16 Julie Caddy Catanzarite
Pilot Mountain Middle School, Pilot Mountain, NC, Washtenaw Community College, Ann Arbor, MI.
Julie Caddy was one of the two students not in my classes at GVSU and served as part of a control group for this oral history, even though I do not consider this work a traditional academic study. I did have an opportunity to see Julie in action when she was student-assisting in the Grand Rapids Public Schools as part of a team observation with Dr. Scott Stabler. Julie was in a very diverse middle school, with a major part of her classroom consisting of Latino/Latina students. That day, in the early 2000s when I observed her classroom I thought she did a good job with a challenging group of students. Julie did her student teaching at Caledonia High School, south of Grand Rapids. She graduated with a Social Studies major with a Geography emphasis and an English minor.
When I tracked Julie down after graduation, she had accepted a middle school teaching position in Pilot Mountain, North Carolina. She was teaching in her minor, English/Language Arts. Her school was a high performing school with some poverty amongst the student body, which consisted of both suburban and rural students. She started teaching at this school in mid-year, a challenging prospect for any beginning teacher. Her teaching schedule featured block scheduling and she had three, 90-minute blocks of classes, averaging in the mid-20s for the number of students. Her classes had many “advanced” students, primarily determined by standardized test scores. Julie’s classroom appeared well-organized, with bins and bookshelves neat and orderly.
Her first block class was 7th Grade English/Language Arts, consisting of 20 students and that day they were reviewing the use of analogy using graphic organizers to arrange their thoughts. Julie told me that in line with middle school philosophy she had team planning time and she said she got many of her ideas and resources from her teammate. For this particular class Julie’s lesson was a writing assignment with a rubric. The assignment included a state teaching standards benchmark. The prompt was “You are concerned that your sister is watching too much violent TV.” This assignment was designed as a problem-solving model and she asked her students for a solution. The students immediately engaged in the task at hand. This particular assignment was part of a journaling activity. After about 5 minutes, Julie had the students describe the steps they took to solve the problem and their solution. One of the first student solutions was “turn off the TV”. Straight and to the point. This class was a little unsettled because the school was delayed from starting this day due to fog and freezing drizzle. The normal 90-minute class was reduced to 50 minutes.
Julie’s policy, which I considered as being part of the school policy, was allowing remediation through re-writing of assignments. She mentioned that a good number of her students had difficulty writing organized paragraphs. She introduced and reinforced a mnemonic for her students “FANBOYS”[1] that helped them remember the rules for commas and conjunctions. For a change of pace, instead of writing on the whiteboard in her classroom, Julie was typing on her laptop and projecting corrections to examples on a screen. The technique worked for her students. The editing and suggestions were easy to do and modeled both the physical/technical part of the writing using technology, plus the actual mental part of good revision and editing. She was promised a Smartboard for her classroom, but at this point there were already problems with existing Smartboards in the school and maintaining Internet connections.
During the day Julie talked with me about starting a graduate degree in Higher Education Student Affairs, a career path she later followed. She was happy living in the Winston-Salem area in 2008 and her current school. She told me if she stayed at Pilot Mountain for five years, she would qualify for student loan forgiveness, a solution for student debt that several of my students pursued.
As the class progressed the students remained engaged and volunteered in answering solutions to writing problems and corrections. Julie offered positive examples for improving her students’ writing and offered herself as an example for editing by sharing her own mistakes, and, in that way, admitting the necessity for everyone to keep working on their writing.
The next writing prompt had to do with raising money for athletics; again, a prompt to which the students might easily relate. Student solutions included selling oranges, student mascot gear, homework passes, yard work and yard sales. Julie asked her class how they would get people to donate and then offered a real-life example that had happened at the school. That example provided relevancy to the students’ lives. Julie appealed to her students’ prior knowledge by using the term “bandwagon statement” and a student recalled this type of statement from a previous persuasive writing assignment.
Julie’s second block class started with a quick homework check before her students headed off to lunch. The students had self-corrected their homework with colored pencils in order to distinguish from the original work. This class had the same assignment but their solutions were different from the first class. Their solutions this time was blocking the offending channels or getting their sibling to change his/her viewing choices. As with many teachers and their classes, this class was not on the same schedule in terms of assignments completed. Julie read two stories from the book Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul II. The first story had to do with losing an enemy by showing kindness and understanding in winning someone over to be a friend. The second story was tied to a recent journal prompt and had to do with boosting someone’s ego. Julie made a connection to an enrichment class that the students were taking with another teacher, thereby strengthening the theme and the students’ memory of the lesson.
