This fellowship trains young men of color to teach literacy in Arizona preschools

In a Desert Garden Elementary School preschool classroom, Taigee Dillard reads Dr. Seuss' "One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish" to a circle of 18 four-year-olds. He dances and sings to them as they wait in line to wash their hands after recess; later, he pulls four students aside to help them practice writing their names.

"That's a really good 'A,'" he tells Mia Ochoa Quintana, 4, as she writes her name in red marker. "That looks like I just drew an 'A.'" As she writes her "M," he guides her: "Pull down straight, slant right, slant up, and pull down straight again."

Dillard, 22, is one of 17 fellows in Phoenix's Leading Men Fellowship, a program of a Washington, D.C., based nonprofit, The Literacy Lab, to increase the number of men of color in education. The program launched in 2016 in Washington and is now in eight cities across the country.

The fellowship aims to diversify the teacher pipeline, provide professional development opportunities for young men of color and increase kindergarten readiness for students, according to Arizona Leading Men Fellowship Program Manager Navarro Whitaker.

During the 2020-21 school year, 6% of public school teachers were Black, compared with 15% of students, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Just 23% of all public school teachers were men.

“Most of the guys that sign up with the program have never had a Black male in their entire educational experience,” Whitaker said. “Maybe they had one. Maybe. And so they know the importance of having a male teacher and a minority teacher in their life.”

A study published in March in the Early Education and Development journal found that young children being taught by a teacher of the same ethnicity as themselves go on to develop better working memory, and the effects were most pronounced in Black and Latino children. Another study published in 2017 by the Institute of Labor Economics found that assigning Black male students to one Black teacher in third, fourth or fifth grade significantly reduces the probability of dropping out of high school.

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In the yearlong Leading Men program, fellows are placed in preschool classrooms to work as literacy tutors and receive training and professional development. In Phoenix, which launched the fellowship last year, fellows work in Mesa Public Schools and the Glendale Elementary School District.

Fellows read to the preschoolers, sing rhyming "transition songs" to the students while they're in between activities, and pull students aside for small group activities, like practicing writing their names. These activities are intended to support the preschoolers in building vocabulary and developing phonological awareness, a foundational element of learning to read.

The guidance Dillard used to help Mia write her name came from a script provided to all of the fellows to help them give preschoolers explicit, visual directions for writing each letter of the alphabet.

The transition songs are a way to turn a moment like waiting for the bathroom into something "more informative," according to fellow Kamen Jones, 21. There are more than seven transition songs they can use, he said, singing an example: "Cat, hat, these two rhyme, they sound the same at the end."

"While I'm doing the song, I'm going kid to kid, getting their attention, and I'm making eye contact with all of them, and I'm clapping, and I give every last one of them a smile," Jones said. "And they love that."

Jones' own experience in school has helped guide the way he approaches the program. "I was that kid in school that, when teachers felt like they did enough, they felt they didn't have to give you that much more attention," he said.

"Coming from, 'I hate school, I don't want to be in school,' to being put back in that environment. ... Now I have an opportunity to change things ahead of time," Jones said. "Going into this, I feel like I'm an agent to my people because I know that Black and brown kids get looked over the quickest, especially at that young age."

Dillard said the program has been "life-changing," not only because he's able to help "sculpt these kids into better people for the future," but also because it's given him support and mentorship. The program could not have come at a better time in his life, he said — he was living in his car searching for jobs online when he got a call inviting him to apply.

"I was really down ... and they called me at a time when I really needed them," he said.

In addition to the literacy training fellows receive, Whitaker said he brings in professionals from various industries throughout the year to work with fellows on skills like financial literacy and mindset development.

"Having that brotherhood bond with them also helps further that whole experience," Dillard said.

Christy Discello, Glendale Elementary School District's preschool coordinator, said she's seen the preschoolers be inspired by the fellows.

“There’s not a lot of male teachers or men of color and our kids really look up to them,” she said. “I’ve noticed, especially our boys getting more involved and wanting to learn and not always just play.”

Christopher Robinson, 24, initially thought the program would just involve reading to preschoolers. “But then once I learned that it's more like a tutoring position, teaching kids how to do things, it blew me away,” he said. “And I'm more in love with it than I was coming in.”

He’s a senior fellow in his second year of the program, and he's been focusing on helping preschoolers at Mesa's Lowell Elementary School understand the difference between the lowercase letters B, P and D, which he said is challenging for the students. While he’s not sure yet if he wants to pursue education, he said he’s heard from teachers and people around him that he has great teaching skills.

“That’s not something that I've seen before in myself,” he said.

Fellows work up to 30 hours per week and receive $17 an hour, as well as a $120 transportation and communication stipend and a $2,500 higher education award at the end of the program. They're required to be between 18 and 24 years old, have a high school diploma or equivalency, pass a background check and be able to work legally in the U.S. Whitaker said he hopes to recruit 30 fellows for the Phoenix program next year.

Madeleine Parrish covers K-12 education. Reach her at mparrish@arizonarepublic.com and follow her on X, formerly known as Twitter: @maddieparrish61.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Leading Men Fellowship aims to bring more men of color into teaching