Interview with Gloria Neubert

Gloria A. Neubert graduated from Towson State College in 1967 with a bachelor's degree in English with secondary education preparation. Dr.

Neubert taught in the Baltimore County Public Schools for five years. She came to Towson University in 1972 as a faculty member in the Department of Secondary Education, where she served

until her retirement in 2012. These are her reflections. Dr. Neubert, thank you for sharing your thoughts about your teacher

preparation here at Towson University and your subsequent career in education. My pleasure. We're trying to enrich our understanding of the evolution

of teacher education across time, and this certainly will be a wonderful addition to that story. I guess a good place to begin is the beginning. So we would love for you to share with us your early social

context, where you grew up, what you were thinking about in terms of possible career choices, the point at which you thought maybe you might want to become a teacher, and your choice of Towson University.

Well, I grew up in Baltimore. I am a Marylander all my life, by choice, eventually. Baltimore City is where I grew up. It was suburban Baltimore City.

And for twelve years I went to private Catholic school. So for twelve years I was in Catholic school. When I thought about a teacher, probably the moment I thought about what am I going to do when

I grow up. You know, it was the stereotype of having the stuffed animals and the dolls lined up and my little chalkboard and being a teacher. When I got to high school, you know, in those

days, girls' choices were very limited. It was in the early '60s and so teacher, nurse, and the new one was in the science field, lab technician. Well, I had no desire to be in hospitals and so it never

occurred to me to be anything else other than a teacher. I loved my teachers and that's what I wanted to be. So...

So you chose Towson. Was... Well, that was an interesting... That was interesting because I had won a scholarship to Notre Dame of Maryland since my parents would be paying for me to go to school.

But I really did plead with them and I said I really don't want any more private school. Teacher education at Towson. That's the place to be. And so I was going to get tuition waiver, two years,

I would have to teach in Maryland. But other than fees and transportation and such, Towson was the place I wanted to go. I had friends who were coming here also to become teachers.

And so with my parents' total permission and blessing, I applied and, yeah, came here. I've been associated with Towson for a very long time, actually since 1963. Undergraduate work, graduate

work, because my master's in education is from Towson also. And then I finished my master's in 1972 in the summer and then started as a faculty member in September of 1972. So starting back in 1963, there hasn't been a time that I

haven't been associated with Towson with the exception of my retirement this year. So it's been quite a long and happy relationship.

Yes. Well, let's go back to 1963 when you arrived on campus. Are you thinking at that point in terms of being an English teacher?

Yeah, well, in high school I really preferred math as opposed to English. I was secretary of the math club and I'm very proud of that. And I had the most marvelous math teachers and went through

all higher math, including calculus, which was unusual in those days for an all-girls school to even offer calculus. And so when I went to my guidance counselor in high school to talk about what I was going to do, et cetera, I was

told that girls don't go into math. Really? And this was 1967. And so I went into English, my second love. It wasn't until I was a graduate student that I really did get to

pursue any kind of math, statistics and non-parametric statistics and things of that nature. So I really wanted to be a math teacher, but that's... My hand was slapped.

And so when I came to Towson, I signed up to be an English major and honestly, I enjoyed my English classes. I didn't do as well, I don't think, as I would have if I had taken the math major, but, history, History.

Yes. So 1963 here was a very different place. If you... I was a commuter, as most of the students were. If you didn't get to park by the boiler room, that was just a

terrible day for you. You had to park.... You had to park in what was the Linthicum lot and that was quite a trek.

So you tried to get here before the 8:00 time so that you could park right by the boiler room. Because the student center is where Newell is now. That's where the student center was.

And that's where we commuters lived and socialized and met future spouses and, you know, whatever. It was the center of our lives, playing pinochle too. It was another way that we got through.

Tell me a little bit about your education courses. What do you recall about those? Were they mostly theory, practice, a combination of the two?

Well, remember, I was an English major. Being secondary, I was an English major, so I spent a significant amount of time in the liberal arts program. In terms of my secondary education, I don't remember

terribly much about it. My advisor was not in education. For example, my advisor was Vernon Wanty, who was in communications, et cetera.

Dr. Wanty went on to be president of the Community College and one of the things that I remember so clearly is I would go to him faithfully every semester because we were required to do that.

