Part of the NIU College of Education’s commitment to the Illinois Tutoring Initiative is the hiring of a full-time coordinator for the 16-county hub of Region 2.
After all, the project funded by $3.4 million in federal pandemic relief for Illinois schools will support hundreds of children in third- through eighth-grades whose learning has been impeded by COVID-19.
NIU is hiring, and will supervise, hundreds of tutors who will begin as soon as possible and no later than the fall to provide evidence-based, high-impact tutoring to accelerate student learning one-on-one or in small groups of no more than three students each.
Meanwhile, NIU is working with eligible school districts disproportionately affected by the pandemic to identify students, match their needs with tutor specialties and then schedule delivery of services focused on math and reading.
The workload is enormous and critical – but Dean Laurie Elish-Piper is confident that Amanda Baum is the right person for the job.
“In Amanda Baum, we have a local, talented and veteran educator who was on the front lines of remote teaching and learning during the pandemic. She clearly understands the toll of that time on children, and cares deeply about their success, making her the perfect person to carry this vital tutoring mission forward,” Elish-Piper says. “As a former classroom teacher myself, I admire Amanda’s energy and passion for her work and for this initiative, and I know that our school district partners and tutors will appreciate that as well.”
Baum, who began her new position March 21, had taught in DeKalb Community Unit School District 428 for nearly 19 years. The last 11 of those were logged at Clinton Rosette Middle School in a seventh-grade math classroom.
Her work was honored in 2015 with the DeKalb County Excellence in Education Award for Middle School Teaching.
Coming to NIU will allow her to multiply her impact.
“The past couple of years have really done a number on our students and our school communities,” Baum says.
“Rather than the broad brush attempt we try to make as classroom teachers, it’s really exciting now getting to really focus on one student and their data, and what’s going to help them reengage in that core instruction,” she adds.
“At the same time, pulling more people into that potential teacher pipeline, and helping them develop some of those really important skills that are a little bit different than what they get in their teacher prep programs, I think is also exciting.”
She has been busy recruiting tutors through visiting the classrooms of educator licensure candidates, advertising the opportunity to PSYC 101 students and meeting with other colleges in northern Illinois to spread the word to their teacher candidates.
Meanwhile, she is meeting with school district leaders to promote the program.
“This whole tutoring model is based on relationship. It’s not your garden variety tutoring where you have a student show up with homework and just whoever is there to help them,” Baum says.
“It’s establishing a relationship between a tutor and a student, or a tutor and a small group. They meet three times per week for an hour to check in and work on skills,” she adds. “And while they’re developing the academic skills, the students also are getting one-on-one time with somebody who’s their ‘person.’ There’s a little bit of mentoring that can go on with it.”
For children, Baum says, the second half of that equation is immeasurably valuable: “They’re getting somebody’s attention,” she says.
“We have plenty of kids who get attention for doing the wrong thing . We have plenty of kids who get attention for doing great things. And then we have a lot of kids who just kind of slip between the cracks,” she adds.
“It’s really sad to watch a kid make it through their whole day with nobody sitting down and engaging with them, and that happens more than we’d like to admit because teachers’ jobs are really hard right now, and classrooms are understaffed.”
Naturally, she says, their academic performance will improve thanks to the focused tutoring on whatever skills are lagging.
“Let’s say we’re learning how to add and subtract fractions and we have a student who doesn’t know how to engage in that because they don’t how to make a common denominator,” Baum says.
“A tutor can drill down to, ‘Oh, that’s the piece you need. Let me show you how to do that so I can unlock the rest of the pathway to what your classmates are learning about, and you’ll be ready to access that information,’ ” she adds. “I think that’s really powerful.”
Preservice teachers also will grow from the experiences.
Tutoring offers a “low-risk situation” for those licensure majors as they build one-on-one academic relationships with children and practice classroom management skills on a small scale.
Baum’s been doing so for as long as she can remember.
Growing up in San Diego, she “was always doing teacher and mentor-type things.” That includes playing school as well as her membership in Girl Scouts, where she became a counselor-in-training at summer camp.
“My mom laughs about how I, as an only child, would have everybody in the neighborhood – like all the kids in the neighborhood – in my yard,” Baum says. “She’d go to Costco and get granola bars, and the next day, they’re all gone because I brought them out to everybody for snacks. I was probably pretty bossy, but I believe I was teaching people things.”
In high school – Baum’s family moved up the West Coast to Oregon when she was a sophomore – she enrolled in a “science mentors class that I could take for science credit. We were going into elementary schools and teaching science lessons. It really appealed to me. It was something I really enjoyed.”
Yet when she matriculated at Oregon State University in Corvallis, the daughter of involved in commercial real estate thought she was “supposed to be a business major” to follow in her parent’s example.
She soon knew that was not the case.
“I was in class in the spring quarter of my freshman year where they basically said, ‘By the end of this class, you should know what you want to specialize in,’ and then all the details down to what color your desk should be,” Baum says. “I couldn’t visualize myself doing anything. I didn’t know what direction of business I wanted to take. I was like, ‘Maybe this isn’t for me.’ ”
Changing her major to Elementary Education, she earned her bachelor’s degree in 1998 and moved on to complete her M.A.T. in Elementary Education from Concordia University in 1999, studying in the same Portland neighborhood where children’s author Beverly Cleary had lived.
After teaching for three years in Oregon and one year in Ohio, she arrived in DeKalb.
Teaching math allowed Baum to help students once in her shoes.
“I don’t love math when I was in middle school. I didn’t get it. I had great teachers, but I had teachers who, when you would get the answer wrong, you would get it back in red pen … I never knew why I did it wrong,” she says.
“Part of my passion for teaching math to seventh-graders comes from the fact that I know what it feels like to not get it, and to feel like it’s kind of being kept secret from you,” she adds. “I worked really hard with my students to show them, ‘Here are the mistakes I made: Younger Mrs. Baum would have done this. Why was this wrong?’ ”
Doing so showed students that “taking risks and making mistakes are OK because they give us a chance to learn, and they give us a chance to find a different path that leads us away from our mistakes.”
Baum earned her math endorsement at NIU, where she also became an adjunct instructor for MATH 402/403: Methods of Instruction in the Mathematics Curriculum for Elementary School as well as EPS 550: Classroom Management for Elementary Educators.
She’s also co-directed the Department of Curriculum and Instruction’s Project TEAMS: Team-building Experiences and Activities in Middle School, which has connected her with Middle Level Teaching and Learning majors. She’s also hosted student-teachers for their clinical experiences.
“She started as my student-teacher, and we were literally team-teaching together when I left,” Baum says. “I just really developed a passion for developing the preservice teacher and being able to be part of somebody’s journey from being a college freshman to potentially being my colleague. To be part of that process is really exciting.”
None of this means that Baum won’t miss the DeKalb Public Schools.
“I will tell you, without pause, that the colleagues and the teachers I worked with in District 428 are just above and beyond in their passion for kids, their passion for content, their passion for their colleagues, their passion for learning and their passion for helping kids to become the best possible versions of themselves,” she says.
“It’s outstanding that people will work so hard together, not for themselves but for what’s best for kids and what’s best for their schools,” she adds. “It’s a really great place.”
