Becoming a Teacher

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Miranda-Gomez directs students in her class.

At barely five feet, Brenda Miranda-Gomez is smaller than most people. But she moves faster, and with much more purpose. Trailing her around Match High School is to see a young woman who has found her calling: teacher. 

She’s already developed eyes in the back of her head. During the four minute transition time between classes she doles out a series of instructions, reprimands and encouragement to students as she weaves her ways through the crowded hallways: “Tuck in your shirt, Israel.” “I’ll see you in tutorial later, right?” “Where are you supposed to be right now?” “Hey, I consider freakin’ a bad word.” “High-five, let’s go.” 

Brenda has two little brothers. She credits this with her natural tendency to be in charge. Brenda grew up with her two brothers, and her mom, in an urban and largely Latino neighborhood in Riverside, CA. Brenda knew from an early age that she wanted to move away from her home city, in her words, “to get out and be successful.” She excelled in high school and attended UC-Berkeley, where she majored in math.  

As graduation approached, she started researching education-focused organizations and got curious about charter schools. “I wished I’d had the ‘no excuses’ charter model for myself growing up,” she says. She had friends who’d done Teach For America, but nobody she knew stuck with teaching after they’d completed their two-year TFA commitment. She knew she wanted to try something different. And she knew she wanted to live on the East coast. So, she applied and was accepted to the Match Teacher Residency (MTR), the first year of the Sposato Graduate School of Education. 

Miranda-Gomez meets with her Sposato coach, Jawad Brown.

MTRs spend the first year of Sposato’s two-year Master’s program working full-time as a tutor at a Match campus or teaching assistant at one of our partner schools, and completing coursework and practice (including Group of Six) on the weekends. During the spring semester of the school year, MTRs also teach at least two full class periods a week. During the second year of the program, Sposato graduate students work as full-time teachers, continuing their coursework online and receiving regular feedback and coaching from Sposato faculty.  (Brenda has accepted a job teaching 9th grade math and Excel Academy High School next year.) 

The culture of continuous feedback is one of Brenda’s favorite things about Sposato, along with her students, the good friends she’s made and the opportunity to live in a new city. (Her first time in Boston was when she moved here.) “I love how immediate and specific the feedback is,” she says. “I can implement it quickly and keep getting better.” 

The day we visit, Brenda has several tutoring sessions and is student teaching a 9th grade algebra class. Brenda can do high school math in her sleep, but during tutorial, she slows down the pace of her kids.  She bounces her right knee under the table as she works and clicks her four-color ballpoint pen from red to blue ink. “We’re going to go through it step by step so it sinks in a little more,” she says.  Together, they work through math problems that require students to factor out the leading coefficient, write equations as binomials, identify the vertex and write quadratic equations for given points on a graph. 

In class, Brenda immediately gets her kids to work on a “do now.” She gives a kid with the sniffles a tissue (early-spring colds are hanging on), and walks to the back of the classroom to stand next to a student who looks disengaged, slumped over in his chair. The aim of the day’s lesson is to transform quadratic equations. Her class is an energetic mix of lecture and independent practice. It’s orderly and you can see how hard she works to put the thinking work – the cognitive load – back on her students. 

Being a teacher, especially a new teacher, is hard for many reasons. But it’s especially hard because of the thousands of decisions teachers are required to make every hour. Sposato gives its students lots of on-the-job and simulated practice to help many of those decisions start to feel instinctual. Before every student teaching day, Brenda’s faculty coach from Sposato gives her something specific to concentrate on- an instructional move or a classroom management technique called a big takeaway – during class. On this day, Brenda is working on setting clear expectations by being more intentional about how she uses the white board at the front of the class.  This is the kind of nitty-gritty, specific feedback she loves, because it’s so actionable. 

After her lesson, Brenda has a 45-minute feedback session with her Sposato coach, Jawad Brown. (Jawad was a 7th and 8th grade math teacher for several years before joining Match).  He starts off the coaching session by asking Brenda how she thinks the class went – what went well, what could have gone better, what she was thinking and feeling at certain moments in the lesson.  He congratulates Brenda on a great day.  Her big takeaway for the next lesson? Challenging students to use more mathematical vocabulary. She’ll implement it during the following day’s lesson. 

“In middle and high school my teachers kept me going,” Brenda says. “They helped me believe I could go to Cal, that I could major in math. When I look at my kids, I know I want to do the same thing for them.” 

