Bio
UTEC Position: Fieldwork Supervisor
Mentee Supervision: Multiple Subject Fieldwork I and II
Degrees: BA, Liberal Studies from San Francisco State University; MA, Special Education, San Francisco State University
Credentials: Multiple Subject, Mild/Moderate, Exceptional Needs Mild/Moderate (National Board Certification), Administrative Services
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Interview
The Advantage of a Liberal Studies Degree
Question: I noticed that your BA was in Liberal Studies. UTEC just started our Education: Liberal Studies major, which is meant primarily to serve our Multiple Subject students and lets them waive the [state] exams. Is this similar to your Liberal Studies major or was it different?
Maggie: No, it was really a generalist major. It was your classic liberal studies degree. So, humanities. I took a lot of the classics. A lot of literature and philosophy.
Question: When students are grounded in the liberal arts, what are the advantages when they become teachers? What did you find was an advantage?
Maggie: You have a wider view of learning the world and the opportunity for reflection. We’re watching how education is changing, how college education is changing. You know, so many institutions are saying, Well, you don’t have to have a college degree. You don’t have to necessarily go to college anymore. And I’m like, Oh, yes, you do. If you love to learn, you really do. It teaches you on a whole other level. When you’re at a critical developmental stage, ages 18 to 25, it is a time to think critically and deeply and vastly on as many different topics as you possibly can.
Advice for Fieldwork Students
Question: What are some of the most important things for students to remember and practice when they go into the field?
Maggie: You’re going to bomb every day, at least once a day, and that’s your best teacher. Your best teacher is your last mistake. Nothing is perfect. It’s an incredibly difficult job to do. You’re not there to entertain, although it feels like you’re doing five or six live shows a day. And just because things didn’t go well from your perception, doesn’t mean they didn’t go well from a student’s perception. And even when it doesn’t go well, learning is happening for you and for the students. There’re rarely big explosive moments. It’s all made up of these really important small moments of thoughtful planning and reflection. Readjust, plan, reflect, readjust. It’s the endless loop and it’s a really important one.
Question: What are the differences between the first fieldwork experience and the second?
Maggie: I would say in Fieldwork I, you just have to watch all the inner workings of a day. You have to see what happens at the whole school site, from intake to coming into the classroom to classes to learning how to transition from one content area to another. Even if you’re going from one room to another, just watch the big picture and ask every possible question you can about every little thing.
In Fieldwork II, you really have to start paying attention to content and how it’s organized, and the sequence of content and assessing student learning, because that’s the ultimate goal. I don’t mean assessment in terms of testing. I mean you’re assessing everything. How do you keep your information straight about what Maria over here is doing and what Julien over there is doing? Do you have work samples? How are you going to evaluate student learning? How does the mentor that you’re working with evaluate student learning? It’s varied, depending on the grade level and on your style. But you have to have the evidence. You can’t talk about student learning unless you have evidence about their performance.
This is why you really have to know each of your students. You have to know where they’ve started and where they have progressed to. It’s not that big a deal where they are in the continuum of the Common Core state standards. It’s where did they arrive and where did they finish when they are done with you? It’s about month-to-month progress and if they’ve had a successful year, even if a student sitting down the row from them is light years ahead. That’s not the important part. It’s the value of rubrics too, because you share that rubric with the students and say, Okay, here is the highest expectation, this is what this looks like. And here are all the steps in between. If you progress some steps, you’ve been successful.
Question: You have four credentials. Tell me a little bit about your motivation and journey for each of them. What was your path?
Starting Out: General and Special Education
Maggie: I have a number of educators in my family, and my sister was also a teacher. All my sisters-in-law were teachers. My sister, who was ten years older than me, taught special education. So I kind of went that route. I left New Jersey with a special ed credential. But back then in California, you couldn’t get a credential in an undergraduate program. So a lot of my units were not honored and I had to go back and do a California credential. In order to get a specialist credential, you had to do a general ed credential first. So I went and got my general ed credential and started teaching with that, then worked on my specialist credential. I was subject to the whims of interstate credentialing laws. That’s how it unfolded.
I ended up going into a different area in special education. I really enjoyed learning disabilities. My sister worked with the cognitive impaired and my sisters-in-law were all elementary teachers. I found because of my love of reading, that literacy was an area that I really enjoyed learning about. Kids who processed the text differently had all these wonderful gifts that you could see expressed in many different ways throughout the day. But when it came to looking at text, they processed it differently. I found that incredibly interesting. I taught fourth and fifth grade general ed for a while, then I worked as a resource specialist while I worked on my specialist credential. That’s where I really delved into brain differences and how learning-disabled students, particularly with visual processing disorders, processed text.
I have been very blessed my entire career. I worked with an incredible team of people. Not that there weren’t challenges, but I always worked with amazing people. I had principals that were great instructional leaders and developed team work. Now I’m watching these young people at USF and I’m thinking, make your friends, because these are the people that are going to be with you through life. I’m still friends with the people I started teaching with over 30 years ago.
National Board for Professional Teaching Standards
I went on to do my national boards and that was about year thirteen of teaching. At the time, I thought, Well, I’m pretty good at this, but don’t really feel challenged. What am I missing? Do I want to be a principal? The National Board had been around for about 10 or 12 years at that time. It was a real movement. So a couple of colleagues and I did it and it was incredibly rigorous. It was then when I realized, Oh, there is so much depth to teaching. It just goes deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper the longer you’re at it if it’s truly your passion. There are just new ways to reflect. Of course, there are always new things to learn, but it’s reflection that is the most powerful. Reflecting with colleagues and watching yourself and learning how you can improve. So that’s what took me on the national board trail.
Different Pathways
Question: You have an administrator credential as well.
Maggie: It’s a preliminary. I’ve never exercised it. At the end of it, I thought, Oh well I’ll do that at the end of my career. And I did run a program for the school district, the National Board Support Program. But it didn’t require an administrative credential. I was able to do it as a teacher even though I had the credentials. When I left that position, which I loved, I was part of a multi-state grant—Arizona, Washington and some districts in New York. We got a multi-million dollar grant to push for national boards. After I left that program, I thought, okay, this is it. I’m at the last leg of my career. But I begun to fall in love with literacy again because this other movement came along, which was the Reading and Writers Workshop that came out of Columbia University. I thought, Whoa, this is the way to teach in a whole classroom setting, not just specialized. You could have all kinds of learners in this kind of environment and really help everyone move along a continuum. So I went to Columbia one summer and did their teachers reading workshop. Then in the last leg of my career, instead of being a principal, I went back and was a first-grade teacher.
My advice is as a teacher, learn as much as you can, try many different things. This is a varied profession. There are many different things to do now. There are colleagues I have had who have gone on with one grade level or one school for 30 years. It was not who I am. Every 10 to 12 years I needed a new milieu, so to speak.