Next on the agenda were student presentations. These presentations were based on tri-fold brochures the students had constructed and based on a similar writing rubric. One of the Latina students made a presentation based on a Hispanic TV comedy show, which imitated other TV shows or movies. There were altogether five presentations in a half hour time frame and overall, the students did a good job, with only one presentation showing a lack of preparation and delivery. The last presenter had a soft voice and her classmates respectfully quieted so her presentation could be heard. I took this as a sign of respect they had for one another, plus some good guidelines for behavior provided by their teacher. At one point three boys jumped up to give their classmate a standing ovation for his effort, but Julie quickly reset the rules for polite behavior. The idea for classroom presentations seemed a good one, not just for setting the atmosphere for listening respectfully, but also for modeling and practicing good public speaking.
After the presentations, Julie handed back old writing assignments and debriefed the students with her general comments. There appeared to be much more success with students who chose a formulaic approach versus an open-ended one. Julie told them not to start sentences with conjunctions and gave the class ideas for spicing up transitions. A student responded to her comments by saying the prompt was difficult, but Julie used positive statements about her students’ abilities in dealing successfully with difficult prompts in the future. As Julie reviewed and corrected the writing samples on the projector the students were attentive and focused. She went on to explain the use of interjections and exclamations as a way to improve their writing. The students offered good ideas and revisions as the lesson went along and they were definitely engaged in the activity.
Julie commented to me later that she thought 7th grade brains were “wired” differently than any other grade. Based on my four years of teaching 7th graders in New York State, I would say that 7th graders are eager learners with fewer reservations or preconceived ideas about how they might please their teachers’ wishes in order to fulfill the assignments and make the grades they wanted to achieve.
Julie’s Third Block class was much the same as her second class. She showed throughout the day an attempt to tie her lessons in with other lessons by other teachers. She had a good sense of humor with her students for the whole day. This class had an interesting balance between reality and an application to the task at hand when it came to formulating solutions that the writing prompt provided. The students, as in the other classes, were attentive to their classmates’ presentations and Julie held them to a standard of conduct as members of the audience.
Interview, 2008
Defining Success, 2008
Julie first definition for her success was based on workshops she attended in North Carolina. While other teachers were learning new skills, Julie, based on her training at GVSU, found these workshops as a form of review. As an example, she described a Criss workshop for developing reading skills and the strategies which were presented were ones which Julie had encountered during her time in college.[2]
Content Preparation, 2008
Julie admitted that teaching in North Carolina versus Michigan had presented challenges. When teaching North Carolina History, for example, she would rely on her U.S. History content background provided in college, but she learned many of the details regarding the state right along with the students. She said that no one could learn all there was to teach in any state so a certain amount of learning had to be continued while teaching. She also said that the challenge of teaching in her minor area of study, English/Language Arts was a bit more of a struggle. In particular, she had to teach herself the rules of grammar. She remembered that she had rote practice in her K-12 years, but she had no experience about teaching grammar in college, except for writing papers in college. Specifically, she pointed out a class on the Civil War, taught by Dr. Stabler, who was a stickler for correct grammar.
Strategies and Methods, 2008
When asked if her college experience prepared her with the tools for teaching, Julie response was that she had a gazillion examples. What she did not feel she was prepared for were the many forms for differentiating lessons to match student learning abilities. Terms such as: layered curriculum, layered lesson plans and curriculum compacting were new to her when she arrived in Pilot Mountain. She did say that she applied her college experience in the form of applying the idea multiple intelligences when allowing alternative options in assignment, for instance, when one of her students displayed a talent for drawing, she had him develop an assignment that incorporated his skill. She also mentioned Marzano’s work and Bloom’s Taxonomy as knowledge and skills which she applied to her teaching based on her college experience.
I asked Julie if she thought the History Department prepared her for using history thinking skills when teaching her students and she was able to recount a lesson where she had her students create artwork based the Great Depression. The students gathered pictures of poverty so they could see how poverty had changed over time.