Match More: Ending the Summer Slide

During every recess period, Carla reads and talks about a new book with Ms. Davis. A year ago, she arrived in sixth grade two grade levels behind in reading.  She refused to read aloud in class. Every minute of guided reading makes the difference to her, and she's now only six months behind grade level. What Carla needs is a summer filled with trips to the library, museums and a guided reading program to help her select, read and talk about books.  But last summer, she visited the library only once and hung out at home. 

During sixth grade, Kevin was eager to do well in school and to make his parents and teachers proud.  But things changed the following year. There was stress at home and the family budget was too tight for him to participate in the local baseball league. His drive to excel faded to underperformance in school. Kevin needs an idyllic summer camp where he can be a kid and can get back in touch with his hopes and dreams and re-imagine himself.  He told us he was a little “bored this summer."  

Unfortunately, these stories are all too common.  Stories like Kevin and Carla’s have inspired us to launch a new initiative called Match More, that will aim to give all our students access to amazing summer experiences. 

Research compiled by the National Summer Learning Association show that during the school year, lower-income children’s skills improve at close to the same rate as those of their more advantaged peers. But over the summer, middle and higher-income children’s skills continue to improve, while lower-income children’s skills stall.  What happens when all the summers of "hanging out" pile up? Summer learning loss, also known as the “Summer Slide” or “Summer Setback.”

The impact of summer learning loss is serious academic and life consequences for our kids. Consider the research.

• Two-thirds of the ninth grade achievement gap between disadvantaged youth and their more advantaged peers can be explained by the unequal access to to summer learning opportunities during the elementary school years (Alexander et al, 2007). All the losses pile up, contributing to an achievement gap that can make the difference between whether students set out on a college path or decide to drop out of high school.
• By the time a low-income student reaches 6th grade, she has had 6,000 fewer hours of learning time than her middle- and upper-income peers.
• Most students lose about two months of grade level equivalency in mathematical computation skills over the summer months. Low-income students also lose more than two months in reading achievement, despite the fact that their middle-class peers make slight gains (Cooper, 1996).
• Research spanning 100 years shows that students typically score lower on standardized tests at the end of summer vacation than they do on the same tests at the beginning of the summer (White, 1906; Heyns, 1978; Entwisle & Alexander 1992; Cooper, 1996; Downey et al, 2004).
• Children lose more than academic knowledge over the summer. Most children—particularly children at high risk of obesity—gain weight more rapidly when they are out of school during summer break (Von Hippel et al, 2007).

Our mission at Match More is to give all our students access to amazing summer experiences - in the great outdoors, sports, academics, the arts, service and beyond.  

For students like Carla, an academic program is essential this summer. She needs a program like Summer Ink at Simmons College where she'll go on interesting field trips and end her day writing about her experiences. For students like Kevin, an overnight camp like Brantwood, situated in the great outdoors with a focus on leadership development, will re-ignite his passion to learn and make good choices.  

In a parent survey of Match families this fall, 90% of families stated that cost as the #1 barrier to enrolling kids in summer programs.  Here is what Match More does to help:           

• We identify high quality summer programs across New England.
• We partner with these programs to secure free or subsidized placements for Match students.
• We work with families to identify the right opportunity for their child, and we help them apply.
• We raise funds to cover partial tuition, transportation and other incidental costs.

Help us end the summer slide for Match students. Click on MatchMore to donate and become a fundraiser.

Food for a Thousand

The vast majority of our 1,000 students eat breakfast and lunch with us every day. At Match, we do our best to offer kids healthy meals. The last couple of years, we've done that with help from our partners at Revolution Foods. What follows is a Q&A with Joshua Birdsall of Revolution Foods, about the company's philosophy, menu and how many apples they go through in a week (hint: it's a lot). 

What’s your philosophy?
Our mission is to build lifelong healthy eaters by making kid-inspired, chef-crafted food accessible to all. We believe that high quality, real food can be fun, flavorful, and good for the body and for the mind!
 
Who creates your menu?
Our menu is a true partnership between our dedicated team of chefs, nutritionists, and local representatives.  
 
What food can’t kids get enough of?
Our food needs to be delicious first, and healthy second. Not to say that healthy isn’t important to us, because it truly is. But our experience has been that you can serve the healthiest school lunches in the world, but none of it will matter if kids don’t want to eat it! To that point, our strategy is to put a better-for-you twist on kid-favorite meals.

It’s hard to pick an absolute winner, but some of our kid favorites this year have been our chicken potstickers (steamed in a whole wheat dumpling wrapper), our inside out cheese pizza (think healthy calzone!), and our all-natural hot dog.

