Imagine that you’ve just graduated from a four-year teacher-preparation program and are ready for your very first year of teaching. You’re facing 25 first graders, and you’re the one in charge. Nervous? Yes. Excited? Check. Ready for a pandemic to shut down your school? Uh, no. Have experience teaching online? Again, no.

Dayana Fauver took her first semester in stride. A 2019 graduate of the UNC Center for Urban Education teacher-preparation program, she felt up to the task when she first stepped into her bricks-and-mortar classroom at Sixth Avenue Elementary School in August of 2019. “My first year of teaching was a whirlwind,” said Fauver. “There were so many unknowns, but I had a lot of prior knowledge from my classes and experience working as a school volunteer that I could put to use,” she said.

It wasn’t just that, either. Her team of fellow teachers and the administrators at the school made her first year of teaching “amazing.” Fauver said, “You can always tell when you walk into a building if you are going to feel welcomed, and that’s exactly how I felt from day one.”

She saw that teamwork and community-building were important values at the school. She participated in exercises at her first staff retreat where she and the other teachers got to know one another, as well as what the school goals were for the upcoming year. “I just loved my team,” said Fauver. “They were there for me from the start, all the way to the end of school. If I had questions or if I needed anything, they were there.” Fauver also learned and practiced their golden rule, “We take care of ourselves and each other.”

“Where do we get the time to do everything they ask of us?” was one question she brought to her team. Time management was a big problem. But they told her it would always feel like that—you can’t get to it all. “Teachers are like magicians,” said Fauver. “They have so many different tips and tricks they pull out of their hats.” So she listened, and watched, and learned.

As she continued through the first term, she found that just because she wasn’t able to get to everything she had planned that day, it didn’t mean she wouldn’t get to it at all. “If I feel stressed, my students feel that stress, too,” said Fauver, “so I have to take my time, slow down when necessary, and make sure they understand. If they don’t, we can’t progress to the next learning objective. The content builds on itself.”

At UNC Center for Urban Education, she also learned how to make the content relevant to all of the diverse kids in her classroom. “Two of my professors really dug deep into multiculturalism,” said Fauver. They stressed that you have to know the students, parents, and their communities. Fauver added, “You can’t make any assumptions. You have to be the question asker.”

Fauver also said that the curriculum must include a variety of rich resources to make the concepts come alive for every student. “We use sentence stems, singing, pictures, and other ways of helping the students understand the language,” she said.

“When the principal told us that we would not be returning to teach face-to-face but instead transitioning to remote learning, it was all teachers on deck,” said Fauver. “Everyone supported everyone else with ideas and strategies and just being there for each other,” she said. They didn’t have all the answers, but they made it work because they did it together.

“Online is not my favorite way of teaching, but I have adapted and my students were learning,” said Fauver. She uses hands-on exercises to keep the kids learning at home, like science experiments where they use their own materials. They grew a bean plant to learn about its life cycle. They grew sugar crystals. They went on a virtual road trip where they mapped out all of the states her students travel to. 

We are thrilled to say that our enrollment at the UNC Center for Urban Education is strong for this fall. We have been persistent in our efforts to educate local paraprofessionals and others who are interested in becoming teachers about the program offered at the Center. And it's working, even during the pandemic. That's because we offer all the support you need to make it through the program. We can even transfer up to 90 credits from other colleges!

If you would like to be a part of the new wave of educators who are helping to create a bright future for our community's children, we would love to have a conversation with you about starting classes in the spring. We are enrolling through December.

For more information, or to get started in the enrollment process, email Rosanne Fulton or call her at 303-637-4334.

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Rosanne Fulton, PhD
Director, Center for Urban Education
UNC Denver Center at Lowry
1059 Alton Way
Denver CO 80230
Office: 303-637-4334
rosanne.fulton@unco.edu
www.unco.edu/UrbanEd