On your mark … get set … learn

It’s a review day for McCarthy’s eighth graders, a chance to reinforce everything they’ve learned in the last few weeks about the human body’s various systems. It’s 8:11 on a Friday morning, and Mary-frances McCarthy sits in her silent classroom at Denver’s Bruce Randolph Middle School, going over the day in her mind, thinking about the review she has planned for her science students.

Any minute, the bell will ring and more than two dozen seventh-graders will bound in, and she knows a kind of controlled chaos will set in as the students move around the room to a series of stations that she has set up on the body’s various functions. She has calculated down to the minute how long it should take the students at each station. She knows it will be, in a sense, grueling as she bounces around the room, helping one group of students and then another.


Listen as Mary-frances McCarthy, a recent graduate of Metro State’s Urban Teacher Partnership program, talks about life as a teacher at Denver’s Bruce Randolph Middle School. “Today is going to be one of those days,” McCarthy says in the calm just before class. “It’s always fun for the kids to do this stuff—you get some of those ‘aha’ moments, which are great.

“But a review day is very tiring for a teacher.”

The work will be something different for her students. Eight stations are scattered among the black-topped science tables, each one designed to reinforce everything she’s been teaching in recent weeks. A chance for the kids to learn in a new way, whether it’s arranging the various words associated with the digestive system—from “mouth” to “out”—or seeing how the carbon dioxide they expel from their lungs reacts with a special chemical.

The bell sounds—a prolonged, telephone-like ring—and she rushes into the hall, joking with students in the moments before class begins.


McCarthy is in her second full-year as a teacher at Bruce Randolph, a school in a gritty northeast Denver neighborhood. A boarded-up warehouse and a used car lot sit down the street, and railroad tracks cut across the southern edge of the school’s property. But there are hints of renewal, too: a new row of affordable homes two blocks away and signs of rehabilitation among the neighborhood’s aging houses.

McCarthy is a 2006 graduate of Metropolitan State College of Denver, and she is here because of a program called the Urban Teacher Partnership (UTP). The federally funded project is aimed at equipping young teachers with the tools they need to work in inner-city schools—and at helping districts find them, hire them and keep them.

Denver Public Schools is like many big-city districts. It struggles to attract and retain top-flight teachers to its most challenging schools, ones where poverty, language barriers and life on the streets make it infinitely more difficult to reach students.

“For many years, as a country, we’ve faced a chronic shortage of teachers, in high-needs schools in particular,” says Michael Bennet, who spent more than three years as DPS superintendent before being appointed in January to a vacant seat in the U.S. Senate by Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter.

Bennet sees the problem as a result of several factors. It’s a hard job. The pay isn’t great. And more work needs to be done to make sure teachers have the skills they need to succeed in urban schools.

“You really need people who believe the work they’re doing is the most important work anyone can do, which I happen to believe,” Bennet says. “We have to find ways as schools and also as the district as a whole to make sure that we’re operating in a way that keeps that sense of idealism alive.”

Enter the Urban Teacher Partnership.

Born in 2004 out of a $9.5 million U.S. Department of Education grant, the program is a partnership between Metro State, DPS and the Mayor’s Office for Education and Children. The grant covers some of the costs of Metro State faculty and DPS teachers who develop the curriculum for budding teachers, supervise students as they work in the field, and design training programs to get them ready for the classroom.

The ultimate goal: Prepare a new wave of middle school and high school teachers for urban schools.

Twenty-six seventh graders grab their chairs, and as they chatter, McCarthy, alternately tough and fun, takes charge.

“Five … four … three … two … one,” she says as the students chatter. “If you want to wait after the bell, that’s fine with me.” Goof off, she warns them, and they will pay, maybe with a bad grade on the upcoming test.

“Today is not a day to fool around, guys,” she says. “This is for you. I know the answers to the test.”

She explains the process. The students will break into groups of three and four, then visit stations scattered around the room. At some stations, there will be worksheets. At others, they will find laminated cards to arrange. When they are done, she tells them, they should quiz each other.

McCarthy picks up a stopwatch.

“On your mark … get set … learn,” she says, and the students scramble from their chairs and split into small groups.


McCarthy moves among her students, almost all of whom are Latino or African American, alternately listening and joining in. At some tables, Spanish peppers the talk.

As she had planned the day, McCarthy had thought she would assign the students to their groups, separating friends. At the last minute, she changed her mind, letting the kids pick their groups themselves.

It works.

“Miss,” Priscilla Duron asks from the circulation station, “is the heart an organ?”

“Yes,” McCarthy answers.

Told you,” Armand Watson says, and all the kids in the group bust out laughing.

It is the kind of moment she is after, one where the children drive the learning, where a discussion among friends leads to discovery.

At 8:59 a.m., the students have been through all the stations. They are back in their seats, and McCarthy passes out progress reports.