You guys refer to your food as “real food." What does that mean?
Real food can mean so many different things to so many different people, which is why we’ve created a detailed list of ingredient standards for our meals. At its core, though, real food means simple, unprocessed, freshly-prepared food. Research shows that this kind of food is naturally rich in essential nutrients and does not contain empty calories from added sugar and fat or excess salt. Our menu focuses on whole fruits and vegetables, whole grains, low-fat dairy, and lean protein. We do not allow artificial colors, flavors, preservatives, or sweeteners, in addition to over 52 other “never ever” processed food additives and ingredients.

How many meals/snacks do you make a day for Match?
Between its campuses, we make an average of 600 breakfasts, 885 lunches, and 785 snacks a day for Match!

How do you get it to us? 
A day in the life of a Revolution Foods meal starts early! Our local culinary teams hand-prepare our meals daily, then ship them overnight and deliver them in the morning to each school site by truck.  

Do you freeze your food? 
This may not sound intuitive, but frozen food doesn’t necessarily go against our ingredient standards. Once fruits and vegetables are harvested, the plant will essentially starts to eat itself (and its essential nutrients) in order to stay alive. This means the longer that produce sits unused, the less nutrient dense it will be. Freezing fresh produce can actually be a great way to preserve the nutrients, which is why we sometimes use frozen vegetables.

Apples are the icon of school lunch. How many pounds of apples do you use in a week?
It changes every week, depending on what’s menued. But to give you a rough idea, next week we’re projecting around 600 cases of apples, that 84,000 individual apples for our clients in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.

Proving Ground

[Photo credit: Maya Dukmasova]

The Fall 2015 issue of University of Chicago Magazine includes a piece, “Proving Ground,” about the work of Match tutors in UChicago’s Education Lab. (This work was also the subject of a New York Times article last January, “Closing the Math Gap for Boys.”) We think it’s a great story about how day-to-day work in schools can fuel broader policy change. In fact, the author does a such a good job untangling the challenges and decisions a district or school leader faces, we thought we’d respond directly to a few of the most salient bits. Here goes:

““In any school system, the differences in students academic skills grow larger and larger as they progress through grade levels…no amount of pressure on high school teachers to teach algebra better will help their students working at a third-grade level who haven’t yet mastered multi-digit arithmetic.” ”

You may know that Match was founded 15 years ago, as a high school. We’ve since expanded to enroll students in the middle and elementary grades -- we wanted to serve more students, but we also believed enrolling children earlier on in their academic careers would translate to better results. These days, our preschoolers talk about college and many of our sixth graders are already planning to take AP Calculus. Are all of our students performing at grade level in Math and ELA? No. But we’re tracking in that direction. Less catch up, more mastery – that’s the trajectory.

““The challenge has been not abut solving a pedagogical problem so much as an economics problem: how to give Oxford-style instruction at Chicago Public School prices.

“Match Education may have found a way. ‘The key a-ha moment Match had,’ says Ludwig, ‘was to realize that teaching one or two kids is fundamentally different from teaching 25-30 kids. What you need to be able to do to be a good tutor is massively different from what you need to be a good classroom teacher.””

The Ludwig quoted here is our friend, Jens Ludwig, co-director of the Education Lab and a UChicago professor of social service administration, law and public policy. He’s right: training someone to be a great tutor is a lot easier than training someone to be a great teacher, primarily because being a tutor is just a much simpler job. (Tutoring is about building relationships and helping students master content; it’s not about pedagogy, classroom management, performance, high-volume decision making, data analysis and all the other things one needs to be a stand-out teacher.) It’s also effective. As the author notes, “About half way through the study, the students in Chicago Vocational Career Academy’s Math Lab doubled the amount of math they would have been expected to learn without tutoring…”

Starting in 2nd grade, Match students receive one to two hours of tutoring every day in Math and English Language Arts. That consistent, personalized attention is a big driver of our students’ achievement (alongside outstanding teachers, a commitment engaging parents and a joyful and orderly school culture) and a big reason why parents choose to join our community.

““Our theory of change is if you can show the government how to spend $200 billion better, or it’s $500 billion better, that’s how you start to have a really big impact.”- Jens Ludwig, co-director of the Education Lab and Chicago professor of social service administration, law and public policy”

We like that. The theory of change Ludwig talks about is the reason underlying Match Export. It’s also one of the things that differentiates Match from other high-performing charter organizations, like our friends at KIPP and Uncommon Schools. Once we max out our school enrollment (1,250 students), our plan isn’t to start another school – it’s to do the best we possibly can for the students we have, and to figure out better, more efficient, more engaging ways to share what we’ve learned with anyone looking to improve outcomes for kids: large urban school districts, charter school operators, traditional teacher prep programs and policymakers. Match Minis are the latest, and arguably coolest, thing we’ve done so far.