I don't think you couldn't register, as you can't today if you don't go to your major advisor or to your advisor. But in those days, as a good rule-following Catholic girl, when you're told to go every semester to your advisor, you go

every semester to your advisor, as I did. And Vernon Wanty used to compare me all the time to his daughter who was also going through college at some very expensive place out of state.

And he would say, well, you know, you only got a B and such and such. You know, my daughter got an A in it. And so I did indeed feel admonished about that when I

would... And I loved him dearly. Don't misunderstand. I loved him dearly, but he was taking me to task if I

wasn't doing as well as he thought I should be doing. So I remember Dr. Wanty very well. As a freshman, one of the courses that I remember most of all, and here's a bit of what goes around comes around, is Fundamentals of

Speech 101. I had Dr. Richard Gillespie, who as we know is the husband of our current president, Maravene Loeshke.

And Dick Gillespie at that point was just beginning the drama department, but he was still teaching freshman 101 fundamentals of speech. It was the first A I ever got in college and he was tough.

And I remember that as a turning point for me in thinking to myself, if Dr. Gillespie thinks that I can give speeches and he is such a vanguard in what he's doing, then, you know, I think I might be able to do this.

I think I might be able to teach because I would have to speak, you know. That was an important point for a freshman coming from private school into a public environment and knowing that I had gotten that stamp of approval from Dr. Gillespie.

I also remember Don Craver in the English department who was phenomenal in his teaching. I also had him as a graduate student. He taught me to love literature because he loved it.

Mary Catherine Kahl, who taught history, her anecdotes that she knew about... I mean, I was mesmerized by her anecdotes and I think I carried over from the Dick Gillespies of being strict, high standards,

Mary Catherine Kahl, Don Craver being passionate about their subject. I think that carried that over into my own sense of teaching and what teaching should be, at least in the secondary level,

which was all I knew. My education courses. We had to take a course in guidance, which I thought was very interesting, that we had...

I took that with Mr. Ray, had to take a course in guidance. It was interesting, but as I reflect, I realized that it taught me to look at individual students and the baggage they

often came with. Another course I remember very well as an undergraduate is the reading course that I took. It wasn't until I was thinking about the questions you had

given me, Dr. Blair, that I thought of this reading course. Because it, I mean, back in the '60s, we secondary folks had to, English majors had to take a reading course. I'm not sure if everyone had to, but the English majors had to.

And Mr. Abernathy was really an elementary person, but he gave me insights into how to develop background with youngsters. I mean, what goes for elementary also goes for secondary.

Several years later, I had among my student teachers a student teacher who came in and said, oh, Miss Neubert, I'm so pleased to meet you because we use your unit plan. And I said, excuse me.

She said, Oh yes, Dr. Abernathy gives out your unit plan as a model. Well, I was thrilled. Of course. What a compliment.

I wish he would have told me he was just.. But I was thrilled about that. But the interesting thing about my education program here was that I did not have an advisor in education.

If I did, I don't recall. I remember only the one advisor that I had and more interesting to me, I was getting ready to register as a second semester junior and I needed to take some education courses and I'd been

following what I needed to take and it seemed to me that the I had taken what I needed and it was time for me to student teach. Now, mind you, second semester junior year and I...

Seems a bit premature. Seems a bit, well, I walked into Stevens Hall where the college, well, the education department was, and I said to the secretary, hi, I'm so and so and I've been following and I think I should student teach because that's

what's next on my agenda. And she said, OK, fine. And she just signed me up for student teaching in the second semester of my junior year.

So off I went and did my student teaching. But mind you, then I had an entire senior year to come back and it was only then that I took some methods classes. And by that time, of course, I knew it all, and I was

polite in the courses, but... But you'd been there. I thought, I've been there, and I don't know about that. But that was very different than the program that I then became

an educator of and and dispensed to my students. But somehow I survived the experience. Well, tell us more about the student teaching experience. Where did that occur, you were in one school the whole

time? One school. And two different grade levels or... Well, it was Parkville Junior High school. OK.

And so, we had not gone into the middle school program yet. We were junior high school and that was seven, eight, nine, and and I had seventh graders and eighth graders. I had the gifted and... We would call the gifted and talented

today, but it was 8-1, and then I had 7-16, and in those days one was your top and it was based on achievement. So 7-16 was what they called basic education. Many of those students should have been, or today would have

been in some special education inclusion classes. But in those days, I mean, the only students in special ed were the students who were not educable in the sense of a minimum 70 IQ.

