Our team had been talking animatedly about our school—its history, its students, its staff, and its Byzantine leadership hierarchy. We were trying to provide context for our mentoring program to the team of critical friends we had been assigned at the Teach to Lead Summit last February, so that we could better articulate the problem we hoped to solve over the course of the conference weekend.
Our mentoring program focuses on first-year teachers, and we were hoping to create a plan to expand it. This was our first Teach to Lead Summit. Our critical friends were kind but unrelenting. Something was missing from our plan. Why did we want to support teachers after their first year? "What's really the problem?" asked critical friend Sandi Richards of the Philadelphia Ed Fund. We were stuck.
A Little Background on Us
Our Title I school, Freire Charter, is one of the oldest public charter schools in Philadelphia. We regularly achieve incredible things, but we are not immune the many challenges common to urban schools, including high staff turnover and limited material and spatial resources. We have scored high at the state level and moderately high using the city's metrics. Our nonviolence program is lauded, but we struggle with attrition, especially retaining boys through 12th grade.
We squeeze as much as is humanly possible from our passionate, driven staff, but sometimes, achieving at the same level as other better-resourced schools feels simply unattainable. We wear our wanting like a badge of honor. So we can't afford this or that—we'll just be better than "them" despite our less-than-functional calculators, textbooks, and science lab. However, our teacher and student attrition revealed the consequences of high expectations paired with limited resources. Although we, the authors, have taught at Freire for more than seven years, we are the exception. And our graduating classes are usually 30 to 50 students smaller than when they entered the school in 9th grade.
Friends in Critical Places
Our critical friends helped us refocus our work on our school's core problem: teacher turnover and student attrition. If early exits by staff and students are our main problem, how could extending the teacher mentoring program address it? In a few more hours, we created this student impact statement: If teachers feel more supported and stay in the classroom longer, they will be better equipped to deal with academic and behavioral challenges. If these issues are handled more skillfully, student achievement will increase and attrition will decrease.A lofty goal for sure, but we were now on fire. How could we accomplish this goal? Since our critical friends were instrumental in moving our plan forward, we decided they would be a helpful first step in enacting our new mission to reduce attrition with teacher mentoring.
We piloted our critical friends program in April 2016, several months after Teach to Lead. During a half day of professional development, we asked teachers to discuss tough issues at our school, using the critical friends process outlined in this article. Many teachers commented on how they felt heard and validated by the activity. From this pilot, we expanded our use of the critical friends model to work on complex issues. Our hope is that with increased voice, teachers will feel more empowered to stay at our school. Why is this so vital? Empirical evidence suggests that losing good teachers lowers student achievement and that kids achieve at lower levels when served by a revolving door of new teachers who never get the chance to develop into master educators. Research from the University of Michigan and this ASCD ResearchBrief supports this claim.
Teacher Voice and Support
Our second step is to continue looking for ways to expand our mentoring program. We are now a department of three after bringing on Chad Corbitt as an English coach. The three of us are supporting seven new teachers. We created this program as a nonevaluative model for supporting teachers. We believe real change happens when teachers trust you and know you are there to help them improve—not formally evaluate them. We meet with the new teacher cohort before the school year starts and then begin short weekly observations and follow-up meetings. We have found that frequent interactions allow us to build trust with the new teachers, show their progress as teachers, and better communicate staff needs to administration.
Inequity runs deep in cities; as veteran urban teachers, we feel we have a responsibility to work to change that. On our own, we can only scratch the surface. But as a community committed to constructive feedback from critical friends and mentors, we believe we can empower teacher voice, improve instruction, and make a positive difference in the lives of all of our students.