TFA hopefuls endure five-week training boot camp

JESSICA HUANG
news@columbiamissourian.com

It takes five weeks for TFA to transform a college graduate into a teacher. This past summer before they walked through the doors of their first classrooms, 3,700 young people flew to a summer institute in six different locations across the country. New York City, Phoenix, Houston, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Philadelphia — all play host to a hotbed of idealism and exhaustion. Next summer, TFA will add Chicago to the list.

The five-week training boot camp is intensive. Recruits average between three and five hours of sleep a night. They live in dorm-style housing, eat cafeteria food and are taught how to manage a classroom. In the morning, corps members practice teaching under the supervision of veterans. They attend workshops where they gather in small groups to rehearse the next day’s lesson plan or how to respond if things go wrong. They practice designing lesson plans and assessments and learn tips and tricks. They engage in self-reflection. Leading this boot-camp training are TFA alumni who have chosen to stay in the classroom, other teachers and consultants who are affiliated with the program and current corps members who excelled in their first year.

Gubitz, the program manager who recruited at MU, was a corps member before he joined the organization’s staff. He spent his five-week training at the University of Houston Summer Institute, where he learned how to be in front of a classroom by teaching math to seventh-graders in summer school. Even today, Gubitz says he remembers how it felt to have 30 pairs of eyeballs trained on him and him alone as he stood in front of the room on that first day.

“Good morning. My name is Mr. Gubitz. I’ll be teaching math for the next four weeks,” he told them.

And so he did. He taught for two hours each day — the first hour with a team of teachers, the second, alone. During that summer, Gubitz worked with a young man named Royce who was struggling with math. If Royce didn’t pass math, he couldn’t go on to eighth grade, which meant he wouldn’t be able to play varsity basketball. Royce worked diligently during class and put in extra hours after summer school, but by the end of the four weeks, Gubitz didn’t know if Royce would make it.

It wasn’t until Thanksgiving, when Gubitz went home to Indiana, that he got the message. Royce had looked up Gubitz’s parents’ number and called to tell him he had passed math and was playing ball.

So the summer training institute, while providing instruction for corps members, is also a microcosm of the TFA philosophy: Help kids learn. However possible. Period.

This philosophy, this method, has a name: Backwards design, they call it, though many just call it common sense. Take a goal — a desired result, TFA teaches. Contemplate it. Roll it around in your mind. Then simply work backward using every ounce of creativity and every tablespoon of personal grit and determination until the road map to success is outlined in reverse.

“We ‘backwards design’ — we expect people to backwards design — because you’ve got to know where you’re going,” Gubitz said.

The rest, it seems, is just trial and error.