 Hands-on training in special needs Meeting benchmarks requires educator to survive tons of work outside school hours
By Nancy Mitchell News Staff Writer
When alternative teacher Stephanie Leija took her tentative first steps in the classroom at the beginning of the school year, her students weren't the only ones watching her closely.
Leija's instructor, the one charged with transforming the former tutor into a teacher, sat in the back of the classroom at Wheat Ridge Middle School and scribbled notes as Leija worked through a lesson.
"All I can say is, you are a natural," veteran teacher Stephanie Cavallaro wrote on Sept. 14. "I was impressed with how easily you interacted with your students and got them on task."
These days, Cavallaro's gentle feedback has given way to tougher questions about Leija's teaching abilities.
Can she apply sound disciplinary practices in the classroom?
What about employing a wide range of teaching techniques to meet individual student needs?
Is she able to use technology to advance student achievement?
Those are just three of the 30 benchmarks Leija must demonstrate this year if she is to successfully complete her alternative teaching program.
Next school year, in the second and final year of her program, she must demonstrate 15 more. Together, the 45 benchmarks make up Colorado's new performance standards for teachers.
In addition, by the end of this school year, Leija must pass two state teacher tests in her content area, teaching English as a second language.
She must attend three-hour "how to be a teacher" classes every Monday night throughout the school year.
She must complete a written plan, called a teacher work sample, detailing how she would teach subject matter over several weeks and documenting how each piece would fulfill state standards.
She must spend 100 hours either being observed or consulting with her mentor Connie Kowal, with instructor Cavallaro and with her school principal.
Leija, 27, who worked in publishing before becoming an Americorps tutor, is steadily ticking off those requirements. But it hasn't been easy.
"It's like those movies where there are pits with alligators in them and they throw you in," she said, half-jokingly, of her first year in the classroom. "You either tame them or you die."
Not all alternative teachers fare as well.
At her school, Wheat Ridge Middle, Principal Anne Applewhite hired Leija and two other alternative teachers for the current school year.
The other two hires came shortly before the first day of school as Applewhite struggled to find teachers.
Now, as the school year winds down, Leija is the only one of the three who has not resigned.
"It just didn't work out for them," Applewhite said diplomatically.
"Stephanie has a passion for teaching," she added. "I think the others really gave it their best effort but they learned it really wasn't what they wanted to do."
In Colorado, the growing number of people like Leija who want to teach without completing a traditional college preparation program have two on-the-job training options.
One is the alternative teacher licensure program, a yearlong program shaped largely by the hiring school district.
The second option is the two-year route Leija chose, the more structured Teacher-in-Residence program or TiR.
In 1991, only 21 candidates sought alternative licensure. This year, 673 are enrolled in alternative teaching programs statewide.
The largest single program is the one Leija joined, the Greater Metropolitan Denver TiR program. Run by the Metropolitan State College of Denver, it annually prepares more than 200 TiR teachers for six metro school districts, including Denver Public Schools and Jefferson County.
A study of the metro program's first year, 2000-2001, showed TiR participants have an average age of 34 and come from careers as varied as bartender, social worker and lawyer.
The study also found teaching is not for everyone. That year, 15 percent of participants dropped out of the program.
Cavallaro, Leija's TiR instructor, cited "disillusionment" or the reality of today's classroom, as a key reason why some drop out. The study backed her up.
"They think they're going to get these wide-eyed kids who sit quietly and say, 'Oh, tell me more,' " she said. "I don't know where those kids exist."
Cavallaro began her TiR class last fall with Leija and 31 other brand-new teachers in Jefferson County and Sheridan school districts. To date, three have dropped out.
She counts two more as struggling to meet the program requirements. She estimates another two or three may drop out over the summer months.
But Leija will stick it out, Cavallaro predicts.
"She's a good teacher," she said. "She's hard but the kids like her. I think kids can see through whether you care or don't care."
Some days, like some of her students, Leija longs for summer.
"42 more days, 42 more days," she chanted recently in her empty classroom.
She will miss her students, even the talkative ones. But she is tired.
In her first semester, on top of teaching, taking TiR classes and cramming for her two teacher tests, she took two night classes in teaching English as a second language.
This semester, she's taking only one ESL night class as she works toward her master's degree. Studying for her teacher tests also is out of the way -- she passed both tests on her first try.
But Leija now is busy completing her TiR program requirements by the April 22 deadline and wrapping up a major ESL research project for her class.
Also, Leija just finished translating her first Colorado Student Assessment Program or CSAP for her students. The experience did not endear her to the test.
One student, who emigrated from Bosnia last summer, was so fearful that he would fail the test that he repeatedly pleaded with Leija, "Only six months (in the United States), miss, only six months."
She tried to ease his fears. But he was absent all three days the test was given.
"I'm ready for a break," Leija said. "It's been a pretty good year but there's just been so much going on."
Cavallaro, her TiR teacher, attributes Leija's success partly to her experience. Unlike some other TiR candidates, Leija knew exactly what she was getting into.
Two years ago, after a stint as an Americorps tutor, Leija joined the staff at Wheat Ridge Middle as a classroom tutor. Public schools circa 2001 came as no surprise.
"I knew what needed to be done," Leija said. "I knew you can't just spew out information and the kids absorb it and that's that. You're a counselor, you're a police officer sometimes, you're a hall monitor, a therapist, a social worker."
She also describes herself as determined to make it through TiR. "Bull-headed," in her words.
"I'm going to make it work if it's the last thing I do," she said. "I'm going to be the ESL teacher."
Leija, like Cavallaro, doesn't see on-the-job training as ideal for educators. But she also said she would have been unable to take time off to return to school full-time to earn a traditional degree.
Cavallaro said the TiR program tries to mimic, as much as possible, the requirements of traditional teacher preparation programs.
"The reality is, they are in classroms," she said of alternative teachers. "We're not recruiting. We don't necessarily want our numbers to go up. But they're there anyway. Let's support them and make them good teachers."
Contact Nancy Mitchell at (303) 892-5245 or at mitchelln@RockyMountainNews.com.
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Age: 28 