So it was quite a change of personality to go from 8-1 to 7-16. It was also the first year that English and Social studies was no longer core, where they taught English and social

studies as a humanities approach and it was called core. And my cooperating teacher, we called them cooperating teachers, not mentor teachers. She had been teaching for decades.

And so I still was teaching a bit of core, which, as I reflect on it, gave me wonderful insights into when I teach my English. I cannot divorce my English from the history, the geography, the

civics component of that piece that I'm teaching. It's probably the forerunner of developing a student's background of experience. But I didn't know what to label it in those days.

But I knew that that was an important part of what we were about. I hated student teaching. Oh dear.

Everyone was delightful. My mentor teacher was fabulous. The people at Parkville were fabulous. My supervisor, Gwen O'Neill from Towson was wonderful.

It was all very positive. But it wasn't my classroom and my way of doing it. And being the ENTJ control freak that I am, I had to do it someone else's way.

And I could not wait to get my own classroom. So mind you, I had to go back for a whole year... Yes, you did. ...before I could have my own classroom, right?

So senior year. Well, it sounds to me from what you've said before that you were feeling fairly confident. I felt very confident.

Not cocky, but I felt confident. And that's because I was well nurtured by a wonderful master teacher. She knew about teenagers. She liked teenagers.

And, mind you, I had never been to public school in my life. And so this was a whole new world for me. And I watched her relate to these youngsters, probably to the 7-16...

She probably spent more time with the 7-16 youngsters. She would stop... It didn't look like it was deliberate, but I'm sure it was, five minutes before the end of the period.

So she could just tell them to get their books ready and she would go around and talk with them about their lives. And that was a big message to me. At first I thought, why is she doing this?

And then I realized these youngsters need to talk about their lives and they need to develop that interpersonal... And she had wonderful, wonderful chemistry with them. The 8-1s were wonderful too, in their own way.

But you know, they could do it all and they didn't need that personal attention that the 7-16 students did. When the 7-16 youngsters got it, they attributed it to that teacher.

You did this for me, and she used to say, we worked together and did it. You did this for me. It was a whole different, whole different cognitive interaction that was going on.

So I got the reputation from my writeups that I was good with basic education youngsters. Oh. So I think that was one of the reasons that when I started teaching, my first teaching assignment was at Perry Hall

Junior High School. And it was really a wonderful experience because Perry Hall Junior High School, when I started there, it was the first year as Perry Hall Junior High School.

That school had originally been designed to be a junior high school, but they needed the... It was originally designed to be a Senior High School, but they needed the junior high school so badly that they started as a Senior High.

As soon as the Senior High was built, it became the junior high, and so it was an entirely new faculty. So we were going in as a new school. There were no cliques. No one,

few people knew one another. In my department, four of us were first year teachers in the English department at Perry Hall. We had a veteran who was the department chair.

She had come from another, I think North Point Junior High School. But we were all new in the department. Some had taught for decades.

And as I said then, there were several of us who were first year teachers, all from Towson. And that was a wonderful way to begin, because I and the other novices, we didn't feel like we were the

new kid on the block. We were all in a new school together. So it was just a wonderful situation. You weren't alone.

We were not alone. And the other wonderful thing about it was it was the first year that the new English curriculum came out. As a result, we learned the curriculum together, and

Baltimore County was very sincere about, we're going to do it this way, which was fine for a novice, but the beauty of it was every one of the units was written to be taught inductively, and so I thought that was the only way to teach.

I didn't know there was another way, and I have carried that over to my own writings and to my own teaching In the classroom. I was taught you don't tell the students an answer, you ask them

questions and lead them to make the generalization. And I was teaching them to think as well as to master the curriculum. And I owe that to Baltimore County's curriculum guides,

truly. So I felt very supported in my beginning years. New curriculum very carefully laid out for me. Now, over time I learned to tweak it and make it my own...

Of course. Buut I worked, but I had, you see, I had coaching. I had coaching from that curriculum guide as well as a very sharp department chair.

And that was... That's what made it such a comfortable first year. I don't remember having a difficult first year or second year or whatever.

And how long did you stay there? I was there five years. During that time, I had four student teachers. During my second year...

Now, you're not supposed to have a student teacher until you are tenured. But as it turned out, my department chair was asked to take a student teacher and she said, I don't have enough

classes, but here's what we're going to do. She said, I will be the teacher of student... The cooperating teacher of record.

