14 minute read
Recruiting & Retention
RECRUITING & RETENTION
HOW TO END THE MID-CAREER EXODUS OF TEACHERS
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Margaret H. Jones-Carey, Ed.D.
WHERE ARE THEY GOING?
We are seeing a growing trend of mid-career teachers leaving the profession. According to the National Education Association, approximately 17 percent of teachers are leaving every year. While that number is substantially higher in the first five years, the dramatic increase in those leaving the profession with eight to 12 years of experience should be sounding a siren!
While I am sure we can all debate the many reasons teachers offer for leaving the profession including: increased emphasis on standardized test scores, the shifting focus of the annual professional performance review, and the lack of funding for education at the state and national level. There is a growing stream of awareness that the core of the frustration is the lack of shared decision-making roles and opportunities for teachers in the majority of our schools today. The concept of positional authority remains a consistent theme in education. In order to move up in education and have formal authority over changes in education, one must move out of the classroom. Yet, the most impactful changes for students happen in the classroom. This is a true irony.
HOW CAN WE STOP OR AT LEAST SLOW THE EXODUS?
As a result, teacher leadership is no longer optional. Teachers in formalized teacher leadership roles are able to articulate the impact of their work on their students and colleagues. They are risk takers and still today for the most part are forging a new path for our profession. While the desire to lead is not limited to mid-career teachers, the marriage of the skills and the craft of teaching are often well balanced for most teachers by the time they have been in the profession for eight to 12 years. Many mid-career teachers crave the opportunity to expand and extend their knowledge and practices beyond their own classroom but are still fully committed to engaging closely with student learning by staying either within the teacher classroom role or engaging directly with other teachers daily on improving pedagogical practices.
Failing to engage in the development of teacher leaders within our school systems can create high turnover rates and/or make for frustrated teachers who want to do more, share more, be more, but aren’t allowed. Teaching is the only profession that I can think of that “forces” you out of your core practice in order to provide an enhanced sphere of influence. While there is certainly a need for some of our best teachers to become administrators, the core of our business still is learning in classrooms.
Over my 30 years in public education I continue to be amazed at how the role of teacher leaders remains an under-utilized and under-supported role. Yes, there are department leaders/chairs, mentors and teachers on special assignment that are utilized within schools to impact certain areas of instruction,
but in general, they have a limited role and limited impact. This is NOT the teacher leaders fault. There are also many teachers who lead more informally in the schools as well. These informal teacher leaders have some of the greatest impact on shaping and changing instruction. These teacher leaders drive instructional changes by
facilitating professional learning community conversations that focus on common planning and common instructional delivery. They visit others’ classrooms, sometimes almost secretively, and provide a shared feedback loop that truly impacts instruction. These teacher leaders are often the “go to” teachers in a building for the principal. They are the sounding board for the conceptual framework of instructional improvements in a building. The principal “runs ideas by them” to ensure it makes instructional sense and will resonate in the building. They are often the early adopters of changes and get others to join with them.
WHAT CAN YOU DO?
Yet, the idea of truly training teacher leaders and providing them a network of support remains almost non-existent in schools across the country. This has to change. We must
empower our teacher leaders, provide them with support, and encourage them to help us move instructional change within schools. We have all types of professional membership based groups for content areas, interests, administrators but it’s almost impossible to find a professional membership organization for teacher leaders.
It doesn’t have to be this way. As teachers and leaders, we must demand a more formalized approach to developing and supporting teacher leaders. We need to engage in offering our potential teacher leaders professional development opportunities that allow them to grow, lead, innovate, impact and create the schools we want for our students.
RESOURCES ON TEACHER LEADERSHIP
They are the true believers in this can “get fixed” and “we can get it done.” There
are some supports out there such as The Center for Strengthening the Teaching Profession which offers a teacher leadership skills framework including vignettes which are a great guide to getting started. Yet, it seems that for the most part, teacher leadership development is an isolated task to be learned on the job.
The Teacher Leadership Competencies (Center for Teaching Quality) offer a great guide for defining and developing teacher leaders. First and foremost, teacher leaders must be engaged in reflective practice, understand the principals of teacher effectiveness, have developed communication skills, are life-long learners, understand group and system theories and be willing to share without imposing!
ASCD is also engaged in work around developing and nurturing teacher leaders through a grant from the U.S. Department of Education. Yet, the most recent summit they hosted could only accommodate 25 teams from across the country.
The time is now. The development of a national teacher leader network has never been needed more. Let’s get the conversation going. Let’s join together and create a national teacher leader network!
