The ASU-Teach For America Partnership

 

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This feature is the third in a series highlighting the recipients of the 2008 President’s Medal for Social Embeddedness.

Roundtable Facilitator:

Catherine Traywick, feature writer, Office of University Initiatives

 

Roundtable Participants:
Will Seamans, director of district and public strategy, Teach For America
Heather Carter, director of education downtown, College of Teacher Education and Leadership, Arizona State University
Amanda Burke, associate director for education and education policy, ASU Office of University Initiatives
Sandra Johnson, director of university common computing, ASU University Technology Office

Since the inception of Teach For America’s burgeoning partnership with Arizona State University, the mutually beneficial alliance has received numerous distinctions, the most recent of which is the 2008 President’s Medal for Social Embeddedness. Aiming to eliminate educational inequity, Teach For America (previously featured in the Community Camera) is collaborating with ASU in four specific areas: recruitment of ASU students into Teach For America, teacher support and development, Alumni leadership, and the Teach For America Phoenix Summer Institute. In an effort to learn more about how successful university-community partnerships like this are forged, I sat down with a few of the key players responsible for making this partnership happen.

Catherine: Thank you for speaking with me today. Could everyone begin by introducing yourself and detailing your role in building this partnership?

 

Will: My name is Will Seamans and I’m the director of district and public strategy for Teach For America, so I manage all of our external relationships including the one with Arizona State University, specifically with the master’s program we’ve built at ASU at the West campus.

 

Heather: My name is Heather Carter and I am the director of education downtown where all of the Teach For America corps members are enrolled. So, we’ll have 380 graduate students attending classes by next spring, and I oversee the faculty curriculum and student success in that program.

 

Amanda: My name is Amanda Burke and I am the associate director for education and education policy in the Office of University Initiatives. Initially my role was to help get the partnership off the ground. Now I’m more involved in coordinating it and collaborating with ASU faculty, staff, and administration as well as Teach For America staff to build upon what is in place.

 

Sandra: I’m Sandy Johnson and I’m the common computing director in the University Technology Office. My role overall is to make sure technology is available and 100 percent functional in the classrooms and computing sites. Our group is very much embedded in making things work for whoever comes in our doors. This was an opportunity to get very deeply involved with an outside organization and understand what that meant to us as a technology support group.

 

Catherine: My understanding is that Teach For America initially approached ASU about building a partnership. How did you decide that it was the university that could help meet the needs of Teach For America?

 

Will: I think the obvious answer is how massive ASU is, which means it does have a lot of resources available to the community. Also, ASU’s approach to being socially embedded in the community was something that we were really attracted to from the beginning. Finally, one of the reasons that we really look to ASU to be, probably, our largest partner university is just the way ASU thinks about doing things. For example, historically, Teach For America, which is an alternative pathway, has bumped heads with traditional pathways for masters’ programs. But at ASU, we know it’s an open program that wants to work towards the same outcome versus saying “Our way is better than your way.” You’re just very open to new ideas at this university.

 

Catherine: What are some of the challenges you’ve faced in trying to develop this partnership?

 

Sandra: One difficult thing was figuring out where to draw the line with resources. Teach For America asked for a lot, more than anybody has asked for. I mean, we had to figure out, do we charge them for that, can we do this? It’s been bigger than anything we’ve done. I went out on a limb, a lot. We have offered more resources than we ever had for any group.

 

Will: But truly, if you’re a community organization wanting to partner with a university, one of the things that’s really essential is to throw out what, ideally, you need to make something big happen and work down from there. It’s great, I think, to lay it out on the table from the beginning. I think we’ve grown everything we’ve been able to do because of that. Being really clear about what you’d hope to do with the university is key, and communicating constantly about where we are is also key, and finally a big piece is something that we at Teach For America call “Sense of Possibility.” It means always having an open mind to “what if.” Always being innovative, always thinking outside of the box. Without that, we wouldn’t have become as successful as we are.

 

Heather: Another thing that is both a benefit and a challenge is that things move so quickly, that we have to be very deliberate in our communication with each other. But I think we all know what each of our role is, and we know when we have to talk to each other. And because we had those specific, defined areas where we were partnering, it wasn’t as challenging as maybe it would seem. A lot of it is just assembling the right people on the team. I just feel tremendous confidence in everyone that we’re working with. Part of that might be because Teach For America does a great job of really explaining what their mission is, and I think we‘re all really invested in that.

 

Sandra: I have to say I agree. Amanda made things very clear, Teach For America made things very clear, and I asked my group to try and understand where the university was going and what it means to be socially embedded. Not all of us understood that prior to working on this project. I also read the Teach For America book, and it helped reinforce what Teach For America is trying to do and how we’re going to connect with them. We all now clearly understand what we’re trying to accomplish and I think that was key.

 

Will: Something we’ve seen in other regions, we’ve been  able to overcome here -- it is really getting on the same page as far as what is the vision for this specific partnership and what are each of our parts in making sure that vision happens. I think with ASU we’ve been extremely successful in creating a common vision and both being invested in the communities we serve and finding ways to continue doing that via the partnership.