But I'd like the student teacher to be your student teacher. I thought, OK. I didn't know that... But once again, I mean, that is a testimony to her confidence in you.

Well, yes, I suppose. Well, yes, I suppose it was. I don't think she was just handing her off to me. I think she felt I could do it. And then so I had her during my

second year. I had another during my third year and another during my fourth year and another during my fifth year. Of those four student teachers, three of them were hired at

Perry Hall Junior High. My heavens. So I was teased often - once Neubert trained them, they couldn't survive anywhere else.

We had to hire them here. Two of those folks, one of those folks went on to get her PhD, another one went on to be a department chair, and another dropped out of teaching entirely.

And I really don't know what happened to the fourth, but two out of four isn't bad, two out of four isn't bad. And I loved teaching at Perry Hall Junior High School. Loved it. But...

In my fifth year, in my fifth year, Dr. Margaret Kiley, who was supervising, had supervised two of my student teachers, said to me... Doctor Kiley was an interesting person because she would come

early. If she were to observe second period with my mentor, with my student teacher, she would come early. And I just assumed that she was an early bird, but I think it

was intentional. She would come early and come in when I was teaching, which was fine. I didn't mind that.

So she told me after, oh, I'm trying to remember if, let's see, I guess it was probably a February or March. And she said, we have a new position opening at Towson University in the secondary department.

She said, the State Department has mandated that all secondary teachers will have a reading class and we need someone to teach the reading class. Well, I had had Mr.

Abernathy for reading. That's all the experience I had. And she said, why don't you apply? I said, oh, Doctor Kiley, I don't...

I don't think I could do that. She said, I think you could. I've seen you work with these kids. I said, But working with them and teaching is a whole different

thing. And so I thought, I'm going to try it. I'm going to try it. So I sent my application in and Dr. Michael Jessup was chair

of the department and invited me in for an interview. Very different than the way we hire faculty today. I was invited in for an interview. I had a conference with him, and then I was taken to lunch by

several members of the department. And the deal was, we'd like to hire you with the understanding, you have the practice, with the understanding that you will go somewhere, as it turned out, University of Maryland, and get

your PhD in reading. You will teach for us during that time and go to school. So, Gloria, you had already completed a master's degree at that point.

I had a master's in secondary education. And in those days it was a wonderful master's because it was half English and half additional education. But they were not methods classes, they were research

classes. They were, and I need to go back a bit because when I was a senior here in my undergraduate work, there was a grant that the Department of Education had for training seniors who were going

into education to become educational researchers. There were twenty of us, I believe, and information was sent out. I don't know what the requirements were, to whom they

sent this information, but I remember reading and thinking, oh, I can do statistics and I can do research design. And so that kind of fed into my math interests. And so I applied.

It was a stipend program. We got all of, like, $70 a semester for being in this program. And during our second semester senior year and the summer

afterward, this was in conjunction with Hopkins University. So half of the instructors were out of the psychology department and education department here.

Half of them are from Hopkins. And we learned how to do educational research. We learned how to read it. We learned how to do it.

Now, in those days it was totally quantitative research. So we did that and I did my own research project and we got graduate credit in the summertime. But then I came back during my first year of teaching to start

the master's in education. And that was half English and half really theoretical. You know, what's... I remember taking a course in current theories and applications and that sort of thing.

So yes, I had a master's degree. I said, I really need to get some reading courses if I'm going to start teaching for you in the fall. So Dr. Joseph Gutkosca was teaching a couple of graduate

reading courses in the summer. So that summer, I took two courses with him and he mentored me. He absolutely mentored me.

I remember him saying to me now, Gloria, one day you'll be teaching these graduate courses. And I thought, oh, I don't think so. I really don't think so.

It was a difficult decision for me to leave Perry Hall and Baltimore County. I was in line to become a department chair and I remember calling the supervisor of English and I said, I have this

job offer from Towson University, and I said, but if you have something to offer me for the fall I will stay. And she said, we have no one leaving, Gloria, as a department chair.

So I took a pay cut and said, I think I'm going to try. And that's the rest of the story. So for 40 years I've been at Towson. I actually did resign and come

back because I had two children in 15 months. In that early career, before you took time off to have your daughters, what kinds of things were they asking you to do? Was it just primarily teaching reading courses?

No, actually I was teaching tests and measurements. One of the secondary department members had become ill at the last minute. They need someone to teach tests and measurements.

