Chapter 8. Rethinking Induction: Examples from Around the World

Li Mei, a beginning mathematics teacher in Shanghai, China, has many groups supporting her transition to teaching. To deepen her understanding of the mathematics she teaches, the students she works with, and approaches she can use to help them learn, Li Mei works with a mentor, a group in her school that plans lessons together, a research group that enables her to observe others' teaching, and district-level new-teacher seminar groups. She can't imagine entering the profession without this wide range of guides and opportunities to view and talk about teaching.

Beginning to teach involves both starting a new job and entering a new way of life. New teachers are welcomed and initiated with various degrees of ceremony, and they experience a wide variety of formal or informal procedures intended to help them meet the challenges of this beginning. Whether officially inducted or not, new teachers begin teaching every year, all over the world.

A New Focus on Beginning Teachers

In the United States, this time of transition—from student to teacher, from outsider to insider—is receiving more attention than ever before. Increasingly, states, districts, and national organizations are recognizing the importance of the teacher's early career. Thirty-three states now have policies on induction, compared with only 15 in the 1980s (American Federation of Teachers, 2001). Many national organizations have also begun to target induction. Both the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education and the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education have urged teacher preparation programs to begin actively following up with their graduates. The National Research Council (2001) included significant attention to teacher induction in its sweeping recommendations for reforms in teacher preparation.

Why the attention? Teacher retention has become a serious concern in the United States. Approximately one-third of beginning teachers leave teaching within the first five years, and the attrition rates are even higher in urban schools and high-poverty schools (Darling-Hammond, 2003). Schools are scrambling to hire and retain teachers, especially in science and mathematics. Teacher retirements, growing enrollments, and class-size reduction policies have added to the increased demand for teachers. Induction offers a way not only to keep new teachers in the profession, but also to help them consolidate their craft and move beyond an initial focus on classroom management issues (National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, 1996).

Most discussions about induction, and most programs in place today in the United States, focus on providing psychological and moral support for new teachers—usually by connecting the novice with a mentor—or creating mechanisms for early assessment (Feiman-Nemser, Carver, Schwille, & Yusko, 1999; Gold, 1996). To help attract teachers to a learning profession and to provide ways of keeping teachers engaged in that profession, induction must go beyond support and do more than assess teachers.

A different and more promising approach treats induction as a distinct phase in a teacher's learning career. The first few years on the job create opportunities for teachers to gain knowledge and understandings that they could not learn in their teacher preparation programs (Feiman-Nemser, 2003). Good induction programs create the conditions for developing the vital skills that can be learned only from practice.

How can we reimagine induction as an opportunity for this kind of learning? How can we understand it as more than simply filling in gaps or providing moral support for the novice teacher? Like fish in a fish tank, we may not recognize the water in which we swim. By looking beyond our national borders and considering the experiences of induction in different parts of the world, we can consider a broader range of possibilities and challenge our assumptions about what new teachers need and how schools can help them grow.

Studying Induction in Four Countries

From 1998–2002, we were involved in a study funded by the National Science Foundation that focused on induction for middle-grade mathematics and science teachers in selected countries (Britton, Paine, Pimm, & Raizen, 2003). After an initial exploratory phase that studied induction in 12 countries, we selected four countries in which to do more intensive fieldwork. In France, China (Shanghai), New Zealand, and Switzerland, we conducted one to three months of interviews and observations to examine induction policies, programs, and practices.

The study attempted to capture, in each national context, both the range of settings in which induction activities took place and the important features of the national education landscape. To accomplish this, we adapted the case study design for each site. (See Figure 8.1 for a list of dominant activities in each country.)

Figure 8.1. Dominant Induction Activities in Four Countries

France. Although nationally articulated, French induction policy plays out primarily through regional institutions and schools in each Academy (the regional organizational structure responsible for all K-12, induction, and inservice education). Our work focused on the experiences of teachers in two Academies in Paris. We also examined practices in the higher education institutions, called IUFM (University Institutes for the Formation of Teachers), which are responsible for induction programs and continuing teacher education. In addition, we studied teaching and mentoring in 10 schools and conducted interviews with policymakers, inspectors, mathematics educators, and mathematics education researchers.

China. Shanghai's approach to induction, mandated at the municipal level, is funded by districts, schools and—in some cases—teachers themselves. We interviewed central administrators and conducted intensive data collection in four districts that reflect a range of economic, demographic, and education contexts. We interviewed district staff developers and teacher educators in each district, as well as teachers and administrators in 21 schools. We also conducted less detailed interviews and surveys of teachers in other districts.

New Zealand. There is no intermediate level between the national government and schools in New Zealand. Its national policy of induction, although centrally funded, is largely school-based. We therefore focused data collection on schools, observing and interviewing teachers and administrators in 15 schools in the two major cities, Auckland and Wellington.

