From Immokalee to UF: novel online program grants first degrees to teachers in high-poverty schools
When the University of Florida’s College of Education held its commencement ceremony Aug. 9, the graduates included a handful of expert teachers who are already working in some of the most-challenged schools in South Florida.
They are UF’s first class of education specialist degree (Ed.S.) graduates from Teacher Leadership for School Improvement, or TLSI, a groundbreaking distance education program that allows teachers in high-poverty schools in South Florida to hone their classroom skills with the help of professors at UF, hundreds of miles away.
“We are so excited to see this first group of TLSI students graduate,” said UF Assistant Scholar Alyson Adams, who coordinates the program. “The impact they have already had on their schools is amazing. Almost all of them have already assumed leadership roles in their schools and in their educational communities.”
TLSI is a distance education program that encourages teachers to apply their research skills to the problems in their own classrooms, develop their leadership skills, and become advocates for positive change within their own school systems. Studying online, and also with the assistance of a UF “professor-in-residence” embedded in the classroom, the teachers learn to transform their classrooms into more effective learning environments.
A total of 25 students will graduate from TLSI this semester, including 17 master’s degree recipients and eight candidates for the Ed.S., a professional specialist degree in education that goes beyond the master’s level. Of the eight Ed.S. graduates, one teaches in Miami, and the other seven are teaching in Immokalee, home to a large community of migrant farmworker families.
For Alicia Rosales—herself a former migrant from a single-parent family with seven children—the Aug. 9 commencement will be a milestone in a long educational journey. When Rosales was a child in Immokalee, students with Latino names were automatically enrolled in a separate set of courses designed for second-language learners of English—with no testing to determine their actual learning needs.
“Of course, it was a disaster,” she said.
As an adult, Rosales would go on to work for Collier County schools herself, holding various staff positions before becoming an elementary school teacher. She says the research skills she picked up as a TLSI student have helped her become a better advocate for her students. When her school proposed that courses be rescheduled in a way that cut into her students’ time for literacy instruction, she conducted research to help her make the case against the change.
“This class taught me that if we don’t speak up for social injustices against our children, who will?” Rosales said.
Immokalee High School reading coach Shirley Rainwaters, in her TLSI studies, learned to use ethnography—a method that turns students into amateur anthropologists, studying their own communities—to find out what her students knew about the world, and wanted to know. She used that information to build a social studies curriculum around her students’ needs. Rainwaters, who chose TLSI because the nearest university is 35 miles from her home, said she enjoyed the program’s combination of online instruction and face-to-face learning with a professor-in-residence.
“I believe the online format leads to richer conversations among the students in the class because you give more thought to a written response than a verbal one,” she said. “The professor-in-residence builds community among teachers from different schools.”
Even with the convenience of the online format, juggling a schoolteacher’s responsibilities with the demands of graduate school can be tough. Like most education majors, the TLSI students found that it helped to keep their eye on the end result of their efforts—improving the lives of students.
“Each day, I greet the familiar faces of parents bringing their precious children to school, humbly respecting the sacrifices they have made in order for their children to occupy a seat in my classroom,” said Donna McAvoy, who teaches at Lake Trafford Elementary, which has the largest percentage of immigrant students of any school east of the Mississippi River.
“Their investment in their children’s future strengthens my resolve on a daily basis,” she said.
For more information on TLSI, contact Alyson Adams, at UF’s Lastinger Center for Learning, at 352-392-0726 ext. 295.
