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The 'You Are There' Initiative By Royal Van Horn Illustration © 1998 by Mario Noche

OVER THE past two years, I have garnered the necessary resources to implement a program at the University of North Florida that revolutionizes preservice and inservice field-based teacher education. The program will also affect classrooms at all levels around the world. I call it the "you are there" initiative. Before I get to the necessary details of who, what, when, where, why, and how, let me paint a word picture of the best innovation ever.

On this particular day, most of the undergraduates in General Methods manage to get to my class in the "electronic classroom" at the University of North Florida 10 minutes early.1 When I walk to the high-tech podium, I activate the touch panel that controls everything and dial a video conferencing unit located in a first-grade classroom at Twin Lakes Academy, a local elementary school. The classroom I dial is only one of many I can reach at Twin Lakes and at Andrew Robinson Elementary. It is the classroom of a master first-grade teacher. On the electronic classroom's giant projection screen, my students watch as 23 or so first-graders greet the teacher at the door and independently get themselves organized for their school day.

Since my students are not at all adept at observing "expert practice," I frequently interject comments like "Did you notice how the teacher did such and such?" Or "Carefully watch the girl in the red dress for a few minutes." Coincidentally, I have invited students from a pre-K/primary course and their professor to join my class for this "you are there" activity. Throughout the activity, the visiting professor keeps commenting to our combined classes that what they are watching has nothing to do with coincidence and everything to do with expert practice.

When neophytes get to watch the very best teachers there are, everything changes! For preservice and inservice teacher education, it just doesn't get any better than this.

In another set of classes at the university, Professor Bruce Gutknecht's reading methods students are similarly observing and video conferencing with a master third-grade teacher at Robinson Elementary. Since the project became operational only in May, Bruce has primarily worked with Robinson Elementary and I with Twin Lakes. We plan more cross-school involvement this fall. The populations of the two schools are quite different, and we believe it will profit our students to see master teachers in distinctly different settings.

The College of Education and Human Services at the University of North Florida is known in professional circles for its excellent field-based urban teacher education programs. Our undergraduates are placed in schools for a two-semester "field" or "pre-internship" experience prior to student teaching in their last semester. Every semester, about 350 elementary and secondary teacher education students spend 50 hours observing, assisting, and working with children in actual classrooms spread throughout northeast Florida. There is one drawback to this program: not all 350 students get to work with master teachers. Some students, in fact, get assigned to very poor teachers.

From the point of view of a General Methods instructor, there are several other attributes of our pre-internship program that are problematic. First, since every student goes to a different classroom in a different school, there is no common experiential base for us to discuss when they return to my class at the university. And invariably a few of my students will get assigned to work with the "ditto queen or king," who does seatwork all day long; with the "shouter," who has major classroom management problems; or with various other teachers whom they shouldn't be imitating. More important, since my students are not particularly good observers at this stage of their professional development, most of the subtleties of good teaching go unnoticed.

Those of us who have devoted a lifetime to studying the teaching/learning process know how intricate and subtle expert practice really is. The "greeting the students" episode described above is one example. Sharon, the master teacher (who just happens to be my wife), has students greet her at the classroom door with a handshake, a high five, or a hug. All the children choose to greet her with a hug. Remember, these are first-graders. When we use the video conferencing setup to visit Denise Findley's fourth-grade classroom, you don't see many hugs. My student observers miss things as obvious as this.

As another example, Sharon has trained her students to get themselves organized for the school day by following these instructions: 1) go to your seat; 2) put your homework on your name tag at the top of your table; 3) take out a pencil; 4) put everything else from your backpack - including your library books - into your desk; 5) take your backpack to your book cubby; 6) finish the warm-up sheet that was waiting for you at your desk; and 7) if you get these things done quickly, you will have time to take your library book out of your desk and enjoy reading it. Most of the children finish their warm-up sheets and are reading their library books before the bell rings to start the day. Sharon has just managed to buy herself an extra 10 minutes of work time before the school day has even started. Of course, there is nothing magical about any of this, but Sharon did have to work with the children for many weeks at the beginning of the year to teach them to begin the day this way. My point is that my general methods students would have missed all these subtleties had I not been able to point them out via video conferencing. They also would not have noticed the hundreds of children's books spread all about the classroom or the way the children enjoyed reading them.

On another day, we visited Denise's classroom of 31 fourth-graders. Only a few of my students noticed the larger fourth-grade class size (Sharon had 23 students). At the beginning of the school day, Sharon's students worked independently for about 15 minutes, while Denise's worked for about 45 minutes. This difference also went unnoticed until I pointed it out to my class. Denise had unexpected visitors the day we watched her begin her day. Denise successfully negotiated the interruption, simultaneously being courteous to her guests and supervising her class. It was good for my students to see that teachers need to be highly flexible.