One final note: Match is no longer in the business of exporting our high-impact tutoring model to other cities – that important work has been taken on by our friends and former colleagues at Saga Innovations.

Day in the Life of a Match Corps Tutor

The sun isn’t yet up when Emmanuel Yeboah arrives to Match Middle School each morning and it’s long set before he heads home at night. In between, the day is a blur of tutoring sessions, high fives, hallway conversations, dodgeball, homework help, teacher conferences and spoken word club. 

This is the day in the life of a Match corps member. 

Match is an AmeriCorps program. But unlike other AmeriCorps programs, where corps members are often add-ons to a school, the Match Corps is an integral part of the pedagogy at Match. The model has been proven to get results, and especially for Black and Latino boys. 

Everyday, Emmanuel – a graduate of Boston Latin School and (the) University of Connecticut – provides tutoring in English Language Arts for five hours a day. Each student at Match Middle receives two hours of tutoring a day – an hour in English, an hour in math – four days a week. Tutors coordinate their lesson plans with teachers and academic leaders to ensure that what each tutoring session reinforces a key concept or skill taught in class. 

Every Match corps member is a college graduate. There are 170 this school year, from all over the country, with diverse backgrounds and interests. Some, like Emmanuel, are considering teaching as a career, though just as many joined Match Corps to give back for a year or gain work experience before starting medical school, or law school or some other career-track job. 

Here’s Emmanuel’s story, in words and pictures. 

Emmanuel usually arrives to school at 6:30am. Before the school day begins, he and his fellow corps members prepare for the day in a room on the third floor of the building where they finalize lesson plan and double-check schedules. Today, they confer with each other about students they have an eye on and joke around, complaining about a funny smell in their prep room. 

Emmanuel’s first of five tutoring sessions begins at 7:45am. He only has time to eat half the ham-egg-and-cheese he brought from home before meeting up with four 8th graders he’s been assigned to work with this year. 

Emmanuel has a gentle way with his students. It comes naturally to him, as the second oldest of five siblings. He nudges his students along and finds something to teach in every moment. He talks to them about the origins of the days of the week (Norse mythology) and what happened at the girls’ basketball team the night before (they lost). 

When one girl lays her head on the desk, he pulls out a graphic novel from his backpack. Soon, she’s reading and taking notes. He tells another boy to speak up while he’s reading his work aloud. “You know we’re always going to edit,” Emmanuel says, as they talk through prepositional phrases, tone and word choice: “What do you think is more clear in this sentence,” he asks, “see or watch?” Another student asks, “Why can’t you just turn into the Hulk?” after Emmanuel had explained how radiation’s toxicity changes human cell structure. “That’d be a cool science project,” Emmanuel replied, laughing.  

Emmanuel spends an hour a day with Ty, a whip-smart 7th grader who struggles to stay on task in class. The day’s session is on close reading. Ty is a basketball fan with encyclopedic knowledge of the game and its legends. Emmanuel pulls out an article on Wilt Chamberlain. The question at hand, “Is he the greatest of all time?” Tyree says no: the absence of the three-second violation allowed all 7’5 of Chamberlain to stand in the paint. “All Wilt had to do was stand there,” Ty says. 

Dodgeball at Match Middle School is like dodgeball anywhere. Fun chaos! A gymnasium full of 12-year olds slinging Nerf balls at short range. Emmanuel is in the middle of it all. 

By 4:15pm, students are ready for the end of a long day.  You can feel the energy in homeroom just before the dismissal bell. Some boys are joking around, dancing “the Carlton” from the Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Emmanuel helps them stay calm. He’s good at working anywhere and takes advantage of all downtime – he never stops moving. 

After school, half a dozen students turn up at Boston Pulse, a spoken word club that’s aim is to get young poets to write and perform their own work. It’s a highlight of the week for Emmanuel, who studied poetry in college and writes a bit himself (he double-majored in Africana Studies and Women’s Gender Studies at UConn). The topic of this day’s discussion is how poets use language, punctuation and pauses to create suspense. Tony delaRosa, who co-leads the club, dims the lights to show students YouTube videos of Franny Choi delivering “Wire Woman” and an excerpt of Saul Williams performing from the documentary, SlamNation. 

By now, it’s after 5pm – 10 hours after students arrived to school – but they are engaged, at the edge of their seats.