In 1956, Doris Quick was on her way to becoming a brand-new English teacher. She had had several job offers, but she knew she would need a lot of support during that first year. So Quick took a job at a school where the chair of the English department had a reputation for helping his colleagues.
Her reasoning paid off. For the next two years—until he left the school—that teacher did help Quick, reviewing her lesson plans and offering constructive feedback on her instructional techniques. It was a professional relationship that Quick found so meaningful that upon her mentor's departure, she immediately sought the help of another veteran teacher she admired. "I wanted to be just like her," she recalls. And fortunately for Quick, this teacher, too, was willing to share her experience.
Although many years have passed since Quick entered the teaching profession, what she intuitively knew then is no less relevant today. Accomplished, veteran teachers—our master teachers—have a great deal of professional knowledge that can be used to guide the new and inexperienced.
But such relationships should not be left to chance, say experts. While many teachers, like Quick, will take the initiative to seek help, others—for a variety of reasons—will not.
Most new teachers spend that first year of teaching in survival mode, experts explain. And reports show that it's these teachers—those who lack the support of seasoned, successful colleagues—who ultimately leave the profession. What's even worse, studies suggest, is that student learning is too often hindered when teachers can't (or won't) work collaboratively with their colleagues to learn how to critically analyze their instructional decisions.
What's needed is a rule "that says a new teacher has to be taught by a teacher who has been successful," says Asa Hilliard, professor of urban education at Georgia State University. With that simple rule, he asserts, new teachers would teach better and student learning would improve.
And, Hilliard adds, "if I were searching for good teachers, I would look for those who have achieved extraordinarily powerful results with children."
It's All in the Mentors
Elaine Whissen agrees. Whissen, director of federal programs and student evaluation for the Glendale (Ariz.) School District, helps oversee a systemwide mentoring program for new teachers that emphasizes cognitive coaching. "We want to help teachers develop their capacity to improve their instruction," she says. "We want teachers to become better decision makers, to ask themselves rigorous questions" about their instructional choices.
The district also wants the cream of Glendale's teacher crop to serve as coaches to help teachers learn these skills. "Our selection process for mentors is key," Whissen states. "Mentors need to be interviewed and must come with great recommendations. Those selected [to be mentors] are excellent instructors and excellent communicators."
The mentors are then taught by two teachers who were hand-picked to become the district's cognitive coaching trainers. Becky LaCasse, a 2nd grade teacher at Melvin E. Sine Elementary School, and Linda Armbruster, media specialist at William C. Jack School, were chosen to become trainers because they demonstrated "excellence in the classroom and they had credibility," says Whissen.
Still, as LaCasse and Armbruster are the first to point out, credibility and excellence in the classroom don't guarantee that a teacher will be successful as a trainer or a coach. "Teaching fellow adults requires a different kind of ability," observes LaCasse.
Fortunately, the Glendale School District was willing to provide LaCasse and Armbruster with the training they needed to hone that ability. In the last five years, LaCasse and Armbruster have spent more than 110 hours with nationally known experts in cognitive coaching. They have learned how to coach their colleagues, and the effect in Glendale has been considerable.
"There are at least two mentors who have learned cognitive coaching in each of our 14 schools," reports Priscilla Lundberg, director of curriculum and instruction. "Before the school year starts, these mentors meet with their `mentees' to talk about the year ahead." Throughout the year, these mentors work with teachers by helping them plan lessons, by observing those lessons, and then by helping them reflect upon the lessons. "The focus is not on evaluation," Lundberg hastens to explain. "The focus is on giving support to the new teacher."
As a result, "very few first-year teachers in our district fail," asserts Whissen. What's more, she notes, adopting a model of professional development that emphasizes cognitive coaching for all teachers has also helped "build a capacity for dialogue in our district." Teachers are much more collegial. "It's become a way of thinking," she says. Teachers and students now use a common vocabulary.
"The model fosters communication. There are tools now to develop understanding," agrees LaCasse.
"I've seen profound change," adds Armbruster. "I've seen people from very different philosophical backgrounds have deep discussions about what's going on in the classroom. People are actually listening to each other!"
Still, it's the students who benefit most, says Armbruster. In developing her skills as a "trainer of trainers," she found her own performance in the classroom had improved. "It really works—being able to listen to students, to really try to understand what they're saying to me. I now know how to ask open-ended, higher-level questions." Armbruster also found that her students are quite capable of grappling with this more rigorous instruction. As a result, she says, "My expectations for students are much higher."