Now for the who, what, when, where, and how. The technology that makes the "you are there" initiative possible is in essence quite simple. The classroom-based video conferencing units are about the size of a briefcase and sit next to a 32-inch television set atop an AV cart. Also mounted on the cart is a small TV camera, a microphone, and an NT-1 unit that connects the whole rig to three special phone lines. Specifically, we are using RSI's Video Flyer computerless, 384-kbs, ISDN video conferencing engines.2 These units have a hand-held remote control that makes them operate somewhat like a TV or VCR - no computer skills necessary. The roll-about units can be taken to any classroom in a school and plugged into one of the schools' extra network wall jacks to which we have patched the 3 ISDN lines. If the teacher leaves the TV off, the video conference goes one way from school to university. We can therefore visit the classrooms without being intrusive or disruptive. If the teacher turns the TV on, the video conference becomes two-way and interactive.

The electronic classroom at the university has different but compatible equipment that also operates over three ISDN telephone lines. The main difference is that the video at the university is displayed on a large, 6- x 8-foot screen video projector that makes children's images nearly life-sized and much easier to observe.

Establishing the collaborative arrangements between the university, Duval County Schools, Twin Lakes Academy, and Andrew Robinson Elementary School took a great deal of time and cooperation on everyone's part. I wrote the original proposal in September 1998, and it was discussed and changed in a series of meetings throughout the fall semester. A consensus "memo of understanding" was developed in February 1999, and the installation of telephone lines and the configuration and installation of equipment took place in March and April. Both elementary schools and the university were finally online and functional in early May, so we had only about four weeks to work with the project before the schools dismissed for the summer.

Here are a few of the formal and informal details of the "you are there" collaboration. The project is funded by an Urban Community Service Collaborative grant to the university.

In total, the equipment for the two schools cost about $20,000, the phone bill is about $420 a month, and the cooperating master teachers receive a small honorarium for planning and consulting with the university about the project.3 The teachers involved in the project were selected by Bruce Gutknecht and me, in collaboration with the two principals - Barbara Langley at Twin Lakes and Ruth Cox at Robinson. Bruce and I plan carefully with the teachers prior to video conferencing to make the experiences meaningful to both the elementary students and the university students. We never make unannounced or unplanned calls, and we try to be unobtrusive and polite virtual visitors.

As we gain experience with "you are there" activities, the video conferences will no doubt become more varied. Last spring's activities were mostly with large groups. This fall, we will begin to do more small-group and one-on-one activities. And since the units at the schools can call any other similar unit in the area, I suspect that school-to-school conferences, kid-to-kid conferences, and school-to-business or school-to-museum conferences will begin to happen. This fall I plan to begin a series of "learning community" video conferences that will assemble a diverse group of teachers, university faculty members, administrators, and others to discuss current educational issues.

Early in the project, several people proposed that we videotape the conferences and use the tapes for inservice activities. We are steadfastly against this idea for several reasons. First, the video is not of high enough quality to undergo editing. Second, the spontaneous nature of the "you are there" approach would be lost. And perhaps more important, videotaping is more threatening to teachers and students and requires media release forms.

Currently, the "you are there" initiative has an almost handcrafted nature. A collegial relationship exists between the teachers, the principals, other school staff members, and Bruce and me. The relationship is quite trusting. We are dedicated to observation, discussion, and camaraderie, and we avoid evaluation. Obviously, teachers and faculty members are bound to make mistakes and even to do questionable things. Since we have such accomplished master teachers involved in the project, very few such incidents occur. However, such considerations lead me to one early conclusion: it would not be wise to expand this program to include all regular and adjunct faculty members of a college, who might connect haphazardly with classroom teachers without first establishing the close collegial relationships that now make the project work so well.

To illustrate just how many people had to work together to make this project happen, I need to acknowledge those involved. Thanks are due to Judy Till and Paul Smith of the MIS department of Duval County Schools. Both Judy and Paul made numerous visits to schools to help us get it all together. Principals Barbara Langley and Ruth Cox supported the project from its inception. Connie Gutknecht, vice principal at Robinson, also pitched in and was often called on to act as a liaison between school and university. Technology-savvy people in the schools, Pat Dedicos at Twin Lakes and John Phillips at Robinson, also lent invaluable assistance. Of course, the essence of the project was to let teacher education students virtually observe the expert practice of the master teachers: Sharon Van Horn (first grade) and Denise Findley (fourth grade) at Twin Lakes and Cynthia Diggett (third grade) at Robinson. And without the nearly continuous support and encouragement from the dean and associate dean of the College of Education and Human Services, Kathe Kasten and Tom Serwatka, the project would never have come about.

I can only hope that, within a few years, more and more teacher education students all over the world will be able to observe master teachers practicing their craft and to do so in the presence of a trained professional who can point out the subtleties.

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Last updated 24 September 1999
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