CLU gets second partner school

Another local school has formed a partnership with California Lutheran University, becoming a professional development school that brings together kids, student teachers, longtime teachers and professors on one campus.

Los Cerritos Middle School in Thousand Oaks is the second local professional development school working with CLU. The other is Flory Academy of Sciences and Technology in Moorpark.

Professional development schools benefit everyone involved, from students to professors, advocates say. Children have more adults in the classroom. Student teachers immediately connect theory with practical classroom experience.

Longtime teachers are exposed to the newest ideas in education. And education professors are brought into the trenches, working on campuses filled with kids.

“This is based on the medical school model,” said Michael Cosenza, CLU’s director of university partnerships. “Connections are made on the spot.”

Ventura County has other professional development schools. University Preparation School and University Charter Middle School in Camarillo are associated with CSU Channel Islands. And Manzanita School in Newbury Park has formed a partnership with Pepperdine University in Malibu. That partnership will continue when Manzanita becomes the Environmental Academy for Research Technology of EartH Sciences, or EARTHS.

At Los Cerritos, student teachers are in the classroom with kids in the morning. Then in the afternoon, they go upstairs to an unused home economics classroom, where they learn the theory behind the practice.

“Everything is about this place and our kids,” said Elly Love, principal of Los Cerritos. “That’s a huge difference.”

Brinden Wohlstattar is one of 15 student teachers in the pilot program. She appreciates the chance to do her student teaching with a group of fellow students, rather than being the only student teacher on a campus.

“It makes us feel like we’re in this learning community, that we’re all in this together,” Wohlstattar said. “If you’re at a school on your own, you don’t get a sense of what others are going through, of their successes. Here, you feel steeped in everything regarding teaching.”

Education professors also benefit from the partnership, Cosenza said. When they come on campus to teach some of their education classes, they see what’s going on in real classrooms with real kids, he said.

“Now they’re back in a real school environment,” he said. “When you’re teaching at a university and those children aren’t around, you start teaching about what you remember, and it makes it a little obsolete.”

In addition, CLU is offering training to Los Cerritos teachers as a way of thanking them for opening up their classrooms. The plan is to survey teachers to see what kind of training they’d like, then provide it, Cosenza said.

The children, of course, get more adults in the classroom.

“They can’t as easily misbehave. They can’t disappear into the woodwork,” Love said. “It’s easier to connect. If they don’t necessarily connect with the teacher, they have other adults they can connect with.”

While participants are enthusiastic about the partnership, it takes time to build trust among the various constituents, Cosenza said. It helps, he said, that the university has been sending student teachers to Los Cerritos for years.

“The university and middle school are very different cultures,” he said. “A lot of trust has to be developed over time. At the first staff meeting, everybody was a little suspicious.”

--- Published in the Ventura County Star on Jan. 2, 2009