“This is the grade you have earned,” she says. “This is not the grade I have earned for you. If you are mad at me, you should be mad at you.”

At 9:02 a.m., the bell rings and noise fills the room—backpacks being zipped up, chairs sliding on the tile floor, students yammering.

“OK, guys,” McCarthy shouts, “have a fantastic weekend.”

The scene repeats itself again and again. Finally, 10:41 a.m. arrives. The bell ends McCarthy’s last class of the morning, and she’s ready for a two-hour break. But there’s no relaxation—she has papers to grade and a meeting with another teacher. Her lunch will be leftover spaghetti pie, warmed in a microwave, and a few swigs from her blue water bottle.

A little later, she sits at her desk in the empty classroom, contemplating the path that brought her to this school.

“I love science,” she says. “I love to teach science to different people. I was always that student who was learning new fun facts and teaching them to my friends.”

It wasn’t always that way. In junior high school, McCarthy hated science. That changed in 10th grade, when she connected with a biology teacher who made the classroom fun, who told stories and laughed.

“I’m trying to be that teacher, where you’re not serious all the time,” she says. “They have to see you as human, too.”

In the classroom, satisfaction comes when she sees the light bulb go on in a student’s head.

“When they have their ‘aha’ moments, it’s the greatest thing in the world to me,” she says. “You can spend 30 minutes explaining something to them five different ways and the fifth way they get it, and it’s like, ‘finally.’”

The Urban Teacher Partnership program is open to Metro State students working toward teacher licensure. Although some scholarship money is available, the main thrust of the program is to offer the training budding teachers need to succeed at inner-city schools.

“It is more important than ever to develop ways to find, train and keep high-quality teachers in our cities,” says Esther Rodriguez, director and principal investigator for the Urban Teacher Partnership. “UTP is addressing this need.”

Students accepted into the program must complete 180 hours of work in the field at one of eight DPS “urban apprentice schools” that are UTP partners. That field work can take a lot of different forms. Classroom observation. Working with a teacher. Meeting with small groups of students.

That work comes before a full semester of student teaching.


The program is one option for students who want to one day teach in urban middle and high schools. Although students accepted into the program are not guaranteed that a job will be waiting for them, they get the chance to be out and working in urban schools, where they can gather the kind of experience that can help them land a position after graduation.

“It gives them a leg up,” Rodriquez says.

Although the federal grant expired this fall, the program’s work will go on, including developing and hosting Great Teachers for Our City Schools, its annual national summit on recruiting, training and retaining quality teachers. Held April 1-3, this year’s summit, which drew more than 200 educators and policy makers, featured Geoffrey Canada, president and CEO for the Harlem Children’s Zone, Inc. Canada is nationally recognized for his pioneering work helping children and families in Harlem and as a passionate advocate for education reform.

To date, 248 students have gone through the UTP program. At least 23 have jobs in Denver schools, Rodriguez says.

One of those success stories is Melodie Koss, who, like McCarthy, was hired at Bruce Randolph in the middle of the 2006-07 school year.

“I always knew that I wanted to teach in an urban school,” Koss says. “I feel like I definitely found my niche.”

After her field work at Kepner Middle School and South High, Koss was ready to step into the classroom at Bruce Randolph.

Now she is sharing her experience with other Metro State students, who frequently conduct their observations in her classroom.

Kristin Waters, the principal at Bruce Randolph, has hired eight or nine UTP graduates—and except for two who left to have children, all of them are still teaching there. The field work and student teaching they did in urban Denver schools prepared them for the work they are now doing, she says.

“They knew what they were getting into when they applied at Bruce Randolph,” Waters says. “They knew what the expectations were.”

It’s 2:10 p.m., and McCarthy’s work in the classroom is nearly finished. She has dealt with 133 students this day. She has bounded around the room more times than she can count, talking about the respiratory system and the digestive system, about the essential ingredients of a hypothesis.

At this moment, she stops before three students.

“OK, so what system is this?” she asks.

“Respiratory system,” Arturo Ramirez answers.

“Respiratory system—very good,” McCarthy says. “What does the respiratory system do?” She is met with silence. She lets it hang for a moment, then points to a drawing of the human body.

“OK, these are the lungs here,” McCarthy says. “So what does the respiratory system do?”

“Breathes,” answers Marisol Duron.

“Helps you breathe. Very good,” McCarthy says, before moving on.

At 2:30 p.m. the bell—the last one of the day—announces the end of the class.

“Put up your chairs,” McCarthy says, “and have a great weekend.”

The students stream out.

“You’re going to have a great weekend,” she says again, this time to Jameela Kabir.

A moment later, the classroom is empty once more.

“And that’s a wrap,” McCarthy says.

Journalism graduate Kevin Vaughan, is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated staff writer at The Denver Post.


Read about Leroy Montoya, another of Metro State’s Urban Teacher Partnership graduates, and his plans to give back to the Denver community where he grew up.