Switzerland. The Swiss education system and its approaches to induction are highly decentralized. Cantons—the equivalent of states, each with their own education ministry—pay for facilities, permanent central staff, and mentors and counselors. The cantons also subsidize new teachers for their participation in induction activities by providing substitute teachers. We focused our work in three cantons: Bern, Lucerne, and Zurich. There we observed and conducted interviews in schools, practice groups, and teacher education programs.

These four countries reflect great variation in their level of centralization, organization of the teaching force, education philosophies, and the reforms in play. Yet as we look across the sites, we note a surprising pattern of similarity. All of these education systems employ comprehensive teacher induction—both in terms of the purposes of induction and in terms of the strategies used to promote new teacher learning (Britton, Paine, Pimm, & Raizen, 2003).

What New Teachers Need to Learn

We have noted that the most common goal of new teacher induction programs in the United States is providing personal support for new teachers to help them adjust to the classroom and survive their first few years. In contrast, the four countries that we studied exhibit broad cross-national agreement that the novice teacher's central task—a complex, demanding, and time-consuming one—is learning to teach. Even in Switzerland, where extensive preservice teacher preparation provides a solid grounding in both subject specialization and pedagogy, schools assume that every beginning teacher needs opportunities to learn.

What do schools in these settings identify as the skills that teachers need to learn? The induction goals in all four countries stress the importance of

• Effective subject-matter teaching.
• Understanding and meeting pupils' needs.
• Assessing pupil work and learning.
• Engaging in reflective and inquiry-oriented practice.
• Dealing with parents.
• Understanding school organization and participating in the school community.
• Understanding oneself and the current status of one's career.

This list forcefully reminds us of the demanding nature of teaching as a practice. Clearly, nobody can fully master these matters in advance of taking on responsibility as a classroom teacher. But novice teachers must gain competence in these skills early in their careers.

The programs that we studied reflect remarkable agreement in focusing on both improving teaching quality and enhancing personal development. In addition to offering emotional and psychological support to the new teacher, induction programs in these settings make it possible for novice teachers to take the knowledge that they learned in preservice preparation and deepen it. These programs also create occasions in which teachers can learn knowledge and skills that they had no opportunity to develop prior to teaching. Going beyond support or orientation, these programs treat teachers not just as beginners, but also as learners.

In addition, all of these sites include attention to subject-specific aspects of teacher induction. U.S. induction programs rarely give explicit attention to subject-specific needs. In contrast, beginning mathematics teachers in France—despite having already studied three or more years of university mathematics—spend one day each week at the University Institute for the Formation of Teachers working on developing the pedagogical content knowledge of mathematics. At the end of their first year of teaching, they must defend before a jury a yearlong project on some aspect of teaching mathematics. In this professional memoir, they study a mathematics teaching issue arising in and from their practice, connected to the field of mathematics education research and contributing to it.

Practices to Support New Teachers' Learning

What activities do schools in these five countries use to support the goals of induction? Figure 8.1 outlines the major activities in each site. For the most part, the activities are closely connected to practice. As we examine the range of induction activities across the settings, certain patterns stand out.

Diverse Activities Within Programs

In each of these settings, induction involves a wide range of activities. Programs are developed with the assumption that beginning teachers need different approaches and formats to support the broad range of learning and development required of them.

In New Zealand, for example, induction involves both school-based Advice and Guidance discussions and out-of-school seminars. The former involves regular (often biweekly) meetings of all the beginning teachers in a school. Wide-ranging discussions deal with personal and professional concerns. For example, teachers discuss the first week of school, classroom management, sports, the history of the school, and cultural differences. Out-of-school opportunities include subject-specific workshops organized by regional Advisory Services, follow-up workshops conducted by teacher preparation programs for their graduates, and university courses designed for beginning teachers.

In France, the first-year teacher teaches only part-time in one school, while assisting an experienced teacher in a second school (an activity called an accompanied practice) and taking courses each week at the IUFM, the higher education institution designed to support teacher learning.

The range of options for novice teachers in Switzerland includes practice groups, such as the one that Bertila attends; observation of other teachers; seminars and courses; and individual counseling for any new teacher who wants it. In addition, each beginning teacher undertakes, usually with the help of a mentor, a reflective activity called a Standortbestimmung (“a determination of status”) to examine where he or she stands as a teacher and as a person. This process is a self-evaluation of self-competence, social competence, and competence in one's area of teaching. It leads to a determination of next steps in self- and professional development.

Li Mei and other beginners in Shanghai participate in a range of required and voluntary activities, both in and out of school, that includes demonstration lessons, school-level and district-level mentoring, teaching competitions, school orientations, district seminars, subject-specific hot-lines, and more.