And Dr. Jessup, department chair, said, with your background, you should be able to teach this. And I loved teaching it. So I was teaching tests and measurements and reading, and

then eventually when Manny Velder retired, I took over English methods. So I was teaching reading English methods and tests and measurements and supervising student teachers.

Since I don't think there were, in 40 years, I think there may have been one year that I did not supervise student teachers. And I really kind of insisted on that. I felt it was so important to be out there and see the fruits of

my labor and what was happening and what was current. And so I would say 38 or 39 years out of the 40, I did supervise student teachers. Some years it was one or two, sometimes it was four or five.

But I was always out in the schools. And I think that is so important. I don't think that any teacher educator should be just on campus. At least every other year

they need to be out in the schools. See what's going on. So to be connected. That's right.

And, you see, it also provided me with stories to bring back to my classes. I would see something that day. And I said, let me tell you about what I saw today, the

good, the bad and the ugly. Let me tell you. Let me tell you what I heard is happening. So I appeared to be current even though I had not literally

taught in the public school. Although I must add, during one of my sabbaticals, I went back to teach eighth graders and I took over for Sally McNelis, who was a friend of mine at Golden Ring.

And I took over for two weeks and taught her schedule for two weeks. So it was like being a student teacher again. And it was a very humbling experience, but a sensitizing

experience for what our student teachers were going through. It was a very diverse school and it gave me an opportunity to work with youngsters who had come from very disadvantaged backgrounds,

and, again, added to what I could bring back to the campus that importance of staying current. And probably a different audience or student body than you had at Perry Hall when you were teaching yourself.

Now, when I was at Perry Hall, Perry Hall in those days was a very upper middle class community. However, because we had the boys' training school within our district, any youngsters who were put in foster care were put

into the Perry Hall community. And I taught youngsters who had come out of those juvenile institutions for a while. And that was an eye-opener. I'm sure, and useful to have when

you were working with teacher candidates yourself. One year I had 7-14, all boys. Oh my heavens. All boys. That was interesting.

I was called during the summer by the vice principal and he said, I thought I should let you know. And it was also the same year that I had a seven-period day, which was illegal,

but would you please do this for us? Good grief. That was OK. So you took some time off.

You had two daughters. Well, I took three years off of full time work, but even during those three years I did part time. Oh, you did? Yes, I drove up to Northeast Maryland

and taught extension courses up there. Before TLN, I was teaching up at in Harford, Northeast Maryland. The precursorto TLN. Yes, the reading course for teachers who... They were currently teaching, but they needed it for their

recertification. Well, and reading was sort of becoming or was front and center at that point. So that we were trying probably then to catch up with teachers

who were already in the fields. That's right. And by that time, not just one but two courses were then mandated by the state. So we were doing double duty.

Yeah. When you returned, you were involved in something new to Towson, I think, with the Maryland Writing Project. Would you tell us a little bit about that?

You were there at the beginning, Co-director, and tell us a little bit about that program. Well, it all began with a meeting that the current president Hoke Smith had.

He called together a group of us. I'm not sure how we were nominated to attend this meeting, but it was the beginning of "grants" being important to Towson University.

And it was really just a meeting whereby people from various departments across campus had an opportunity to brainstorm, you know, where would we go for grants, what might they look like, et cetera.

And to be honest with you, I didn't feel I had very much to offer, the word... The concept was new to me. At the end of that meeting, Hoke said to me, Hoke Smith said to

me, I think you should meet my wife. And his wife was Barbara Walvoord, who was teaching at Loyola. And he said, I think you two have a lot in common.

And she has this idea about a national, the National Writing Project, which, again, had never heard of it. So we did meet and the Dean recommended we bring in someone from the school system and that person turned out to be Dr.

Charlie Allen from Baltimore City. And Barbara shared this concept. I think that's how it came down, or Charlie shared the concept. It was not I, it was one of them.

And so we said, well, let's go for it. Let's see if we can't get a chapter of the National Writing Project here at Towson. And so we pursued it, and Barbara had some experience.

She wrote the grant. We got it. Charlie and Barbara and I looked at each other and said, OK, now what are we doing?

We have this. Originally, financially, it was housed at Loyola, but after a couple of years, it was brought totally over here at Towson. Jim Gray, who was director of the National Writing Project,

came during a fall, a spring semester, and he spent two days with us just telling us how it worked, and that summer... And we advertised, and so that summer we started our first summer institute.

