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How pessimism fuels our greatest teachers
Agnes Aleobua is identified in dBusiness, Detroit's premier business journal, as "a veteran of Teach for America."
You can view her Teaching Portfolio.
In another news item Aleobua said this:
Detroiter Agnes Aleobua is the principal of the new school and said new students can expect to go to school from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. before spending much of the night doing homework.
"I think holding that high standard for high expectations for homework completion, for completion of class work, really means that students come in knowing there is something different about this system."
By Brian Dickerson
The people behind Detroit's newest charter school think they've discovered the formula for great teaching -- and one of the key ingredients may surprise you.
University YES Academy, a charter school that will open its doors this September to 125 Detroit sixth-graders chosen by lottery, is the first attempt to export the nationally recognized model pioneered by YES Prep Houston, whose seven campuses now serve 5,400 inner city students there.
The Detroit school's first principal, a Cass Tech and University of Michigan alumna named Agnes Aleobua, says her academy will rise or fall on the strength of the 10 teachers she hopes to hire after a national search that began this month.
And she thinks she knows exactly what qualities she's looking for, thanks to a personality survey YES Prep Houston founders Chris Barbic and Jason Bernal conducted in an attempt to discover what the most successful teachers in their schools had in common.
"Surprisingly, one of the hallmarks was a pessimistic outlook," Bernal, now the chief operating officer of YES Prep Houston, told me during a visit to Detroit last week. A study by an outside consultant found that YES Prep's best teachers were significantly less optimistic than either the general population or their lower-performing colleagues, and concluded this pessimism led them "to take full responsibility for their actions and not to leave any outcomes to chance."
'Supertraits' of super teachers
Aleobua, who spent five months in Houston studying the YES Prep model in preparation for the opening of her own Detroit school, says good inner city teachers "are fixated on the possibility that things won't work out for their students."
"They're pessimistic about the current system, which is obviously broken when it comes to educating low-income and minority students," she said. "And there really isn't hope for those students unless we create something very different."
I'm not convinced pessimism is the right word to describe this sense of emergency. But it's certainly a far cry from the "I'm OK, you're OK" complacency that pervades many underachieving schools. This is more like "You're light years from OK, but I'm not quitting until I've exhausted every trick I know to get you there."
— Brian Dickerson
Detroit Free Press
2010-02-14
http://www.freep.com/article/20100214/COL04/2140402/1068/Opinion/How-pessimism-fuels-our-greatest-teachers
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