Ramapo Magazine

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Meet Ramapo’s New Class of Teachers
By Heidi Reinholdt

"Give us more technology..."
Teachers at a summer institute program who used satellite images to bring lessons to life were so thrilled to have technology right in their hands. All they could say was: "If you offer more courses, we will come !" From this enthusiasm sprang the Master of Science in Educational Technology (MSET) program, directed by Dr. Angela Cristini, biology professor.

Education in America is big news. Scarcely a day goes by without standardized testing, class size, or summer school policies making headlines. Of course, at the core of issues like these -- and of all classroom policies and procedures -- is the classroom teacher. We entrust teachers with our children's education, but as a society we often pay too little attention to their training or their rapidly dwindling numbers. Although it is estimated that American schools will need to hire nearly two million teachers in the next decade, teacher education programs must scramble to compete with high-tech and other professional degree programs to attract resources and strong candidates. In contrast, however, Ramapo's teacher education program is thriving, giving students a solid pedagogy strengthened by a challenging, globally-oriented liberal arts education.

As part of Ramapo's curriculum for more than twenty years, the teacher education program remained small as a secondary education program until the 1990s, when teachers from the late-1960s hiring boom began to retire and the overall number of K-12 age children began to skyrocket. In order to address the growing demand for teachers, Ramapo re-energized its teacher education program, bringing Dr. John Mulhern on in 1996 as the program’s full-time director. Since Mulhern's arrival, teacher education at Ramapo has grown at an astounding rate: between 1996 and 2000, enrollment in the program has jumped from about seventy students to nearly 650.

Since Mulhern's Arrival. teacher education at Ramapo has grown at an astounding rate.

Despite the program's phenomenal growth, one of its key components remains unchanged -- teacher education at Ramapo is not a major. All teacher education students are required to major in another discipline such as English, biology, history, psychology, or another area while completing the requirements for teacher certification. This helps students develop subject expertise in their major and gain key planning and critical thinking skills. According to Mulhern, Ramapo's approach used to be somewhat unusual, but it's becoming the norm. "Ramapo has always believed that good teachers need a well-rounded and academically challenging curriculum; you need to learn to think and learn for yourself before you can effectively teach someone else," he says.

Another strength of teacher education at Ramapo is the program's emphasis on fieldwork early in the program. "Many of our courses require fieldwork, such as visiting classrooms and meeting with teachers," says Mulhern. By the time Ramapo teacher education students graduate, they spend at least fifteen weeks learning about education by attending faculty meetings and observing classes in action, and another fifteen weeks actually leading a classroom as a student teacher. Janel Shelton, who just began her student teaching, feels the intensive fieldwork experience is invaluable: "Everything I've been doing so far -- observing classes, talking to teachers -- has really taken the nervous edge away. I'm student teaching in a second grade classroom at Riverdale Elementary School this fall, and I feel tremendously well-prepared."

Ramapo's teacher education curriculum incorporates fieldwork experiences with plenty of courses in pedagogy, but it strives to do so in a way consistent with today's rapidly-changing classrooms. One of the program's most popular offerings is a semester-long course on educational technology in which students learn how to use technology to help accommodate different learning styles and to help bring a new level of excitement into the classroom. The pressing need for tech-savvy teachers is widespread, giving many Ramapo-trained teachers an edge in the job market. Says Andrew O'Connor, a December 1999 graduate, who is now teaching at Northern Valley Regional High School in Old Tappan, "I know my familiarity with educational technology had a lot to do with my getting a job. It's in high demand these days."

Ramapo's commitment to the integration of technology into the classroom is further evidenced through its graduate degree devoted exclusively to the subject -- the Master of Science in Educational Technology (MSET). The MSET program grew out of Ramapo biology professor Dr. Angela Cristini's highly successful (RST)2 (Revitalizing Science Teaching using Remote Sensing Technology) summer institutes, which trained hundreds of New Jersey teachers on how to use Web- and software-based data to study meteorology and watershed ecology. The institutes were supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Eisenhower Math/Science program. According to Cristini, the MSET program's director, "We recognized that teachers wanted to learn how to use computers in their classrooms in a meaningful way. We had teachers who completed the (RST)2 courses telling us how happy they were and how they wanted more, so we knew the demand existed for a master's program."

In its first two years, the MSET program graduated approximately sixty students and now has a total enrollment of nearly 140 students. It is also beginning to attract graduates of Ramapo's own teacher education program. Cristini believes that part of the program's appeal is that it teaches technology in a less technical, more practical way. "Ramapo's program is different from many others because it is neither a computer science program nor an educational theory program. We strive to teach technology in the context of what's actually happening in the classroom. Instead of writing a thesis on an obscure technical topic, we want our students to get their hands dirty and develop a significant Web-based learning project that they can really use in their own classrooms," she says.

Of course, the MSET program isn't the only option for previous college graduates who want to study education at Ramapo. Nearly forty percent of the students enrolled in undergraduate teacher education at Ramapo are post-baccalaureate students who augment their teacher training with years of experience gained in other fields. O'Connor, who received his first college degree in accounting in 1982, had been an accountant and a New York City police officer before coming to Ramapo to become a teacher. The change has apparently agreed with him, and he has received several prestigious awards including the Year 2000 Commissioners Distinguished Teacher Candidate Award as one of New Jersey’s top fifteen teacher education graduates. "I had been injured in the line of duty and needed to make a change. Teaching just seemed like a natural for me, a way to keep doing something worthwhile," he says. "Plus, after being a cop, it doesn't seem so intimidating," he adds with a laugh.

Although O'Connor jokes about the pressures of being a classroom teacher, the reality of taking responsibility for a group of students is daunting. The high stress, relatively low pay, and pressure to perform according to predetermined standards associated with teaching cause many new teachers to abandon the field quickly. According to recent national estimates, more than twenty percent of all new teachers leave the profession within four years. Ramapo has only recently begun to track the long-term success of its graduates, but early indications demonstrate that Ramapo graduates' commitment to teaching may be long-term. A 1999 survey of the nearly 170 Ramapo teacher education graduates since 1995-96 yielded a sixty-seven percent response rate, with nearly ninety percent of the respondents saying they were still active in the field. In order to continue to improve these numbers, Ramapo has plans to draw on its growing population of graduates and develop a mentoring program to match teacher education students with graduates who can help guide them through the first critical years of teaching.

As Ramapo has grown, so has the reputation of its teacher education program. Approximately sixty graduates received teacher certification this year, and preliminary admissions data indicates that as many as twenty to twenty-five percent of the incoming class of 2004 are interested in becoming teachers. According to Mulhern, "The program here is still growing rapidly and we find great enthusiasm for teaching among our students. Although teaching is more demanding now than it's ever been, we are convinced our graduates are up to the challenge. We are eager to have them join the effort to provide our children with a first-class education."