Dr. Jones-Carey has been a public school educator for more than 30 years. She has held the titles of teacher, Coordinator of Technology, Director of Technology and Curriculum Integration, Principal, Assistant Superintendent, Associate Superintendent, and Chief Academic Officer. Dr. Jones-Carey is currently the Senior Vice-President for Professional Growth at PLS 3rd Learning, an adjunct professor in the Education Leadership program at St. Bonaventure University and the President of Learning Forward NY. She is actively involved in promoting the idea of personalized learning for teachers and developing teacher leaders.
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RECRUITING & RETENTION
GO BEYOND TRADITIONAL TEACHER INDUCTION PROGRAMS
Dr. Andrew Pushchak and Dr. Stephanie Williams
igorous academic state standards, high stakes testing, school district policies, and a shortage of confidence add to the challenges that a first-year teacher experiences in the classroom.
Recent graduates of teacher training programs are certified content experts, as validated by their university diploma. But with minimal experience, they may not be experts in the pedagogy of teaching. Firstyear teachers might also lack the necessary organizational knowledge to navigate the challenges of teaching or struggle to assimilate into the culture of a school and community.
PRE-SERVICE TEACHER TRAINING
Pre-service training programs are designed to meet and abide by state and national standards and guidelines. However, considerable variation exists between programs (Wasonga, Wanzare, and Dawo, 2015). These variations ultimately result in differing competency and ability levels. In order to assist novice teachers in the transition, nearly all school districts nationwide implement some form of a teacher induction program.
TEACHER INDUCTION PROGRAMS
An induction program, also referred to as a mentoring program, allows a firstyear teacher to work with an experienced teacher to improve their pedagogical approaches. Induction programs also assist with the new teacher’s ability to cope with work overload, stress, and lack of support from superiors (Dias-Lacy & Guirguis, 2017). Most state education departments require some form of program in order for a novice teacher to acquire the next level of teaching credential. What if additional supports could be offered to new teachers, beyond the district-provided induction program, by the institution that offers the teacher training program?
A NEW ADDITION TO TEACHER INDUCTION PROGRAMS
Edinboro University identified a need for continued communication with pre-service teachers beyond school walls, mentor teachers, and administrative supervision. Recognizing the value of additional support for recent graduates, Edinboro University launched the 5th Year Seminar.
EDINBORO UNIVERSITY’S 5TH YEAR SEMINAR
A recognized leader in teacher preparation for more than 160 years, Edinboro University acknowledges the benefits of supporting graduates as they transition from college student to professional educator. The 5th Year Seminar, which congregates novice and early career teachers, University School of Education faculty, school district administrators and other professional educators, is an addition to induction and mentoring programs provided by school districts. The free seminar provides novice teachers with an opportunity to participate in a community of learners without the pressures of evaluation. Meetings take place three times per academic year and are open to new teachers regardless of the institution they attended. The agenda for each meeting is developed based upon requests from the novice teachers regarding their own first-year needs and challenges.
CONCLUSION
Lambson (2010) recognizes the value of learning in a community and identifies learning as a “special kind of social practice where the learner develops ways of acting and problem solving rather than a discrete set of knowledge structures that can be taken from one context and used in another.” Lambson also elaborates on the value of a community of learners, “What a learner learns through participating with others in a community of practice is actually how to do practices.” Edinboro University has developed the 5th Year Seminar to promote a community of learners among novice and early career teachers in a setting free from their home school district distractions or pressures. Edinboro believes this link between University and Teacher will not only benefit the novice and early career teachers, but ultimately increase student achievement.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dias-Lacy, S. L. and Guirguis, R. V. (2017). Challenges for new teachers and ways of coping with them. Journal of Education and Learning, 6 (3). Wasonga, C. O., Wanzare, Z. O., and Dawo, J. I. (2015). Mentoring beginning teachers: Bridging the Gap between pre-service training and in-practice results. Journal of International Education and Leadership, 5 (2). Lambson, D. (2010). Novice teachers learning through participation in a teacher study group. Teaching and Teacher Education: An International Journal of Research and Studies, 26 (8).
A Long-term Solution to Teacher Shortages:
THE BIG PICTURE REVIEW
Megan Boren
We’ve all heard the saying, “You can’t see the forest for the trees.” When it comes to state policies that affect the teacher workforce, we need to make sure we see both.
ach individual teacher is important. He or she will make life-long impressions on thousands — the average teacher helps shape over 3,000 students during their career. Every single teacher is responsible for helping to raise the next generation to understand the world and develop the skills and knowledge to become productive, well-rounded citizens. Getting a quality education can lead to increased wealth, tolerance, political participation, better health and selfesteem, reduced crime rates and general stability of our society. And teachers make or break a child’s school-based education. When it comes to student performance, teachers are estimated to have two to three times the effect of any other school factor, including services, facilities, and even leadership. And yet, the forest is important too. States are facing unprecedented teacher workforce shortages. In the 16-state SREB region, all states have shortages in at least three subject areas — some face shortages in all academic subject areas. And 14 of the 16 states are seeing declines in the number of new teacher candidates graduating from preparation programs.
