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May 2003
| Volume 60 | Number 8
Keeping Good Teachers
The Ex-Teacher
Marge Scherer
Keeping Good Teachers: Why It Matters, What Leaders Can Do
Linda Darling-Hammond
Keeping good teachers should be one of the most important agenda items for any school leader, writes the author. Substantial research shows that, among all school resources, excellent teachers have the largest impact on student learning. High attrition rates, especially during the first few years of teaching, impose heavy costs on schools, including the organizational costs of termination, substitutes, new training, and lost learning. Most important, high teacher turnover consigns students to “a continual parade of relatively ineffective teachers.” Darling-Hammond discusses four major factors that strongly influence teacher retention: salaries, working conditions, teacher preparation, and mentoring and induction programs. She asserts that a school's investments in these areas will pay for themselves when balanced against the costs of attrition.
What Keeps Teachers Going?
Sonia M. Nieto
A group of teachers from Boston's public schools collaborated with the author for one year to consider the question “What keeps teachers going, in spite of everything?” Their meetings, readings, and writings articulated some of the reasons and uncovered several interrelated themes. The article reviews these reasons—autobiography, love, hope and possibility, anger and desperation, intellectual work, democratic practice, and the ability to shape the future—with quotes from the teachers involved in the study. The author recommends rethinking teacher education, changing the conditions faced by teachers, and celebrating teachers who fulfill the hopes for public education.
The Schools That Teachers Choose
Susan Moore Johnson and Sarah E. Birkeland
The Project on the Next Generation of Teachers at Harvard University studied the career paths of 50 new teachers in Massachusetts over the past four years. Eight of those teachers—whom the researchers called Voluntary Movers—were unhappy in their original teaching assignments but chose to transfer to different public schools instead of leaving the profession or moving to the private education sector. The stories of these eight teachers provide lessons about what schools need to do to support and retain their new teachers. The study found that these Voluntary Movers sought the basic conditions that would allow them to practice their craft every day—appropriate course assignments, sufficient curriculum materials, and efficient systems for such things as discipline and communicating with parents. In addition, they looked for schools where they could feel like professionals—sharing ideas and resources with colleagues and receiving respect and guidance from the principal.
What New Teachers Need to Learn
Sharon Feiman-Nemser
Beginning teachers have legitimate learning needs that cannot be learned in advance or outside the contexts of teaching. The author suggests that induction programs for new teachers are most effective when they treat the first years of teaching as a phase in learning to teach and as a process of enculturation to professional norms and practices. She discusses how to create a professional culture that responds to these learning needs, provides effective mentoring, and uses standards as a basis for learning how to teach. Keeping new teachers in teaching is not the same as helping them become good teachers. A good induction program seeks not only to retain teachers but also to improve the teaching profession.
The Wrong Solution to the Teacher Shortage
Richard M. Ingersoll and Thomas M. Smith
In recent years, researchers and policymakers have warned that severe teacher shortages are threatening to lower standards for teacher quality. Policymakers have commonly tried to address this problem by stepping up teacher recruitment efforts. The authors of this article use their analysis of data from the Schools and Staffing Survey and Teacher Followup Survey to argue that new teacher attrition is the root of teacher shortages. Survey responses from teachers who have left the profession suggest that job dissatisfaction played a major role in their decision, and that this dissatisfaction came from factors such as low salary, lack of administrative support, poor student discipline and motivation, and lack of opportunities to participate in decision making. By addressing these problems, say the authors, schools can reduce their staffing problems.
In Harm's Way: How Undercertified Teachers Hurt Their Students
Ildiko Laczko-Kerr and David C. Berliner
How concerned should we be about teachers who enter classrooms without pedagogical training and education? To examine the impact of different kinds of teacher training on teacher effectiveness, the authors reviewed the research literature and then conducted an empirical study comparing the performance of undercertified and certified teachers in Arizona schools. The research literature provides persuasive evidence that undercertified teachers do not perform as well as teachers who receive the education and training required for traditional certification. Poorly run and short alternative certification programs—including the Teach for America program—do not provide enough supervision or classroom experience to develop effective classroom teachers. The authors' empirical study, which matched 109 pairs of certified and undercertified teachers, also found the same results, with the advantage of having a certified teacher worth about two months on a grade-equivalent scale. The authors conclude that the hiring of undercertified teachers results in the hiring of unqualified teachers who harm student achievement. Especially as applied to poor students, this education policy is harmful and should be abandoned immediately. The authors hope that the new federal legislation requiring highly qualified teachers will result in teachers with traditional certification in U.S. classrooms.
Compensation and Teacher Retention: A Success Story
Linda C. Morice and James E. Murray
The Ladue School District in suburban St. Louis, Missouri, established a teacher incentive pay program 50 years ago that is still in place today. The Evaluation and Salary Program provides incentive pay for teachers on the basis of their performance on a set of evaluation criteria, which describe teacher behaviors such as planning and preparation, knowledge of subject matter, evaluation of student performance, ability to provide for individual differences, and student motivation. The plan does not link the compensation of individual teachers to student achievement. District administrators attribute the success of the incentive pay program to the fact that teachers have played an active role in designing, revising, and monitoring the program. Other strengths of the program include setting clear, specific, and attainable goals and providing for collaboration among staff members.
Finding Good Teachers—And Keeping Them
Barbara Sargent
To attract and—more important—keep good teachers, the Montgomery Township school system in New Jersey developed a comprehensive program that put in place a rigorous teacher selection process and a structured and nurturing system of professional development and support for new teachers. Montgomery Schools provides new hires with a comprehensive orientation, assigns a mentor to each new teacher, and offers a series of professional development workshops that reinforce the orientation topics and provide continued support. The district's administrators believe that teachers who feel connected to a school are more likely to remain dynamic members of the school community who will share their knowledge about teaching and learning with future generations of teachers.