Julie admitted that she was fortunate in that the teacher she replaced left all of her files for Julie to use. That was a great starting place for any teacher. I was also fortunate to be on the hiring team for one of my replacements at Circle High School and I had the time to show him my store of resources, with the advice to use what he could and clean out the rest. He already had ten years of teaching experience under his belt so he probably had sufficient material to start in a new school, but for a new teacher to find a treasure trove of material used by a successful teacher is immensely helpful. Julie also benefitted from a supportive principal who was always ready to help out anyway it was possible for him to do so. I met him when I checked into the office that morning and some of his first words in greeting were to send more students like Julie to his school. Her colleagues at Pilot Mountain Middle School also reached out to help her with content and teaching materials.
Next, I asked her about teaching gifted students. One of the other teachers in this study commented that while she had a decent amount of preparation for teaching special education students, she had very little background in teaching gifted students. Julie said when she was first hired her principal mentioned AG students, a term totally unfamiliar to Julie. AG meant academically gifted. When it was obvious that she did not know what that meant, the principal said she had to be certified to teach those students and that required 12 credit hours of coursework in her first year of teaching, which she completed. Twelve hours would be a burden for any beginning teacher. Added to that load, Julie was also a swimming coach. I asked her if college prepared her for a work load such as the one she experienced in her first year and she said that student teaching helped, but so did watching experienced teachers at her school staying until 6 pm preparing for the next day or future lessons. They were great role models who helped keep her motivated.
Classroom management was another area where experience in the classroom is a better teacher than just classes focusing on the theory of behavior management. Julie said she had to build her skill from the ground up. She did not dismiss the theory, but remarked that theory did not translate into practice, especially when trying to create different management practices for different groups of students in different classes. Her experiences in the middle school in Grand Rapids with high levels of poverty and with more affluent students in Caledonia gave her a broad spectrum when constructing her management practices. Her students in Pilot Mountain were across the socio-economic spectrum and she said that her two experiences, student-assisting in a city middle school and student-teaching in a suburban high school made her more marketable and better prepared to handle a diverse set of circumstances.
Pearls of Wisdom, 2008
Julie’s first pearl was that it would have been good for her to have more practice with the age of students she was now teaching. She did have one semester in a middle school, but more would have been better. Julie suggested more volunteer hours or more observations involving more teachers and more age groups. As the “volunteer hours” process existed when Julie was a student, she was able to count swimming lessons as her contribution toward the university requirement and she said being in a pool with five swimmers at a time did not constitute the same experience as being in a classroom full of 7th graders for a full day.
An idea was promoted in meetings between the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the College of Education at GVSU multiple times to increase the contact time for future teachers and there were some attempts at situating classes in school buildings themselves, but even that experience would not guarantee that a future teacher would be matched with the same age group as their first job. There really is no substitute for the real thing.
As previously mentioned, Julie was a Social Studies major with a teachable minor in ELA. During her student teaching semester, she was unhappy that she was placed in an English/Language Arts classroom after having her teacher-assisting semester in her major. Looking back on that experience, now that she was teaching English the whole year, she saw that experience in her second placement as beneficial. Since Julie’s time at GVSU the History Department made the decision to increase the number of credit hours required in the major in areas where weaknesses in content had impacted students’ scores on state teacher certification tests. The bulk of the major has always been history credits, with students deciding whether to have their emphasis, or added coursework, in history, economics, political science or geography. There were a few teachers in this study who opted, like Julie, to have a teachable minor outside of the Social Studies area, e.g. computer science, English or physical education. As the program is now constructed, teachable minors outside of the Social Studies area dictate even more credit hours, more semesters (unless students opted for summer coursework or semester overloads), and therefore more expense. An argument was made that our students might become less marketable and, also, if Julie did not have her ELA minor, she would not have had the latitude of accepting her job in Pilot Mountain. On top of that, principals, many times, are faced with filling slots in their schools’ curriculum with the teachers at hand and that means staff with flexible credentials. Julie did admit that she was scrambling to teach herself how to best serve her students when she became an English teacher, and without the help of her fellow teachers her job would have been made that much more difficult. The question is how best to prepare teachers for the content they are going to teach without the prior knowledge of the needs of the administration and the given curriculum choices. There is no perfect solution for this challenge. At one point the State of Michigan was leaning toward removing the Social Studies major, based on its reading of the “No Child Left Behind” mandates, and having students declare straight majors in History, Economics, Political Science or Geography. That idea might have worked for larger schools with large faculties where teachers might only teach History all day long or any of the other subjects. For many medium or smaller school districts, that choice is just not an option. Not only do teachers have to teach all of the subject areas within the Social Studies, but many times, like Julie and when I started my career, they might have to teach in a subject area outside of their major.
