No matter how much pre-service training they have been armed with, new teachers begin their first assignments with a range of urgent, school-specific questions about curriculum, instruction, and classroom management. Yet few schools offer induction programs that give new teachers the kind or level of support they require. This serious mismatch between what new teachers need and what they get is described vividly in an article in Educational Leadership that is based on a study of new teachers in Massachusetts by Harvard's Susan Moore Johnson and her team at the Project on the Next Generation of Teachers. Many new teachers find themselves in schools staffed by veteran teachers with well-established, independent patterns of work who do little to acquaint the neophytes with expert practice. New teachers in these schools are driven to eavesdrop on lunchroom conversations and peek through classroom doors for some clue about what should be going on in their own classroom. Other new teachers end up in schools in urban settings that are staffed primarily by other new teachers who have plenty of energy and commitment but can offer little professional guidance about how to teach effectively. A lucky few novices end up in schools where they receive real support from veteran teachers who have time to observe, offer advice, and help on short notice when things go awry. (Veterans get something out of the relationship too, Johnson notes; new teachers are often able to help older teachers with technology and interpreting data from standards-based reform.) What is clear is that what new teachers most need cannot be supplied by conventional in-service training, with its intermittent after-school sessions on a range of topics, or by periodic visits of the district's curriculum coordinators. Until schools are structured so that new teachers can get the help they need when they need it, the quality of teaching will suffer and attrition rates for new teachers will be high.
It's not only new teachers who need this curriculum-specific, classroom-based support, says James Stigler of UCLA in the same issue of Educational Leadership. Today, most professional development is generic; the people who provide it have created programs aimed at all teachers, regardless of the curriculum they are using, but these programs don't seem to do teachers or students much good. What teachers really need, Stigler says, is: a) to learn how to analyze their own teaching, b) to be exposed to alternatives that have worked for others, and c) to develop the ability to judge when to employ which method. This requires teachers to give up the notion that how they teach in their classroom is their own business, as well as the belief that a teacher is not a professional if what she does is "standard practice" rather than something creative she invented herself. As Albert Shanker used to say, what defines a profession is its standard practice. Stigler criticizes most existing efforts to boost teacher quality for focusing on improving the applicant pool rather improving the methods that teachers use. Most students are taught by an average teacher, implementing the average method, he says, and if we can find a way to make that average method a little bit better, it would have a big effect.
"Keeping New Teachers in Mind," by Susan Moore Johnson and Susan Kardos, Educational Leadership, March 2002
"Creating a Knowledge Base: A Conversation with James Stigler," by Scott Willis, Educational Leadership, March 2002