Hiring the Best Teachers
James H. Stronge and Jennifer L. Hindman
Abundant research suggests that effective teachers are the most important factor in improving student achievement. But what exactly is an effective teacher? The authors point out that the precise definition of teacher effectiveness has proven elusive, but that research does suggest six broad domains that synthesize the research on key attributes, behaviors, and attitudes of effective teachers. The authors present an overview of how the qualities of effective teachers can be grouped into these six domains—prerequisites of effective teachers, the teacher as a person, classroom management and organization, organizing for instruction, implementing instruction, and monitoring student progress—these domains can be used to craft objective screening and interviewing processes to select the best teaching candidates.
Mining Data to Improve Teaching
Fredric Cohen
Data warehousing and data mining technology have given schools access to powerful tools to improve teaching and learning. Data warehousing describes the process of storing all demographic and test data in one electronic location and then mining that data to perform any analysis desired. Data can be viewed, for example, by teacher, course, student, gender, ethnicity, or any other chosen parameter. The author describes one district's system for using data mining to evaluate the performance of individual teachers on the basis of their students' Regents examination scores. He discusses the need for supervisors to look at many variables that may affect student test scores, and emphasizes that the purpose of such analyses is not just to sort or rank teachers but to help them improve instruction.
Fostering Leadership Through Mentoring
Ellen Moir and Gary Bloom
At the University of California's Santa Cruz New Teacher Center, a comprehensive induction program for novice teachers has had unexpected benefits: the reinvigoration of veteran teachers and the creation of a new generation of school leaders who are sensitive to the needs of new teachers and committed to creating ongoing learning communities. The authors describe the mentors' rigorous selection and training program, their ongoing professional development and work with novice teachers, and how the mentoring experience has benefited those who have become school administrators. The project has served more than 9,000 new teachers and trained more than 90 mentors; many school districts in the United States have adopted similar programs.
Setting New Teachers Up for Failure . . . or Success
Lisa Renard
Current discussions of new teacher attrition rarely deal with the central problem: the fact that we expect new teachers to assume the same responsibilities and duties as our most seasoned professionals, and to carry out those duties with the same level of expertise within the same time constraints. Instead of being given extra time to learn on the job, new teachers are often given the most difficult students, courses, and schedules. The author recommends that school administrators make a commitment to give new teachers time to gradually learn their profession. For the first few years, schools should not expect teachers to advise or coach extracurricular activities, serve on committees, or attend unnecessary professional development sessions. Other suggestions include making certain that new teachers have the same planning period as their mentor, and keeping them in the same courses or grade levels until they gain experience.
Teacher Job Satisfaction in a Year-Round School
Shelly Gismondi Haser and Ilham Nasser
Timber Lane Elementary School in Fairfax County, Virginia, adopted a year-round schedule in an effort to meet the needs of its students and families. The school has also found, however, that this schedule offers benefits for teachers: a flexible work schedule, reduced teacher absenteeism and stress, and time for professional reflection. On the basis of their interviews with Timber Lane staff and their review of research on year-round education, the authors conclude that year-round education can help a school attract and retain good teachers.
A Wellness Program for Faculty
John Davies, Roxanne Davies and Sue Heacock
To combat teacher stress and burn-out, Miami Country Day—an independent, K–12 school—developed a wellness program for its faculty and staff featuring an on-campus Weight Watchers program and in-service spa days. Buy-in strategies ranged from posting signs touting the benefits of drinking water and eating fruit to buying a massage chair for the faculty lounge. Although the program is too new to supply retention data, faculty and staff surveys provide encouraging feedback.
Why Great Teachers Stay
Jackie S. Williams
Most research has focused on why teachers leave the profession, but insights into why good teachers stay can inform our efforts to keep good teachers. The author interviewed 12 exemplary veteran teachers in North Carolina and found that these teachers were lifelong learners who feel rewarded by the feedback that they receive from their students' successful learning. She observes that they achieve what Csikszentmihalyi describes as flow in their work, a good match between skills and challenge. The teachers all say that classroom autonomy is at the top of their list of requirements for ideal working conditions. They have all thought about leaving teaching at various points in their careers, but they have learned how to sustain their energy for the work. The author points out that recognition of the delicate balance between autonomy and connectedness and an awareness of teachers' emotional and spiritual needs might be keys to keeping good teachers.
Stubbornness and the Kindness of Strangers
Susan Zimmerman
Reflecting on how she survived her first year teaching kindergarten in a public, inner-city school in the United States, the author credits her stubbornness to succeed and the subtle support of other teachers. Even though she had years of experience performing education research and teaching adults and students abroad, she was not prepared for the exhaustion caused by daily classroom management battles. After three years teaching, she left the classroom. That is when she realized she had achieved her former mantra—“I will make a difference,” “I will make a difference.”
ASCD Visits New Zealand
Peyton Williams, Jr.
Summer Reading on Leadership
Joanne Rooney
Rooney, a veteran school principal, picks her favorite books on education leadership for a summer reading list. Some authors on her list deal with systems in and through which great schools function. Some speak directly to teaching, learning, and professional development. And others describe the importance of character in leadership. Rooney challenges the reader to add and delete names, because conversation is key. To Rooney, it is the task of the thinkers and writers to teach and inspire, but it is the practitioners of leadership who transform their ideas into the real world of schools.
Sustaining Experienced Teachers
John H. Holloway
The Pain of Losing a Parent
Steven C. Schlozman
The Myths That Stir Our Fury
Phyllis Milne
ASCD Community in Action
Web Wonders / Keeping Good Teachers
Deborah Perkins-Gough
EL Study Guide / Keeping Good Teachers
Deborah Perkins-Gough
Copyright © 2004 by Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development
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