Julie’s next pearl was for new teachers to find a colleague who teaches the same coursework that they do and become their best friend. “Wrack their brain because it’s so hard your first year…you’ll spend hours just lesson planning” (Julie, v.t., 2008, p.8). Even with that help, Julie admitted that she would spend hours and hours creating what seemed to be a great lesson plan only to see it flop in practice. Given an opportunity to discuss lesson plan ideas with experienced teachers lessens the opportunity for failure.
Julie’s last pearl was not to put anything off until another time. When she first began her career at Pilot Mountain Middle School an experienced teacher told her, “Don’t ever leave your desk with stuff on it” (Julie, v.t., 2008, p.9). After the long days in the first year of teaching it was hard for her to follow that advice but she felt better for it.
Interview, 2015
Julie was no longer at Pilot Mountain Middle School in 2015. She spent three and a half years at Pilot Mountain and then went to college full time to obtain her degree to follow through with her goal of obtaining a Master’s degree in Higher Education, Student Affairs and served as a graduate assistant at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. She then spent four years working at Forsyth Technical Community College in Winston-Salem, just down the highway from Pilot Mountain. She moved back to Michigan in January of 2015 and was working in Student Services at Washtenaw Community College in Michigan. At of the time of this writing Julie was employed at the University of Michigan as an advisor in the Psychology department.
Defining Success, 2015
Through all these changes of jobs and locations Julie still thought GVSU prepared her for success. Her college work made her transitions between jobs and locales “fairly easy” and she described it as a kind of problem-solving scenario. She knew how to focus on long term goals and what it took to get there. The change in the ages of the students she served still came down to how best help them succeed, no matter what their age or location.
Her job at the time of the 2015 interview was leading student orientation for the community college and training student ambassadors who led tours around the campus. She taught leadership development, soft skills development and professionalism, with the emphasis on taught. Like every one of the people in this study who left the regular classroom, they all still considered themselves teachers. Julie also said a critical factor in achieving her graduate assistantship at UNC-Greensboro was the fact that she came to the college with teaching experience. She was hired to develop curriculum and train peer educators for helping their peers recognize the signs of suicide. She likened that experience to helping her middle school students teach each other in her classes at Pilot Mountain.
I asked her if it was more difficult in her present occupation in evaluating her success, versus success in a middle school with the help of student grades and administration evaluations. She admitted that it was more difficult because her audience changed all the time and her best measurements were survey data based on student satisfaction or perceived growth. She also used quizzes based on the online orientation. Finally, Julie said there were professional standards for college orientation and so she had data points to follow based on those standards. Those standards were part of the accreditation process, which she experienced at Forsyth Tech in North Carolina.
Overall, Julie thought training for teaching was good preparation for her present position. She developed strong public speaking skills, created successful curriculum, understood learning outcomes and how to evaluate those outcomes. She added a kind of humorous comment: she still had to find tactful ways in communicating with parents. She had to work within FERPA[3] guidelines, unlike working with middle school parents, but Julie still needed the same skills in discussing with parents the challenges their students faced while attending college.
I asked Julie why she left K-12 education for higher education and her answer made perfect sense. She felt that her strength lay in soft skill development and student growth, and based on her positive experience at Grand Valley, she wanted to return to the higher education environment. She also admitted to the exhaustion she encountered when teaching middle school-aged children, while being a self-professed introvert. Having to put herself “out there” on a daily basis and continually focusing 30 middle school students every period in a classroom is exhausting for anyone. She knew that she had grown to be less introverted and had developed better communication skills but part of the development had to do with the change in audience. For the most part the college-age students she worked with wanted to be at her orientations, were interested in what she was telling them so were a willing audience. Lastly, even with guidelines and standards, Julie wanted more freedom when it came to planning curriculum versus the guidelines that many states impose on teachers which are tied to high stakes, standardized tests.
Julie last comment concerning her change in occupations was her memory of someone telling her that, “The day that you don’t want to get up and go to work is the day that you need to leave” (Julie, v.t., 2015, p.8). She had several days in a row where she felt like that way at Pilot Mountain and knew it was time to move on. She did admit that she did not want to be part of the statistic concerning the number of new teachers leaving the profession, but even with these thoughts, she realized that her decision to leave the classroom was the correct one.
