Bio
UTEC Position: Fieldwork Supervisor and Adjunct Professor
Mentee Supervision: Undergraduate Fieldwork I and II
Degrees: BA, Music, Piano from UC Santa Barbara; MA, English, Creative Writing, San Francisco State University
Credentials: Single Subject English, Administrative
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Interview
Inspiration to Become a Teacher
Question: What initially inspired you to become a teacher?
Greg: Oh that’s a very good question. At first I thought that I wanted to be a writer. So in that context, I was actually experimenting with a whole lot of things about who I wanted to be and where I wanted to go. Then somehow in that process I thought, well, maybe I’ll teach. It was really conjectural at that point. So I started out with high school single subject credential program in Southern California. I got my English degree and my teaching credential concurrently. They thought I was looked promising, so they didn’t even give me student teaching years, they just threw me into a classroom. I had ninth and 10th graders, who at that time were tracked. So we had so-called remedial and so-called college prep and then honors.
It was an interesting start. But I ended up finding parts of myself in the act of teaching. Teaching came on me slowly. I would think, I like this, I think I can do this. I think I can be helpful here. I think I’m finding out about me here. So it was good in that way and I grew into it. It wasn’t like some people think, “I want to be a teacher. My mom was a teacher” and this and that. It wasn’t like that for me.
Advice for Fieldwork Students
Question: What are some of the most important things that students should be getting from fieldwork?
Greg: I expect a difference between Fieldwork I and Fieldwork II for a couple of reasons. In Fieldwork I, I tell students, you are learning your methods, you’re getting your degree, you’re doing all those things. All that is wonderful. When you stand in front of a room full of students there, what’s happening to you neurologically? What’s happening to you experientially, emotionally, spiritually, everything else like that? There’s just no replacement for it. You can’t sort of say, let’s talk about it. You actually are now trying to do it, and then you feel all the things. You start to feel all the things in your body that are really formative in terms of shaping. How am I going to be when I’m actually up in front of my own students? This is my room and when I’m actually teaching a lesson, how is this going to go? How am I going to process that? Am I actually the person that can do that? Or can I get there? In my case it took me some time to get there. Some of our students appear to be like they just popped out as teachers and they’re ready to go. And for some it’s obvious that that’s it’s going to be quite a journey if they’re ever going to get there.
When I’m observing the students, I’m looking to see, do you have an approximation of what you hope to accomplish in the time that you’ve got. And what do you do if things don’t go quite the way you expected, like a fire drill pops up or a student has an outburst, or there’s just a moment that’s really exciting that you did not expect
I see sometimes students come in with a, “First I’m going to…then second, third, fourth.” That’s not a lesson plan. That’s an agenda schedule. And that’s great. But I tell them that’s not actually a plan, because a plan is really about, what am I hoping to imprint upon you and why? How does that fit into where I’m trying to go with you and with the whole class, for that matter? And how am I checking that? What do I do if you don’t know what I’m talking about, how am I adjusting? This is live. This is a live thing. A student think, Oh, I am up in front of these students and now I have to do this. I have to do this identity shift. I have to do this reconfiguring of how I see me. Presence can be achieved in so many different ways, but how do you actually energetically fill the space such that the students recognize, oh, there’s an order of business that’s happening in this room right now.
There are practical issues, too. They used to have us do diction classes in our teaching credential program, so that we could be understood and understand. We actually had to do take at least a couple of lessons in voice. To lift up your voice, to understand how am I projecting? Am I actually projecting or am I talking down? Am I just disappearing up there? And that’s basic communication theory. Can I be heard? Can I be seen? Is there a presence that the students can pick up which is almost visceral so they understand, oh, this guy is the teacher. The students are responding energetically to whatever’s the biggest force is in the room. And if the teacher is not it, they’re going to go to the next one.
So in Fieldwork I, students often are just really working on confidence. There is a sort of imposter feeling you get when you’re standing up there and saying, who the hell do I think I am? Then, I’m up here trying to teach something. You know, this is so weird. It’s the flip. They have to go through it. And I think that’s the value of the program, is that they start to go through it. They start to get that thing that happens to them neurologically and experientially. You know, I always talk to them about teacher dreams. I said, once you’ve done this before, you’ll start before the start of each school year to have dreams where your students, the ones you like the least, are all back, and they’re all sitting there in your class together, and you’ve shown up and you forgot your lesson plan and you maybe forgot to get dressed. The kind of incredibly exposed and vulnerable dreams that teachers report having all over. And they get up there and they have to go through that. You can’t just read about it. You actually have to do it. So I always ask how do you think that went? Talk to me about what were you hoping to achieve.
Assessing Learning
Greg: We used to call it summative assessment, when we were summative it would be at the end of the lesson. We’re going to do some kind of a mastery thing, like a test or a performance or whatever it may be. But when I’m teaching on Monday and we’re just launching in terms of where we hope to get in 2 or 3 weeks, am I checking in? And how am I checking in and what am I determining about where the students are? The worst teachers just basically read from their notes. The best ones are actually out there among the students, checking in and not letting anyone be sleepers. No hiders in there, you know. And how many of your students are engaged? Is it the same three students asking all the questions?
Different Pathways and Education Reform
Question: You have done many different things over the course of your career, including earning an administrative credential as well as your single subject. What interested you about some of the different education paths you’ve taken?
Greg: So first I was a high school teacher. I moved up from Southern California and changed my life. I moved to San Francisco in 1989, the year of the Loma Prieta earthquake. I was teaching in Fremont Unified at that time. In the process of working at that school—this was called Irvington High School over there in the East Bay—the school got involved with some legislation that was put out to reform high schools. They were seen as not impressive in terms of what they were delivering for students and getting disparate results for students of color, and all the issues that we’re still contending with now. It’s called Senate Bill 1274. It’s a piece of reform legislation, so our school was was chosen to be part of that. We put forth a proposal and I took on an additional role to my full teaching load. We didn’t call it this, but it was a reform coordinator position. I was trying to lead this effort and hold the meetings with teachers and get the consensus on different decisions about how we might restructure the program. In that process, it was sort of my first chance to get out and see the greater field and see what people were trying to do when it came to education at the secondary level. And I started getting really interested in it. I met a lot of principals in the course of that, all of whom had a theory about how to make their schools top contenders and all that. So that started me on this road.
We then got a second reform grant through the Annenberg grants, when they gave half $1 billion to schools in urban areas. Ours was called the Bay Area School Reform Collaborative. We got a pile of money to do things like block scheduling, school-to-career things. They were all new thinking at that time, and I ended up being the reform coordinator for that. For about three years I was in this organization where we were selecting the high schools that we would fund. But I felt really funny. I said, I’m out here advising high school principals or middle school principals in some cases on how to run their schools, and I have never actually tried that. So I said, I’m going to go in and get my admin credential and see what that’s about. I tried a short stint about two years at the county office level, and I just said, this ain’t it. This is not the thing. So then I jumped in and I started as an assistant principal in the East Bay at Willard Middle School. Then I got my own school, Treasure Island School.
The state was putting forward its own model. The nine-point plan to reform a school is typical state response to everything, which is just create a set of binders and a formula, plug it in. And there’s your school. I met a lot of folks through that process because I ended up being an external evaluator for a short time, going into these schools that were on the edge of being closed or reconstituted or doing the reconstitution thing at that time.
