Teachers Learn Too at Tigard Summer School

A Shared Signal for Learning

To quiet a roomful of students, whether wiggly third graders itching for recess or chattering teachers-to-be decompressing after a morning of tutoring, Amanda Sanford has a plan that works every time. The Portland State University special education professor places one finger to her lips and, with her other hand high above her head, makes a peace sign. In the classrooms of Tigard’s Metzger Elementary, where 20-plus future special education teachers and their professors have landed this month to tutor nearly 100 students in foundational math and literacy skills, everyone, from age 6 to 60, understands that means it’s time to use your “peace voice.”

The shared signal is part of the overlapping learning journeys unfolding at Metzger this August, for students and aspiring teachers alike. Elementary school students from Tigard and Tualatin who need help catching up to their peers in reading and math fill four classrooms, benefiting from a much-needed back-to-school refresher in a state where post-pandemic academic recovery has consistently lagged behind the rest of the country. They’re taught by Portland State students who are training to be special education teachers in a state that is perpetually short of people to fill those jobs.

“This allows them to hit the ground running (when they start work in school systems),” Sanford said. “They’re able to see how best to give feedback to the kids, and able to take on a small group right away.”

But the initiative’s future is cloudy. Its funding was among billions of dollars in federal education funding for educator professional development frozen by the Trump administration this summer. Money for K-12 spending has since been released under bipartisan pressure from lawmakers, but university-level grants like Portland State’s are still under review, even though Congress has already approved the funding.

That means, Sanford said, she and her colleagues won’t find out until the end of September whether or not their grant money will be available for the upcoming academic year to cover faculty salaries during the summer tutoring program. The money also covers tuition for the teachers in training, payments that are due before September 30.

“This funding is directly paying for the training of special education teachers for which there is a major teaching shortage,” Sanford said. “Districts are having to hire unlicensed teachers for kids with the greatest needs. This funding cut means it will be harder for future special education teachers to pay their tuition.”

Mornings at Metzger

Every morning, the elementary school students are sorted into small groups and matched with a Portland State student who leads them through two hours of foundational literacy and math exercises. “Which way does p go?” one of the students asked teacher candidate Vinh Pham on a recent Tuesday. He hesitated momentarily, weighing how to answer, then looked up and caught the eye of one of his professors. “Does the letter p look away from the word or toward the word?” Pham replied. “Check your p with my p. If it’s backwards, I’ll help you fix it.”

Only about 15 of the 90 or so students in the Metzger program qualified for special education services, Tigard-Tualatin leaders said. But Shaheen Munir-McHill, an associate professor of practice at Portland State, said a secondary goal of the Metzger residency is to ready PSU’s special education teacher graduates to work in any classroom setting. Traditionally special education teachers have worked one-on-one with their students, but more Oregon school districts are experimenting with a model that keeps special education students with their mainstream peers for most or all of the school day, meaning special education teachers are more often co-teaching with their general education colleagues.

The West Linn-Wilsonville School District has long had such an inclusion model in place, as does Evergreen Public Schools in Vancouver, Wash. Portland Public Schools has a number of such “neighborhood inclusion schools,” mostly clustered in North Portland. The district has paused plans for a wider rollout because the model is complicated to implement, given the cost of hiring more special education teachers and support staff to work in mainstream classrooms, Director of Student Support Service Jey Buno told The Oregonian/OregonLive this summer.

Metzger Principal Jessica Swindle, who oversees a school where about 40% of students are from Hispanic or Latino backgrounds, said the collaboration with Portland State paid off for her students last summer, in a district where only 45% of third graders were rated as “proficient” in reading and math on state tests given in 2023-2024, the most recent year from which data is available.

“On average, kids were showing gains of [reading] two more words correctly [per minute] per week, which is ambitious growth,” Swindle said.

As a bonus, the student-teachers and their professors haven’t cost the Tigard-Tualatin School District anything, though the district has used summer learning money from the state to support daily operations of the program, including a complicated web of school busing routes.

The lack of certainty over the federal funding for the program means at a minimum that it will be harder to plan for next year’s program. At a maximum, it means the program may not continue unless an alternate funding source can be found, Sanford said.