And that's where teachers bring their ideas about success they've had in writing. And they share that with the cohort, and they learn how to give presentations on what they have done in the classroom.

And they had to.... And we were really forerunners here with authentic assessment. They had to show the work of their students and the success

that their lesson plan resulted in. And then that presentation was critiqued according to some specifications on what a good presentation was. So that was the beginning of the Maryland Writing Project.

And that first group was, they were outstanding teachers. They were the stars from around the state and that was six graduate credit hours. We were five weeks, four days a week.

Intense in that work. Fabulous project, fabulous project. I direct... After a while, Barbara had to leave and Charlie had to leave.

So I ended up directing and I did that for five years. During that time, the teacher consultants and I put out other arms of the project and two of them are really my babies. The first was the student writers workshop.

By that time my girls were in elementary school and now being totally immersed in writing as I had been in reading. Flip sides of a coin. I did not believe my girls were getting the kind of writing

instruction and writing instruction time that they should have, nor was I seeing it out in the schools. And so I put together this idea of a student writers workshop where here at Towson in the summertime, there would be a

week-long writers workshop for first graders through twelfth graders who like to write. And they would be taught by our teacher consultants in a workshop fashion, giving them an opportunity to write and get

their work critiqued, et cetera. As it turned out, that became quite a money maker for us and we had to be almost self-supporting. So that was very helpful.

And the other was the Research Institute. Probably three years into our project, qualitative research started to be in the limelight. Not just quantitative, but teachers and college folks who

were saying, research doesn't have to always be numbers involved, it can be qualitative. So I quick learned qualitative research. I studied with the Dixie Goswamis of the world and

learned all about how to triangulate data and key informants and all of that. We had several workshops here by national figures who knew how to do this kind of research.

And then we started having our own where teachers were invited to sign up. There was a three credit course and two semesters. So three credits, three credits.

And they did their own classroom research and we published some of that. We published our own booklets of that and did conferences, and then after five years, I said, enough's enough.

I don't want to deal with the budget and the administration and all of that. I'm a visionary. I'd like to develop and then give it off to someone

else. It sounds like you gave it all of your best ideas. It was time. It was time for me to move on.

And then at that point, I suppose you're sort of maintaining. I think so. But they went through some very lean times because education

went through some very lean times and other directors who were micromanagers and details people. And I'm not that kind of person. They stepped in and guided it and took it to the

reputation that it maintained until its demise this past year. So... So what's in your next chapter? Well, the last chapter was neuroscience.

And I, because of a personal health issue with my husband, just became enthralled with what was happening in the brain. And so I spent the last probably ten years studying neuroeducation, how what's happening in the brain can

influence teaching. So that's where I ended my career when I retired in July. And like others who have gone before me, I needed to do it cold turkey.

And so just two weeks ago, I loaded my trunk up with 19, no, 24 three-inch binders, three-ring binders, and took them to the dump. And that is the end of the story.

And so I'm... Was that difficult? No. OK, good. No, I, you know, I felt good about what I had done and it was time to move on to another chapter.

Let me go back and talk a little bit about how your take and your implementation of teacher preparation changed over time and how that appeared at the end of your career. And I want to preface this by noting that you have earned

virtually every award that I'm aware of for teaching related to education. You received the President's Award, You received the International Reading Association's Outstanding

Teacher Award and the Board of Regents Faculty Award for excellence in teaching. This suggests that not only do you do it well, but you know how to to prepare others to do it well as well.

Could you tell us a little bit about what that looked like by the end of your career? Do you want to know how it looked in our department or how I did it?

Well, I didn't realize that there was a difference. And of course, everything has an individual take. I understand that. The way I would approach teaching a course

in reading would certainly have similar elements to the way you would do it, but it would be individual. My statement was not a criticism of what the department was doing. Right.

But I do believe we still have a long way to go. The way it's done now is certainly different than the way I experienced it. There's no doubt about it.

We now require every one of our tracked students, because they're still majors in liberal arts, but they're in the secondary track, to meet with us every semester. We start them out in their sophomore year with a series of

courses. In the junior year we got them out into the schools to observe. I never did that. We educate them in terms of special needs populations.

