Teachers Need Support

Teacher Josh Rogen writes about the support young teachers need to succeed.

While I’ve written some about teacher attrition in Nashville and noted that teachers in Nashville — and across Tennessee, for that matter – need a raise, Josh offers some perspective on the type of support new teachers need.

Here’s what he has to say:

  • Every single school needs a school-wide behavior program, created and trained in the summer, and implemented in the year. The lack of SWBS is crushing for new teachers. Doesn’t need to be the same plan, but there needs to be a plan.
  • End the idea of 1-3 time district-wide PD on behavior management and push management to school-sites. Context across the district vary too widely for district-wide PD on behavior management to matter. Plus, good grief, one day in central office is obviously not going to make a difference for a first year teacher; it’s just convenient.
  • Assign and really pay a mentor teacher to observe weekly and coach all 1st and 2nd year teachers. Maybe this teacher’s only role is to coach other teachers. I loved the MCL model for that reason, and I’m concerned when I hear schools moving away from it. Why?
  • Train coaches on TLAC techniques at the district level, using the skills sequence found in Get Better Faster.
  • Create district partnerships with Relay and similar programs with experience in training teachers in behavior management. They also really ought to reach out to the old NTF crew. I want to underscore that there are people in Nashville, and within MNPS right now, who know how to train new teachers. Pay them. Use them differently.
  • Random, unannounced, but formative district-level culture walkthroughs of all buildings with a real culture rubric.
  • Stop punishing or judging teachers for writing referrals. That’s a school problem and needs to be solved at the school level.

There’s more, and it’s worth checking out.

More on MNPS and teacher retention:

Memphis, Louisville, Cincinnati

Computers Replace Teachers

 

For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport


 

Holden: Trust Teachers

Former teacher and current education blogger Mary Holden offers her thoughts on how to address the teacher shortage. Of course, even if there wasn’t a teacher shortage, this is the right way to treat teachers. Here’s some of what she has to say:

Trusting teachers to do their job – BECAUSE THEY ARE TRAINED PROFESSIONALS – should be commonplace practice in every school district. But it’s not.

An article from last year in The Atlantic discussed what happened when some Finnish teachers taught here in the U.S. Guess what they noticed? The lack of autonomy. And that’s a very bad thing: “According to a National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) report, teacher autonomy is positively associated with teachers’ job satisfaction and retention. And while most U.S. public-school teachers report a moderate amount of control in the classroom, many say they have little autonomy.”

Let me repeat that in a different way: We have a teacher shortage. Want to retain teachers and attract new ones? Then trust them to do their jobs. Ask them what they need, and then give them the support they need. (Oh, and paying them more would help, too!)

Holden also offers this suggestion:

I wish more districts would recognize what teachers have been saying for years – stop focusing on the data and the test scores and all the punitive measures that have been in place since the dawn of the accountability movement, and instead, focus on what matters: People. Relationships. Community. Developing the joy of learning. And trust our teachers to teach the subjects for which they are trained to teach.

This (and the rest of her article) offer sound advice on how to support and nurture teachers. I hear people say all the time that decisions in education should be made based on what’s good for kids instead of what’s good for adults — as if the two are mutually exclusive. Guess what? Supported teachers who are given autonomy are happy teachers. Which means they are better teachers. Which is GREAT for kids.

For more on education politics and policy in Tennessee, follow @TNEdReport