and 85% Hispanic/Latino. The parents of the children attending the school that have earned a college degree are reported to be 6% while the county average is around 19% and the state average is 30%. The school spends approximately $5,381 per student (including both restricted and unrestricted funds) whereas the district average is $8,303 and the state average is $8,117.

All of this information just helps to provide some context to the school where I am a student teacher and where the teacher I have interviewed has worked for most of his career. Brian (also a pseudonym) has worked at Duke Ellington Elementary School for 22 of his 25 year teaching career. He is highly regarded at the school. His leadership throughout campus was noticeable on the first day I started my student teaching rotation. During his time at the school he has taught every grade offered, from kindergarten through fifth grade. For many years he focused on teaching fourth and fifth grade and loved it, but recently he made the switch back to teaching first grade, which is what he is teaching this year.

When I asked him about his philosophy of teaching he at first seemed a little perplexed, but after a short pause he rephrased the question to himself and began a thoughtful response. Brian explained that in the early grades your focus as a teacher has to be on creating interactive learning for the children. Talking and discussing a subject will not help the children learn. It might provide context for an activity, but there needs to be more hands-on things to engage with. He goes on to explain that the younger kids must experience to topic through multiple mediums: drawing, singing, self-guided learning, small groups, pair-share. "The more hands-on your lesson can be the better," he explained with enthusiasm.

He is fond of a community model classroom that is structured around the notion that all participates in the community have a responsibility to fulfill. If you create a community atmosphere from the first day then you will be more successful in getting your kids to open up and engage with the material you're trying to teach. He continues with his response by talking about the first few days of the year. He explains in detail how important the first week can be for every teacher. That is when you get your kids to understand your perspective about how the classroom will work. It is during that week that the kids are learning what is tolerated and what is not tolerated by their new teacher. "You got to provide them structure during the first week and throughout the year," he said.

I then asked him a question that I have been thinking about since I started this student teaching placement: how do you satisfy the needs of a variety of learners? Duke Ellington Elementary claims to do this with a program they started last year called Universal Access (UA). The administration has been struggling to figure out how to make it happen this year. Brian explains to me that since last year's Language Arts test scores experienced an upward jump, the principle has been more than happy to award all of the credit to the implementation of the UA program, even though many teachers remain skeptical. UA is a language arts pull-out program where children are divided into classes according to their English language testing scores. Brian tells me this is how the school tries to satisfy the needs of a variety of learners: sort them into groups, then begin teaching.

Brian says he sees much more positive results from small-scale techniques like pairing students with another student that can challenge them in a good way. He uses manipulatives and interactive projects as much as possible. He likes story telling with visuals. He encourages the quick finishers to help others that may need assistance. It is good to be flexible and work creatively with your seating chart to form good working groups that can really engage students constructive dialog. Most importantly, Brian tells me, you must create the community from day-one and build on that community each day to help the children understand they have a responsibility to themselves and their peers.

To make all this happen you have to know your students really well. You must know more about them then just their test scores, where they sit and who their parents are. You must be completely committed to understanding them as dynamic individual. He tells me that this is one way he keeps from getting burnt out over the years: he needs to remind himself that each child is different, each year is different and he therefore needs to constantly renew his approach to the kids.

I then worked the conversation into the question I was looking forward to asking: what is the purpose of a public education in the U.S.? Brian smiled when I asked this question. He started to talk about standardized testing and how many changes he has seen over his career. As he talked about his experiences he went through a couple false starts in his response and his hesitation made me think that perhaps teachers don't get asked this question often enough. I enjoyed hearing what he had to say, but I wasn't really expecting that this question would come as such a surprise to him. Brian talked about how he believed teachers in the public education system were preparing children to become productive citizens in our society. He felt he was helping to form them into good community members and he thought each child in some small way benefits from being in his class.

After my conversation with Brian I felt inspired and proud to have found a profession with so much challenge and reward wrapped up into just one day's activities. After having the chance to hear his perspective, I felt like I was able to see his room and the environment he had set-up in a new way: I could see the community he was describing to me. What had seemed like a chaotic first grade class to me the day before our talk seemed a different classroom altogether when I popped in a day later to thank him one more time for the interview. I can see why Brian is well respected at his school and I now better understanding of why he goes out of his way to volunteer his time for extra duties more often than some teachers at the school; he perceives Duke Ellington Elementary as part of his community and he does an amazing job of modeling this lesson for others.