I had no education in that respect. We have an entire professional year and that is their senior year, unlike my experience. And so I think we really try to gradually integrate them into

the school system and we truly do try to hold their hands and then eventually let go as opposed to... I was dumped into the ten feet of water, sink or swim. Although, again, very good supervision from my cooperating

teacher and supervisor. What do we know now about what works and doesn't work? What we know is how important appropriate coaching is, and we still have a long way to go with this.

And what does that mean? Appropriate coaching? Coaching means we model for our students and then we gradually let them try it under protected practice and eventually to

practice it in the real world of schools, still with someone there who is helping to mold what they're doing. Now, here we still have some problems. Change in the public schools is very slow, very slow.

What we know from the research is not necessarily being done consistently out in the school system. We need to bring every mentor teacher either to this campus or somewhere and share with them what we know has been proven in

schools that can be effective and ask those mentor teachers if they're not doing that or not that way, would they at least try it and allow the students teachers, interns, to try it that way?

What happens too often is we teach them in our protected practice on campus, how to write a lesson plan, let's say inductively. We know from the research how effective it is.

We know it's interactive. We know it's X, Y, and Z. We've read the research. We know the theory that supports it.

We know the neuroscience that supports it. They go out into the school and what they see is a mentor teacher who gives the answers, who gives the generalization, as opposed to questioning. That needs to be

improved because what happens too often, and we know this from research also, is that the interns abandoned what we have taught them and go to what they see out in the schools. We also need to make sure that every single one of the teacher

educators are out in the schools. Again, not necessarily every semester, because we have research, we have other research we have to do, and we have writing we have to do, but on a regular basis, at least every

other year so that they, the teacher educators, will take what they know from theory and research and put it into a realistic context. It isn't just valid, it's not just reliable, but it's usable

also. How do you frame it within the confines of a practicing teacher and a practicing school system? So we need both.

We need both the mentors to be educated about the theory and research, and we need the teacher educators to be educated about the practicalities and the usabilities and the constraints. We also need to work very deliberately with curriculum

writers in the schools, and I don't see a great deal of that happening. The individual systems write their own curriculum and then of course our interns are expected to teach that curriculum and

very often through the pedagogy established within that curriculum. Most curriculums are well- done in terms of their content, but it's the pedagogy that may not be the most appropriate as

we know it in terms of research and theory. So we need much more of that communication, that interaction. And that really is a time element.

I mean, how do we... We have professional development schools and ideally that's what they're to do, but how in the world do you get the teachers released from teaching, the teacher educators to have time to be out there, and them to work together?

That's the big question. How do we meld that so that those experiences can happen? But until we do that, it's going to be same old, same old, and

things are not going to change. I have taught reading for 40 years. When I finish with my students in the two reading courses, they are gung-ho about using reading and writing as learning

processes. Do they do it when they get out there? Not unless the mentor teacher does it. It's abandoned.

So how about if... Can I give you my advice for... Oh, please do. That might be the next... My advice for anyone who's going into teaching is you have to

like teenagers, and I'm talking my field of secondary. You have to like them. You don't have to love them. That's their parents' job.

You have to like them. If you don't like teenagers with all of their idiosyncrasies and their their joyousness and their struggles, don't go into teaching. You just have to love it.

You have to realize that you are making, unfortunately, a sometimes seven-day-a-week commitment. Not every week, but many weeks. You are not going to be rich.

You will live a good life. You will have a salary that is a good salary. You will have a pension if it continues, but you will not be rich.

You must understand that if you are going to continue to be a good teacher, you have to be a lifelong learner. You don't stop once you have the master's or the 30 beyond. You must get the journals of your content and you must read

them. And you must continue to say, maybe I could try doing this, as opposed to, well, I've done it this way all along. I'm going to continue to do it this way.

That's fine if it's working, but if it's not, if you have to search for another way to do it If you are not getting to Karen in the second row, what's her story and what's out there that can help me?

Lifelong learners. Not being satisfied, content. That's it. I have nothing more to tell you. Would you recommend it?

Let me check. Yes. Have we forgotten any... I don't think so.

Would I recommend it? Absolutely. There was never a day in 45 years, whether I was teaching 7-16, 8-1, or graduate students on a neuroscience course, there was never a day that I didn't want to go in and teach.

There was never a day that I left not enjoying what I was doing, not always being satisfied with the way I did it, and saying to myself, how can I do that differently? But there was never a day. Gratifying?

Oh, absolutely, absolutely gratifying. Thank you. You're welcome. My pleasure.