Learning Tied to Practice

Induction provides opportunities for novices to look closely at teaching through specific activities and relationships. In the programs we studied, new teachers observe and are observed; discuss individual lessons with their mentors and sometimes with others; and are encouraged to talk about particular pupils. We found at least three kinds of activities that were common across the sites: mentoring, peer-group activity, and reflective work.

Working closely with a mentor. In every site, beginning teachers have the opportunity (in most cases, the requirement) to work one-on-one with an experienced teacher. We found it intriguing that the terms used to describe this role vary by site and that different connotations were associated with these terms.

The words used in Shanghai have a strong colloquial feel to them—guiding teacher, old teacher, or master (and they imply a counterpart—one being led, a disciple or a new teacher). All Shanghai beginners work with two different kinds of mentors. The subject-specific mentor supports the novice's instructional work through collaborative planning, observations, and post-observation debriefings. Another mentor helps a beginner learn to take on the diverse duties of a “class director.” The novice shadows this mentor, who convenes a cohort of students and is responsible for supporting each child's social, personal, and academic development throughout the year.

France has its pedagogic advisors, a title that accurately suggests that their work focuses on instructional expertise. In contrast, New Zealand's Advice and Guidance advisors, department heads, and buddy teachers together might be seen as taking on different mentor-like roles. The Advice and Guidance advisor, usually the school's deputy principal, creates the Advice and Guidance program for the first-year and second-year teachers, including convening and running the regular Advice and Guidance meetings for all these teachers. This advisor also looks out for the novices' personal welfare, as a sort of “mother hen,” as one advisor explained. Department chairs observe beginners' classes both formally and informally, hold one-on-one meetings with them, invite beginners to observe their classes, and alert them to professional development opportunities outside the school. Buddy teachers are assigned as another resource, a teacher often chosen to complement the skills and attributes of the department head. Sometimes the teacher next door, and often closer in age to the novice, the buddy teacher can offer quick help and support on an impromptu basis.

In Switzerland, mentoring is the main form of induction in upper secondary school. It is one-on-one, sometimes provided by the same teacher who supervised the student teaching practicum of the beginning teacher. The mentor may observe as often as once a week and hold discussions with the new teacher afterward.

Despite the linguistic variation, mentor programs share the underlying assumption that one does not become a teacher alone or in isolation. Experience helps, and the novice can tap into the collective experience of the profession through close, sustained contact with a more experienced teacher.

Connecting with peers. Many U.S. programs mandate that novice teachers work with mentors, but the interactions among novices that we observed in the international sites is less prevalent in the United States. In each of the settings we studied, induction providers created regular opportunities for novices to share, discuss, plan, investigate, support, and vent with other beginners. Induction can help beginners develop collegial relationships with their peers. The new teachers whom we interviewed clearly valued the trading and sharing of experiences with others who faced some of the same challenges of transition. As Sarah explained after participating in a workshop with other first-year teachers, “Everyone felt overwhelmed by the job. I was so relieved to know that I wasn't the only one who had been discouraged by classroom management problems.”

Peer observation, peer reflection, and joint inquiry projects all reinforce the idea that novices can learn from one another. Switzerland's practice groups offer perhaps the clearest example of the attention and value given to such connections. First-year and second-year teachers from different schools can voluntarily form a group to discuss problems on a regular basis. Meeting six to eight times during the year for about three hours each session, the participants try to resolve problems in their practices, drawing on shared observations of one another's teaching to anchor the discussions. The novices themselves direct the group discussions, but each group has a well-trained, carefully selected facilitator.

Reflecting, inquiring, and researching. Induction can also push beginners to look closely at their own practice by creating activities that focus on reflection and inquiry. Through these, beginning teachers develop a reflective stance, personally and professionally.

The Standortbestimmung reflective activity in Switzerland exemplifies the importance that Swiss educators place on the personal aspect of teacher development. A reflection on one's professional growth, it takes place either in the context of personal counseling (available to the novices as one option in induction and usually by the practice group leader) or as a culminating experience during the last meeting of a practice group. The beginner engages in a self-evaluation and contemplates future personal and professional development.

The professional memoir typifies France's interest in having new teachers develop analytical and reflective skills that they can bring to bear on aspects of their own emerging practice, including—in the case of mathematics—task design and the use of curriculum materials and pedagogic resources.

Learning Outside the Novice's Classroom

Schools in the countries studied act on the belief that new teachers' learning can be amplified by activities outside of their own classroom. Thus, each system also provides opportunities for beginners to participate in activities out of school: courses at the University Institute for the Formation of Teachers and regular visits to another teacher's classroom through accompanied practice in France, occasional seminars in New Zealand, and practice groups in Switzerland. In Japan, a teacher cruise ship takes about 20 percent of the nation's new teachers on a summer cruise each year that emphasizes cultural activities. These induction activities all rest on the belief that beginners need some distance from the immediacy of the classroom in order to see their teaching in new ways.