 

Catherine: How would you say you did that?

 

Will: I started attending ASU events so I could start to understand language and systems and what it looks like from their perspective. On the flip side, we had university professors and Heather join our meetings regularly and we also trained them on Teach For America language and culture and values so that we’re able to understand what one phrase might mean for Teach For America and translate it to what it might mean for ASU, and I think it’s allowed us to communicate to a much higher degree than other partnerships we’ve had in other regions.

 

Catherine: Has the partnership continued to evolve, perhaps in ways you didn’t anticipate?

 

Heather: Definitely. Teach For America has recently partnered with the ASU Biodesign Institute. They have to partner with educational outreach efforts, like working with teachers in K12 schools, specifically with children in low income schools. This year Richard Fisher [the director of educational outreach for the Biodesign Institute] was looking at targeting high schools that have an existing biodesign program…So I told him that we have phenomenal science teachers in the classroom with Teach For America who have the capacity to do this, some with bioengineering degrees. It’s a great opportunity to marry several different philosophies and visions for both schools and children. Through that conversation, in less than ten days, it’s taken a life of its own.

 

Will: What’s neat about that is it benefits our organization in many ways. In recruitment, we’re able to attract people with bioengineering degrees, from the east coast, who might not have chosen Arizona because there wasn’t this sort of opportunity before. We’re really gaining access to some quality leaders that we couldn’t otherwise get to Arizona -- and, obviously, once they’re here, being able to offer them something like that in between their years of teaching really benefits the ones who long terms goals of going into med school or starting biodesign teams at their schools.

 

Catherine: Coming from Teach For America, did you at any point find any difficulties accessing university resources?

 

Will: Honestly, I can say no. We’ve never had an issue accessing resources. I think it’s because we have so many people working on this project and for me, personally, it’s been essential having Amanda where she is, because she is the connector for all of this.

 

Amanda: Thanks Will. I think identifying the right team to develop the partnership has been so important. Within ASU, there are faculty, staff, and administration collaborating on the partnership – which makes it truly university-wide and allows us to bring more resources to bear. I think it is also key that the people involved within both ASU and Teach For America are in positions where they are able to make decisions that enable the partnership to move forward. So many great things have come out of the partnership. Our ultimate goal is to impact student achievement, but I’d love to hear from everyone what benefits they have seen as a result of the collaboration.

 

Heather: That’s huge in our program. Our Dean, Mari Koerner, consistently looks to our partnership to see how the things that work for Teach For America can be layered into our other programs. That improves our curriculum, our supervision, the way we schedule classes in terms of scope and sequence of classes. We are constantly looking at what we’re doing with Teach For America and figuring out how we can replicate those efforts with other partnerships, curriculum, faculty, across the board.

 

Sandra: That would be my theme too. We are able to improve the way we offer technology. For example, we’re going to have about 650 people brining laptops to the university for the summer institute. We have to improve our documentation and our processes to make this happen seamlessly. I don’t think we would have done this by now without the partnership. We’ve changed how we’re doing things. We’re automating things that we wouldn’t have done before. For us, it was a very good opportunity to look at things we were doing technology-wise, and make them better. We’re really learning a lot more about how flexible we can be. We have different partnerships, but we haven’t gotten so embedded as we have with this one. We love stuff like this. Teach For America is so organized it’s been beneficial for our group as well.

 

Heather: Previously, we would build masters’ programs and hope that students would come. Teach For America is bringing 380 graduate students to our door, whereas if I had to recruit 380 graduate students it would take more effort, energy, resources than we have available. And with those students come extra resources in terms of tuition, so that forces us to make this work for them. We have to be really entrepreneurial in recruitment efforts at ASU.

 

Will: As far as the ways this partnership benefits Teach For America, the biggest impact we’ve seen is that we’ve tripled the number of ASU graduates going into Teach For America. That’s huge. ASU in the next couple of years has the potential to become, if not the largest, then one of the top three schools to recruit from in the nation, out of 400 universities. Regarding the master’s program – not only have we won two awards in the last year, but our corps members’ satisfaction has tripled. We are also hoping to use this master’s model throughout our other university partnerships across the nation. On the alumni side of things, we’ll have 15 school leaders coming out of ASU in the next three years ready to take on school leadership positions in Arizona. As far as the summer institute, just the fact that we are going to be able to train between 650 and 800 new teachers here in Arizona – people who would not otherwise be teaching – and then send them off so that ultimately their impact will be on 75,000 low income students is massive.

 

Catherine:  That’s great. It looks like you’ve all done an excellent job of identifying those key factors that make partnerships like this truly successful and beneficial for everyone involved. I think we’ve also touched on a lot of useful tips that will be really beneficial for our readers as they seek to create or strengthen university-community partnerships of their own. Thank you all for taking the time to share your experiences and advice and congratulations on your recent awards.

 

Catherine Traywick, ASU in the Community feature writer
catherine.traywick@asu.edu
(480) 965-0335

 

Share your comments, questions and thoughts. Send an email to maureen.mills@asu.edu