Retention of the current workforce is another major issue for many states. National teacher survey data points to several leading reasons: inadequate preparation for the job, lack of support like mentoring, professional development and collaboration, and dissatisfaction with compensation. Teachers’ responsibilities increased significantly in the last two decades, but support has not kept pace. Teachers are now responsible for educating a more diverse group of students, who bring many different needs to the classroom, including mental and emotional health. And they must do this under expectations that they increase student growth at much higher rates.
School leaders and policymakers face two very important demands at the same time: We need better teachers. And we need a lot more of them now.
SHORT-TERM SOLUTIONS ARE CREATING LONG-TERM PROBLEMS
Many leaders are answering this question with short-term solutions: emergency certifications to allow teachers to begin filling empty classrooms before they’ve completed their training; incentives for retired teachers to return; larger class sizes; concessions in requirements for non-traditional preparation routes; incremental pay raises to appease the growing unrest in the teacher workforce. Is it working? Well, sort of. Some schools and districts can fill their teacher openings. But is the quality of instruction improving? The latest data says no. As of 2018, one in seven teachers in the South are unprepared or inexperienced. Trend data shows this will get worse
before it gets better.
Think about it this way — would you want your child to be taught by a brand-new teacher who has not completed the basic training for the job year over year? Children taught by a highly effective teacher for three years in a row average 50 percentile points of growth. A teacher who isn’t at least minimally effective at their job can actually cause students’ achievement to decline.
Teacher Experience, Certification, Retention
In the South, 24 percent of the teacher workforce is inexperienced, unprepared, or planning to leave within the next five years. This table shows these percentages for states in the SREB region.
Inexperienced: Teachers with one or two years of experience. Uncertified: Teachers practicing under an emergency or provisional certificate. Plan to leave the profession: Teachers planning to leave teaching as soon as possible or as soon as a more desirable job opportunity arises. Sources: Learning Policy Institute (2018). Understanding Teacher Shortages: 2018 Update. Primary data from the National Center for Education Statistics Civil Rights Data Collection, Public-Use Data File 2015-16. Planning to leave the profession primary data from the National Center for Education Statistics Public School Teacher File 2016, National Teacher and Principal Survey.
SEE THE BIGGER PICTURE FOR MORE — AND MORE EFFECTIVE — TEACHERS
State leaders now need to look for long-term solutions to the teacher shortage crisis — increasing the quantity and quality of our teacher workforce, year over year. But we will find long-term solutions only through careful analysis of the problem and its causes.
Analyzing the reasons for the teacher shortage is not easy. A complex web of policies and their effects are at play. You’ve heard some: inadequate pay, school budget cuts, declining respect for the profession. We can’t address these in isolation. For example, states that are focused on the important strategies of increasing pay and restoring education budgets are not seeing the increases in the quantity and quality of their educator workforce. Why? Because these strategies are not coupled with investments in key elements for any profession — quality training, career advancement and customized professional growth. We have to look deeper into the forest. We have to think about how the trees are planted and cultivated — to really see the needs of individual teachers, who are some of the most important people in our society.
This will require leaders and educators to come together across agencies for a thorough review of all their state’s policies across the teacher career continuum — access to quality teacher preparation, teacher recruitment, certification, induction, compensation, growth, retention and advancement. All with the goal of making the profession more attractive and respected.
Four states are now undertaking these complex policy reviews, creating plans specific to each state to adjust and redesign the most deficient policies with a holistic approach. SREB is facilitating these conversations and sharing — as a resource for more states to and conduct their own broad reviews — a growing inventory of research and recommendations on each of the policy areas affecting the teacher workforce.
These states are keeping an eye on the big picture as they redesign and connect teacher workforce policies across the full teacher career continuum. They’re leading the way on a long-term strategy to solve not only today’s teacher shortage crisis but also the need for even better teachers in tomorrow’s classrooms.
Megan Boren is program specialist at the Southern Regional Education Board, currently focused on educator human capital strategies policy, implementation and technical assistance. Previously at SREB she led the readiness course initiative as well as educator effectiveness technical assistance grants and community of practice projects. A two-time graduate of Virginia Tech, she lives in Charlotte, North Carolina.