Sufficient Time for Learning

Induction takes time. The experience in all of these sites suggests that it takes time and effort to make the necessary arrangements, establish relationships, link the beginning teacher to effective instructional practices and curriculum, and more.

Notice, for example, the frequency and intensity of induction activities in these programs. The total number of hours is impressive:

• Shanghai beginners undertake a minimum of 100 hours of induction activity, although we consistently observed novices engaged in even more hours of intensive induction.
• French first-year mathematics teachers have their entire week arranged to support induction: attending classes for a day and a half at the University Institute for the Formation of Teachers; teaching a single class by themselves in one school throughout the entire year; developing and presenting a professional memoir; and supporting and observing an experienced teacher at another school, usually for a block of 12 weeks during the year.
• In New Zealand, weekly Advice and Guidance meetings, coupled with a range of other activities, constitute 20 percent of the beginning teacher's schedule.
• The Swiss cantons we studied had no uniform time requirement, yet in each setting induction activities were intensive. Practice groups in Lucerne meet for 30 hours in the course of the beginner's first year, and each novice also spends 20 hours on classroom observation. Zurich's program requires two years from beginning teachers. Toward the end of the first year, they must take an intensive four-week course. They are also entitled to individual counseling and may request up to 32 hours of counseling during their induction period.

Just as important, each induction activity in these four locations is sustained over time. Working with a mentor, constructing a professional memoir, and participating in a practice group all involve repeated interactions over a substantial period, giving novice teachers the opportunity to develop relationships, dig into a topic, consider alternative views, and gather and explore data.

Reflecting on Substantive Education Issues

The induction system in each of these countries encourages beginning teachers to think deeply, often collectively, about specific aspects of teaching. Novices engage with difficult issues that they face in their own classrooms: the challenges of planning, the design of learning tasks, the management of education settings for learning, the dilemmas of assessment, and so on. Induction creates opportunities for teachers early in their careers to work in targeted ways on broadly conceived elements of their own practice. The focus of the activities demonstrates the complexity of teaching, whether that focus is on subject-matter instruction, as in France, or more wide-ranging issues, as in New Zealand.

Two practices in Shanghai—report lessons and the teaching competition—provide opportunities to deepen new teachers' understandings of the many dimensions of teaching. Shanghai beginning teachers conduct at least one report lesson as part of their induction. The beginner teaches a class that is observed by colleagues and sometimes outsiders. Following the class, the novice offers a reflection on the lesson and engages in a discussion with the observers.

In the teaching competition sponsored by the city and its districts, new teachers develop and explain a lesson plan, working closely with colleagues as they develop their ideas. Schools, districts, and the municipal authorities hold competitions each year, and schools may expect their new teachers to participate at least once in their induction period. Typically working as a tiered system, the competitions have winners from the lower level go on to compete at the next. At each level, panels composed of expert teachers and local professional development specialists judge the candidates. Although winners receive a small monetary reward, the real prize is the honor and distinction.

In both the report lessons and the teaching competitions, beginning teachers must reflect on the ways in which content and learners come together so that they can articulate and argue for the benefits of their pedagogical decisions before a panel of expert teachers. The intense preparation for these events, as well as the lively conversations that follow them, reinforce new teachers' recognition that teaching is an intellectually demanding practice that requires advanced knowledge, skill, and judgment.

In these sites, induction typically focuses less on sharing techniques than on encouraging problem solving as a necessary skill for teachers. Not surprisingly, the induction programs that we observed—for example, the Swiss practice group with its wide-ranging conversations, reflections, and guided discussions—were complex, both in the individual activities and in their combination.

Rethinking the Purposes of Induction

Looking at these international examples, we see that induction programs vary tremendously in their particular arrangements but share remarkably similar goals. The heart of induction in all of these sites is an effort to make the transition to teaching a period of intense and productive teacher learning. Although teacher recruitment was a motivating factor in establishing the current induction approach in France, and teacher retention is still an ongoing problem in Shanghai and Switzerland, schools in all of these sites value induction for more than its ability to respond to problems of teacher hiring or retention. They view the induction period as an essential tool that supports the learning and growth of new teachers.

In these sites, the purpose of induction is not primarily to fix problems, but to build something desirable: effective teachers, a strong teaching force, a vital profession, and optimum learning for students in schools. When we commented in a Shanghai interview on the many efforts directed toward assisting new teachers there, a young teacher corrected us, “It's not for the teachers; it's for the pupils.” She was right. If we rethink induction and recognize that it can encompass not only teacher support and assessment but also teacher learning, we can use this special period in the professional lives of teachers to accomplish much broader goals.

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