St. Joseph schools keep PACE with master's degree students

Intermountain Catholic

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Brigid Lane, a PACE teacher, gives instruction to her third-grade class at Saint Joseph Elementary School.  IC photo/Marie Mischel

OGDEN — Saint Joseph Catholic schools are benefiting from teachers who are learning the latest in educational theory and technology while teaching in the classroom.

For the past four years, master’s degree students from the Pacific Alliance for Catholic Education (PACE) program though the University of Portland have spent the school year teaching in Ogden classrooms, while their summers are taken up with attending classes in Oregon.

The students enter the program with bachelor degrees in various subjects, then spend two years pursuing an advanced degree in education. Some PACE graduates have gone on to be hired by Utah Catholic Schools.

"The quality of the student that’s coming to us from the University of Portland is phenomenal," said Nancy Essary, St. Joseph Elementary School principal, adding that these students seem to be natural teachers: They relate well to students, they’re organized, have excellent class room management skills and know the subjects they’re teaching. "They come in very, very well prepared from the University of Portland."

While the student teachers benefit by gaining experience in the classroom, St. Joseph schools benefit as well, Essary said. "They’re bringing a fresh outlook on education to us. We have many veteran teachers, so it’s bringing that new and mixing it with the old so we both benefit."

PACE "makes young teachers successful," said Andrew LeTellier, who was at St. Joseph High School last year as a PACE teacher. Upon his graduation from the program this summer, Essary hired him to teach middle school writing.

The program also "is a great way to meet strong, joyful, young Catholic people and to celebrate education and to reflect on education and what it means to be an educator," LeTellier said.

PACE students live in community with others in the program, an experience that all those interviewed for this article said was positive, because they can learn from each other and also share frustrations with those who are experiencing the same things.

The support and camaraderie of this community were "life-giving," LeTellier said. "When you came back from a hard day of teaching it was a breath of fresh air."

Being able to teach in a Catholic environment also is a draw for those in the program.

"I never realized until I wasn’t in a Catholic school how effective that made education for me," said Tess Gates, who teaches history and theology to 6th- and 8-graders at St. Joseph. Gates attended Catholic elementary and high schools but didn’t enroll at a Catholic university.

The PACE program emphasizes that students are a gift from God, she added, and also "is good at developing virtues that we can share with students."

Corbin Johnson quotes one of his instructors, who told him to look at students "from the God’s eye view," he said. "They gave me the tools to see the students as students and as individuals."

Johnson, in his second year in PACE program, teaches biology, human anatomy and physiology, earth science and sophomore theology at St. Joseph High. Mixing theology and sciences "is natural to me because you’re trying to describe the same world," he said. "If your view of science doesn’t match your view of science there’s going to be a dissonance."

"As a Catholic I believe very strongly in an education that teaches the faith as well as teaches the mind." LeTellier said. "If you take faith out of the equation of education, I just feel like you’re a one-legged person. There’s more to us than just a brain."