I have met other teachers who felt the same way, but for whatever reason, still came to work. Both they and their students suffered from their decision to stay. The teachers were unhappy with what they were doing and their students easily recognized and recognized that unhappiness. Julie further offered some sound advice to future teachers, and I offered the same advice to my students at GVSU: if you found out you do not like what you do after you graduate, what is your back-up plan? I had more than a few of my students admit to me that teaching was their back-up plan and I did my best to dissuade them from this point of view. Teaching is not a back-up plan. It takes too much dedication day-by-day, year-by-year to be a second career choice if your heart is not in helping your students learn and loving what you teach them. Luckily for Julie, she realized, even though she was recognized by her principal at Pilot Mountain Middle School as being a good teacher, that her heart and skills lay elsewhere.
Her comments on leaving teaching made me reflect on a part of all my classes while I taught at Grand Valley. In an effort to challenge my students and make them aware of the number of new teachers leaving the profession, based on what Julie said, I may have created guilt in my students’ minds when some of them decided to leave teaching. Perhaps, instead of discussing the reality of those numbers, I should have made the comment that I would do whatever was in my power in helping them be successful.
Evaluations, 2015
Julie said feedback from her principal and the results from state testing were two of the ways in which she evaluated her teaching in North Carolina. She did say that her principal told her to “take it (state test scores) with a grain a salt” (Julie, v.t., 2015, p.11). Julie was somewhat surprised by his comment because such weight is put on those scores around the United States, but she thought it was his way of saying that he knew she was doing a good job and if the scores did not accurately represent that fact, then she should not be worried.
Her formal evaluations took the form of 30 minute drop-ins, not uncommon based on the comments from the majority of the people involved in this study. Informally, her colleagues had a good idea of what kind of teacher she was based on the ideas she shared with them concerning activities in her classroom, but she admitted that she really did not know exactly what they thought of her teaching or how she successful she was in the classroom. One scenario she provided was if her students came to her with high scores early in the year and left that year with the same scores, what did that say about her teaching? If their scores improved, then there was some idea that she helped with their growth. Julie said that she was her own greatest critic as to her success and abilities and we had a good laugh about that self-criticism now that she could reflect back on it and see how hard she was on herself.
Pearls of Wisdom, 2015
Julie cautioned future teachers not to dwell on being a statistic and if they felt that they needed to change their profession, then they should follow through with that desire. She supported the idea that people should be willing to take risks in order to fulfill their dreams, such as when she quit her full-time teaching job to go back to school full-time for her Master’s. Julie reinforced the idea of finding a good mentor. She still considered Professor Scott Stabler at Grand Valley her mentor, as she did her supervisor at her last position before moving back to Michigan.
Julie reinforced the idea that teachers in training should realize the importance of collaborating with colleagues on curriculum design and implementation. She did not remember many opportunities for that type of collegiality during her undergrad years. She said she felt awkward, at first, when introduced to the idea of Professional Learning Communities in North Carolina. At first, she felt that she had to create all her curriculum and lessons on her own in showing her creativity and ability. She overcame those feelings after a while and grew to appreciate the combined skills and efforts in working with other teachers, many of them with more years of experience than she had.
Another pearl Julie shared was that future teachers need to know that they should be leaders in their classes and leaders in their schools. Based on her knowledge and ability, and despite the fact that she considered herself to be an introvert, she was called upon to lead professional development for her school. She referred to a book by John Maxwell, “A 360 Degree Leader”[4]. Julie said in that book Maxwell describes that different levels of leadership that exist and that people can lead from the middle of an organization and that leadership should not be limited to only high status people.
- https://www.grammarly.com/blog/coordinating-conjunctions/. accessed April 8, 2020. ↵
- https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/Docs/InterventionReports/wwc_projectcriss_061510.pdf, accessed April 10, 2020. ↵
- https://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa/index.html, accessed April 13, 2020. ↵
- https://www.amazon.com/360-Degree-Leader-Developing-Organization/dp/B082TMZRSX/ref=sr_1_20?crid=3I15M2H64VVK8&dchild=1&keywords=john maxwell leadership books&qid=1586876680&s=books&sprefix=John Max,stripbooks,174&sr=1-20, accessed April 14, 2020. ↵
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