Whether you are a fresh-faced new teacher or a seasoned veteran, you have valuable wisdom and diverse experiences to share. By exchanging knowledge in a collegial environment, both novices and veterans develop new ideas and strengthen their educational practices.
As a new high school teacher, Carol Frederick Steele's first year teaching was almost her last. Classroom management seemed like her biggest problem, but, she reflects, she was just unaware of how her teaching affected her students' achievement.
"I wasn't able to interpret events in progress," she says. "For me, the classroom was sort of like a video projected on the back wall. I didn't get the multiplicity of things that were happening." After that miserable year, she left teaching—at least temporarily.
Attrition statistics today reflect Steele's formative experiences: teachers feel isolated; uncertain; and that, overall, they lack support from colleagues. There is a better way. We talked with a group of education experts and ASCD authors who unanimously related the benefits of collegial exchange between veteran and novice educators, explaining how these relationships enrich both groups of educators by improving teaching practices and reigniting their passion for their profession.
Linking Digital Natives with Institutional Wisdom
Jane E. Pollock, author ofImproving Student Learning One Principal at a Time (out this month), delivers curriculum planning and professional development to groups of educators across the country. "What I really value," she reflects, "is the institutional wisdom—a phrase coined by education authority Fenwick English—of a veteran teacher coupled with the open-mindedness and technological skill of younger teachers."
Pollock sees the new generation of digital native teachers driving new uses of data and communication technology to improve instruction, and sharing their expertise with their colleagues.
Author and head of New City School, in St. Louis, Mo., Thomas Hoerr adds, "Collegiality means that educators learn with and from one another, regardless of our and their background or experience. Sometimes that different background or lack of experience enables a new teacher to ask a question that benefits everyone."
In Reframing Teacher Leadership to Improve Your School, Douglas B. Reeves synthesized data on 81 teacher leadership projects, and his research forced him to revisit myths about how age affects teacher quality. "The idea that veterans are fixed in their ways and you can only influence people in their 20s was really blown up," Reeves says. "Almost all those 81 projects were age-diverse teams, and there was a lot of innovation that had nothing to do with a person's age."
New Learning through Collegial Exchanges
Later in life, when Steele (whose book The Inspired Teacher: How to Know One, Grow One, or Be One comes out next month) returned to teaching, she worked with Michigan State University teaching interns in real classrooms. She discovered that there were concepts—such as education theorist Madeline Hunter's seven elements of effective instruction—she understood better after discussing them with new teachers.
"When my interns would ask me why I did certain things in my lessons, and I found I could unpack a reason that I hadn't been able to articulate until someone asked me the question, I owned it in a whole new way," she says.
Through observing the interns at work and discussing their teaching practices with them, Steele reevaluated her own methods. "It's so startling to have two adults talking about lessons. When you have two people teaching the same students day after day, that interactive quality is revolutionary," she says.
Bob Sullo, author of The Motivated Student: Unlocking the Enthusiasm for Learning (coming in June), agrees that dialoguing with newer teachers can help experienced educators clarify concepts. When Sullo was a middle school administrator in Plymouth, Mass., one of his first hires was a young middle school counselor with whom he worked closely to develop his use of internal control psychology.
"Classroom teachers know that their students deepen their learning when they have the chance to teach their peers what they know. The same is true in a mentoring relationship," Sullo says. "As I taught my young counselor about the principles of internal control psychology and we discussed how to interact with students in a way that nurtured their growth and decision-making ability, I found my own thoughts became more clear."
Virginia L. Cunningham, author of Tips, Tales, and Tidbits to Nourish New Teachers: The All-in-One Guide for a Successful First Year (out in November), takes on the role of nonthreatening observer in the classrooms of teachers she mentors to learn what contributes to or detracts from healthy learning environments.
"Sometimes we're so bulging with knowledge as classroom teachers with many years of experience that we forget to sit back and learn from different teachers and teaching styles," she says.
Passion as the X Factor
Reeves discloses that he really admires one of his young colleagues, a chorus teacher, for "what his students do when he's not around." If he gets held up and isn't in class right at the bell, his students sit down at their pianos and begin rehearsing. "And I thought, man, I've been doing this for 35 years, and that's the kind of respect and norm establishment that any veteran would like to have." Reeves couldn't exactly pinpoint why this particular teacher commanded such respect and enthusiasm for his content, but perhaps the teacher's seriousness and passion for his material had transferred to his students.
"You have to really love your subject," says David Waterman, a first year math teacher at a D.C. public high school. "If I go in there and am not super pumped about whatever I'm teaching, the kids sense it, and forget about teaching anything on that day."
Enthusiasm for a subject isn't something teachers can learn, and neither is a passion for teaching. "Anybody who's taught a lot of graduate students knows that you can teach multivariate stat all day long. You can't teach passion, you can't teach love," Reeves says. "It's a decision to commit yourself to students."
Educational Leadership columnist Joanne Rooney mentors new principals and emphasizes the sometimes missionary quality of the work educators do. "We need to impress this upon new teachers and administrators and really nurture the noble and altruistic tendencies of these young educators," she says.
Reeves adds, "People who've decided to invest their whole lives in this profession have an unconditional love for kids that you don't always see." Modeling that love for newer generations can ignite a fervor for education that's contagious and so important for novices to experience in part because teaching never gets easier.
"You might have more preparation or more tricks in your bag, but the more concerned you are and involved with your kids, the more challenges you take on," Cunningham says.
Steele reflects that if an experienced mentor had told her in her first year of teaching how hard it would be to reach a level of expertise, she probably wouldn't have quit after one year.
"I wouldn't have gone in thinking I'd be as brilliant as my 8th grade teacher Mrs. McFarland," she says. "I would've known it's going to take me at least 5 or 10 years to get near that point."
