Star educator doesn’t take teaching sitting down

By LARRY BIVINS
Gannett News Service

BALTIMORE — Linda Eberhart doesn't like to teach from a chair. It's just not her style.

These days she has no choice, after breaking her ankle during a recent field trip. But the minds of her fifth-grade math students are in constant motion during the 15 minutes of each class that Eberhart must spend in her seat.

The students sit in groups on the floor or at desks near Eberhart's perch. Some work on multiplication tables. Others try to master fractions or other basic math elements — addition, subtraction, division, decimals — contained in a series of workbooks. Those who get stuck on a problem can turn to Eberhart or one of their classmates for help.

"It's like we're all teachers," Eberhart said.

This daily ritual at Mount Royal Elementary/Middle School is called Team-Assisted Instruction, an individualized math program that Eberhart pioneered at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore 15 years ago. It is designed to allow students to proceed at their own pace.

Apparently, it works. For two years in a row, Eberhart's fifth-grade students scored highest in the state on the Maryland math test. Last year, their scores were third-highest.


Their achievement is all the more remarkable because Mount Royal is an inner-city school where 99 percent of the students are black and about 80 percent are on a subsidized lunch program — exactly the sort of school where students consistently fall behind.

"She diagnoses each student and develops a treatment plan for each student," former Mount Royal Principal Mark Frankel said. "It's very rare that you'll see her doing whole-group instruction."

In addition to spending extra time on instruction, Eberhart uses lots of visual aids. She has developed a series of hands-on interactive lessons that require the application of math skills to real-life problems.

A recent class project, for example, called for students to build a model of a Japanese suspension bridge from one table to another using paper clips and straws. She also engaged her students in a Japanese cooking exercise to teach them about measurements.

"Kids have to feel and see and touch," she said. "Some kids can get it with just a picture, some need more concrete examples."

Her students' confidence shows in the glow on their faces or the fists pumped in the air when they learn from Eberhart's smile and nod that they have mastered a set of skills and are ready to move to the next workbook. It also means free time on Friday.

"When you see them get so excited about learning, you know you're making a difference, that you're just doing it," Eberhart said.

That feeling, she said, is what has kept her at this inner-city school for 24 years. And her success earned her 2001-2002 Teacher of the Year honors in Baltimore and Maryland.

"Everybody talks about her math, but nobody talks about the reading scores and nobody talks about her getting 98 percent attendance year after year," Frankel said. "Nobody gets 98 percent attendance. She's won the first battle, and that is kids want to come to school."

A sign above a projection screen in Eberhart's classroom reads, "Attitude is a little thing that makes a BIG difference."

Eberhart's colleagues say her attitude has made a huge difference in the progress of students and teachers alike. She mentors other Mount Royal and Baltimore teachers with less experience. And she meets three times a week with other fifth-grade teachers to assess students' progress and design a strategy for bringing slow learners up to speed.

"She's really an advocate for the children," said Erica McCullough, 26, a writing teacher who is a member of Eberhart's fifth-grade team and one of her former students.
McCullough recalled that when school officials said there was no money to teach students on Saturdays and evenings, Eberhart said, "So what? We're going to do it anyway."

Eberhart, however, is the first to say that Mount Royal's success has been a team effort.

"It's working together, supporting each other and helping each other," she said.

For the 80 fifth-graders attending Mount Royal this year, Eberhart has developed an "intervention matrix," using the laptop computer that was one of her Teacher-of-the-Year prizes. Some students need evening and Saturday help. Others benefit from group study.

"Kids can learn," Eberhart said. "It doesn't matter where they start. What has to happen is you need these interventions and time and the help. One year we taught 20 weeks straight on Saturday — and burned ourselves out."

Eberhart recognizes that for many of her students the world extends no farther than their neighborhoods, so she emphasizes field trips. On one such outing in May, she slipped and broke her ankle in three places as she excitedly tried to point out the Big Dipper to her students.

Her doctor advised her to stay off her feet in the classroom after the next school year began in the fall. Eberhart shuddered at the thought recently, as she hobbled to the front of her class for a lesson on decimals. She turned to a visitor and asked a clearly rhetorical question:

"How can you teach sitting down?"