The Master Teachers
Holding higher expectations for students is something Doris Quick hopes to help instill in the teachers she works with. Quick now helps manage the Master Teacher Network, which was established by the International Center for Leadership in Education Inc.—an organization founded in 1991 with a vision of helping schools create a more rigorous curriculum that is more relevant to students' lives.
More rigor and more relevance was a popular notion with teachers, says Quick, but many weren't certain how to drive that kind of reform. So the Center's president approved of Quick's idea to establish "a corps of teachers that can go out and share what they know."
If a client requests assistance, Quick explains, the Center sends a team of master teachers representing different curriculum areas to the site. This presents a bit of a problem for members of the team who are practicing teachers because they can't leave their classrooms for extended periods, she notes. "Therefore, we have to have a fairly large group." (Initially a group of 25, the network has grown to nearly 60 teachers, many of whom teach full-time.)
"In most cases, we provide `turnkey' training," says Benjamin Lindeman, a mathematics consultant and master teacher for the Center. "Our hope is that the teachers we work with will go back [to their schools] and be our guiding lights."
Lindeman also hopes teachers will bring to their schools an emphasis on making math relevant "from kindergarten on up." For that reason, he shares lesson ideas that are designed to make mathematics exercises more authentic. For example, a teacher who wants a student to interpret or analyze a graph could "have that student write an article for a newspaper explaining what the graph communicates," rather than just asking the student questions. Teachers can also easily show how different professions use mathematics, he adds. "A secretary, for example, needs to make an analysis of data to decide which car rental deal is the best for her boss, and cost isn't the only factor weighed in the equation."
These tips of the math teaching trade represent the kind of assistance Lindeman says he would have valued when he was a beginning teacher. He started his career in a "very rural area" and was the only math teacher for grades 8 through 12. Although he recalls receiving strong support from the other teachers, he did not have a math colleague with whom he could trade ideas and lesson strategies. Lindeman now sees how valuable such a partnership is. "It certainly would have been helpful," he asserts. "And it's extremely important that these kinds of mentoring programs exist today."
Michael Voiselle, a science teacher who is also part of the Master Teacher Network, agrees, adding that it's also the job of the master teacher to "help prevent stagnation." Sometimes, Voiselle observes, veteran teachers get into a "comfort zone" and are resistant to new ideas. By helping teachers see how a subject like science can come alive using hands-on activities and by helping teachers see how easily they can implement these activities, master teachers "give a `shot in the arm' to those colleagues who need reinforcement from time to time." Says Voiselle, "we help our colleagues find the good teacher that resides within them."
Finding the good teacher within, however, may require more time than the teachers in the Master Teacher Network have. "If there's one drawback to our work, it's that we can't guarantee a long-term relationship," says Quick. School districts must pay for the expertise these master teachers offer, and often these schools can't afford—or simply won't pay for—follow-up visits.
"It's great when we can have a more sustained relationship," a wistful Quick observes. Through a more long-term relationship, she and the other master teachers have a better chance of turning skeptics into believers.
Quick recalls when the master teachers worked with teachers in New York State to help them prepare students for new exit exams. They would visit the school six times in 18 months and would work closely with the teachers to help them implement suggested learning activities. One teacher, says Quick, didn't think she had much to teach him. "He was convinced his students couldn't write the essays we suggested they write." Quick urged him to try her suggestions despite his reservations, and when she returned a few months later, the teacher "brought his students' essays and proudly displayed what they had done. It was remarkable to see his transformation."
That kind of transformation can also occur without face-to-face meetings, Voiselle points out. In this age of electronic mail, teachers who become excited do have a means of communicating with him—and he will respond. "Teachers want to know what they can do to make their lessons more exciting, more hands-on." So Voiselle encourages the teachers he meets in workshops to correspond with him. Through these "great long-distance friendships," he assures teachers "that their ideas have merit and should be tried out."
After all, says Voiselle, that's his job as a master teacher. "Every profession has its competent senior members that have been recognized by their peers as having mastered that profession," he explains. Often, these masters have gained respect because they've made bold innovations and followed unorthodox methods. "They dared to do something different and unusual." Master teachers, Voiselle asserts, inspire others and are excellent role models to those innovators who "will shape the teaching profession in years to come."