“We need this funding to train special education teachers well and provide needed literacy and math support to elementary school students,” she said. “It has a direct relationship on both the quality and number of teachers trained, and on the math and literacy learning of the students we are currently serving, as well as their future students. Without it, many of these training opportunities could be eliminated.”

A Special Education Shortage

For Portland State, the pop-up residency at Metzger is key to the ongoing statewide effort to increase the number of special education teachers in Oregon, particularly those who speak Spanish. With just a few weeks left until school starts, the Teacher Standards and Practices Commission’s job dashboard, which is not an exhaustive list of vacancies, currently shows nearly 200 open special education positions across the state, many more than any other single licensed discipline. By comparison, there were 125 open positions for school counselors statewide, and 56 job ads for math teachers.

During the most recent session, state lawmakers acknowledged how difficult special education jobs are to fill by setting aside almost $9 million for one-time bonuses to teachers and support staff who spend at least three-quarters of their time working with special needs students. However, teachers and paraeducators have said that when spread across all school personnel, the extra money amounted to only a few hundred dollars apiece.

At Metzger, the summer teachers are in their final year of the two-year program at Portland State and will hit the job market next summer. This fall, they are headed for student-teaching placements in classrooms around the metro area, where they will be matched with a mentor teacher but won’t have their professors around to provide immediate feedback.

“So this will allow them to hit the ground running, to know right away that they are able to take on a small group and learn how to give feedback to kids,” Munir-McHill said.

It’s a crash course in classroom management, on-the-ground training in the hundreds of tiny, unseen decisions a teacher makes every day, on the fly, that keep a classroom running – with their professors still around to provide real-time feedback on their choices.

Adjustments in Real Time

During a recent morning at Metzger, Esparza Brown and the other Portland State professors moved around the classrooms, observing as student-teachers went through scripted literacy lessons with their charges. With the lesson plans set in advance for the PSU students, the emphasis was on other classroom tasks: how and when to give out praise and reinforcement, making sure materials like white boards and markers added to learning instead of being distractions, and the all-important seating arrangements. (Hint: Best friends don’t do well next to each other, students who need extra help should sit closest to the teacher and everyone needs a clear line of sight to your white board or computer.)

At teaching candidate Sabrina Costa Evans’ table, Sanford watched her use a gameboard to keep students focused on reading words that end with -ain, like gain, or main. Good behavior was rewarded with a stamp; a gameboard full of stamps could earn an end-of-lesson sticker. Sanford, sensing a looming loss of focus, leaned in to help, suggesting another behavior management tool, a teacher/student scorecard.

“Once I see everyone’s eyes on the teacher, I’m going to give you all a student point,” she said, and four pairs of eyes swiveled in Costa Evans’ direction.

By 10:30 a.m., after a concentrated hour and a half of learning, students lined up at the doors to get a snack and head to recess, the PSU students visibly exhaled, and started downloading about their morning.

“Did anyone feel overwhelmed by behaviors today?” Sanford asked, and about half the hands in the room went up, kicking off a round of collective problem-solving.

“I had a girl today, and it was her first day,” student-teacher Therese Deslippe said. “She sat next to one of my other students who really likes to help and is warm and friendly. They also share Spanish as their first language, and so they were able to help each other with their work.”

Sanford followed up: “Oftentimes, if we are working with multilingual learners, and you have two students who are speaking the same language, it can be really helpful for them to sit next to each other,” as long as they aren’t distracting each other.

Student-teacher Jamie Young said she’d found it helpful to give her students a few minutes each morning to free draw before getting down to business, finding it helped them settle down and gave her insights into what they love and what was on their minds.

“That’s great,” Munir-McHill said. “Those kinds of drawings, or all about me pages, they can give you insight as to what your kids are willing to be motivated by and what they are willing to work for, so you can plan for what their rewards might be and you can make connections with them.”

Student-teachers should be on high alert for their charges’ energy to wane, especially as the days go by and everyone settles in, Sanford said. And so she gave them their own homework assignment for the next day’s series of lessons.

“What I want is everyone to figure out what your strategy is going to be to give your students’ feedback,” she said. “It needs to be something concrete and visual. When kids start getting off track and we don’t have a strategy and a tool to use, we often times just try to redirect, or continue on, and we’ve lost the kids. So we need a strategy to bring everyone back.”