ACE News
ACE Pre-Service Training: A Tale of Redshirts
November 13, 2012
Transform a roomful of 120 nervous strangers into a supportive, confident team with a common purpose and set of skills. You’ve got five days. Go!
This is Pre-Service Training (PST). On the morning of Tuesday, September 4, a conference room in the University of Texas at Austin’s Thompson Conference Center swarmed with strangers all wearing brand-new red shirts emblazoned with the logos of ACE and AmeriCorps.
There’s a running joke throughout the Star Trek television shows: the “redshirt” crewmembers will be the first to die. Who could blame a novice ACE member for [briefly] entertaining the notion that she, too, might be fated to sacrifice more than ten months of service? After all, we only had five days: how could we all learn to intervene successfully in the literacy struggles of children from an untold number of backgrounds and in three different grade levels? And who were all these other people, anyway?
I was lucky: as a second-year ACE tutor returning after a hiatus of two years, I already knew most of our beloved supervisors as well as two other members from my year (now team leaders at their own campuses), and a good friend from twelve years back joining the program for her first year. I also knew that ACE-style Pre-Service Training matches intensity with inspiration.
For many of the other ACE members, this morning was the first opportunity to put faces to names and email addresses. Many had only arrived in Austin a few days before: hailing from Maine and California, Wisconsin and Florida, New York and Oregon, converging upon the heart of Texas in response to ACE’s call for help.
Director Mary Ellen Isaacs welcomed us into the ACE family in an opening ceremony that emphasized the critical importance of literacy to the individual and the community. She was visibly moved by the WHAT of the program expansion she and her staff had worked hard to achieve.
Throughout the training, we learned how to identify through benchmark assessments the students who most need our intervention, how to monitor their weekly progress, how to motivate and manage behavior, and how to communicate with campus teachers and with administrators.
Most importantly, we learned how to teach the ACE lesson plans for each grade, from the plastic letters of kindergarten to the sight words of first grade and the science texts and Reader’s Theater plays of second grade.
We took a break from literacy intervention on Thursday for a full day of team building led by Amy Salinas of CAC Consulting, an expert trainer with deep knowledge of nonprofits. We grouped ourselves by our styles of leadership and working within a team, based on the metaphoric four points of the compass, and shared how best to work with each group, finding in the end more similarities and differences: everyone valued communication, honesty, and respect.
As the week progressed, our giant binders no longer loomed as heavy repositories of arcane and inaccessible knowledge, but slowly transformed into familiar resources marked with sticky notes and highlighter trails.
On Monday afternoon, the suspense that had gripped us over the weekend was finally released: each campus leader announced their team members. Tutors flocked to chat, lay plans for the coming week, and learn directions to the schools.
Though everyone still had questions (perhaps chief among them, “Will the kids like me? Will they listen to me?”), most of them could only be answered in the doing. We couldn’t wait to start. What better sign of effective training than that?
The next day each team arrived early at each of the 22 elementary school campuses, neatly arrayed in ACE red shirts, ready for our very first day of school.
But that’s another story.
Katie Van Winkle
ACE Full-Time Tutor