Strong Finishes: Conference Supports New Teachers During Difficult Year

Carl Smith

If you ask a veteran educator what it was like to teach during the 2020-2021 academic year, they will likely tell you they used their years of experience to get themselves and their students through one of the most challenging years in the recent history of education. If you ask the same question to a teacher whose first year leading a classroom was during this past academic year, they might say the experience left them rethinking their career path and seriously doubting their future in education.

For those new teachers and others with few years of experience, the Finish Strong 2.0 spring conference offered outreach, support and guidance many participants said helped them end the school year on a positive note and reaffirmed their commitment to education.

Approximately 220 teachers joined together — albeit virtually — for the April event. The conference, a partnership between the Mississippi Department of Education (MDE) and the Oxford-based North Mississippi Education Consortium (NMEC), married a pre-COVID-19 goal of the MDE — provide targeted support to new teachers to keep them in the profession and cultivate a new generation of experienced educators — with the specific task of supporting teachers as they navigated the first full academic year during the pandemic.

For Jennifer Sykes, an English Language Arts teacher at Aberdeen School District’s Belle/Shivers Middle School, the conference’s support and outreach came at a pivotal point in the semester. The first-year teacher said she felt lost at times during the year and was so overwhelmed when the event was about to start, she mulled not attending.

“I equate it to others like this: I feel like I went to church that day. All of the speakers were like the preachers, and they hit on everything I felt like I was dealing with and even some of the issues, problems and feelings I didn’t know I was dealing with until they put them into words,” she said. “I let out a sigh of relief. It was truly that good.”

‘We want you to love teaching’

Shanequa Robbins, a two-year assistant teacher who will take on her own classroom assignment for the West Point Consolidated School District this academic year, works on multistep math equations with eighth grader Abigail Young (right) during the spring semester. Robbins said the Finish Strong 2.0 conference reaffirmed her desire to be a positive influence and a guiding light for her students.

Dr. Jimmy Weeks, the NMEC director, knows how important the first years of a teacher’s career are.

His dissertation covered teacher retention and mentoring, and the data Weeks collected for it showed the majority of teachers who would eventually leave the profession did so within three to five years.

“If those are the statistics and you also have people retiring, who is going to be there to teach our children and grandchildren? It’s a scary thought,” said Susan Scott, a NMEC project coordinator who helped facilitate the conference. “We want them to begin teaching and to love teaching for a long time. We want them to have an impact on so many lives. We want them to stay in the profession and feel like they’ve been supported and guided the whole way through.”

Dr. Kristina Livingston, MDE’s lead professional development coordinator, said she knew her organization had to step in and specifically assist inexperienced teachers following the outbreak of COVID-19 and subsequent school shutdowns. If administrators already struggled to retain these young educators, she asked, how many more could walk away because of the additional stresses and uncertainty caused by the pandemic?

“We all know what it’s like to be a new teacher, but we don’t know what it’s like to be a new teacher during a pandemic. This was a whole new ballgame,” she said. “A lot of these brand-new teachers didn’t get to finish student teaching [as education majors in college], or they might have taught for only a month and a half [before COVID hit]. The flexibility these teachers had to have is unlike anything our teachers have ever experienced.”

In organizing the conference, MDE staff and conference facilitators asked what teachers needed the most in terms of support and planned professional development tracks and sessions along the event’s theme: Think strong. Be strong. Finish strong.

Specifically, organizers touched on numerous key topics — social and emotional needs, high-quality instruction, student engagement, classroom culture and motivation and general ways to help struggling students, among others — that covered both general and special populations.

At its core, the conference focused on learners’ and educators’ mental health — the most important short-term need of all those involved in education.

“In every session, we wanted to be very intentional about preparing teachers to teach the whole child — socially, emotionally and academically,” Livingston said. “There has been such a stigma around mental health support in the past, but, if anything, this pandemic has made us more understanding about what it means to deal with depression and anxiety, among other things. We also wanted to be intentional about giving teachers an outlet and sessions they could attend to help them better cope with the stresses of the year.”

Jeremy Anderson, a motivational speaker who gave the conference’s keynote address, “spoke to attendees’ minds, souls and hearts,” Livingston said.

One of Anderson's messages left a profound impact on Shanequa Robbins, a two-year assistant teacher in the West Point Consolidated School District who will lead her own classroom for the first time in the new academic year: Teach by faith, not by sight.

“Sometimes you must meet children where they are. They might not have the grades they’re able to have at that moment or maybe they’re having behavior issues — the important thing is to speak life into your students,” she said. “You don’t know the circumstances they’re going through. As an educator, we can be a light and a positive influence for them because we might be the only source of stability they have.”

Like many of the attendees who left feedback for NMEC facilitators, both Sykes and Robbins said they took away numerous strategies that helped them end the year on a high note and many encouraging supports that reaffirmed their desires to be teachers.

“They felt like when they left, they were rejuvenated,” Livingston said. “We’re trying not to lose teachers. We want them to feel and know there’s a reason they’re here and a reason they’re doing this, and they can, in fact, finish strong.”