Who's the Mentor? | Unprepared New Hires ...
Tips for New Teachers
Tips for Experienced Teachers | Rx for Teacher Isolation ... |

Cover Story
Who's the Mentor?

Everyone knows veteran educators have a lot to offer new teachers. But new teachers, despite their lack of experience, often have ideas that even the most veteran teacher can put to good use. Just ask these NEA members.

NEA member Karen Jensen knows her craft so well she coaches other teachers.

Karen Jensen is about as veteran a teacher as you can be. She's taught for 28 years.

But Jensen, a French teacher in Bellevue, Washington, feels she's still learning her craft--and probably always will be. And she's not afraid to admit that she's learning a lot from a source many veteran teachers would never think of seriously tapping: her younger colleagues.

Allison Dan is just one of the new teachers who've impressed Jensen with their fresh approaches. Dan showed Jensen a technique she learned at college in Wisconsin.

The technique, called "Total Physical Response," aims to help students learn a foreign language by associating words with physical action. To learn the word for "walk," a student says the word, then takes a step. For "elephant," a student might wave an arm like a trunk.

"Sometimes it looks a bit cornball," smiles Jensen, "but it's very effective." Over the next 10 years, the U.S. Department of Education estimates, 2 million new teachers will be entering classrooms. Many of these teachers--like Allison Dan--will enter their new profession well prepared and knowledgeable. They'll have a lot to offer.

Will these new teachers get a chance to share what they've learned? Or will they be advised to forget everything they learned in school about teaching because they're now in the "real world"?

The answer will probably vary by district. In many schools, veterans are quite willing to credit new teachers with enthusiasm--and maybe some computer smarts. But, beyond that, a lot of veterans simply assume that most new teachers don't have a clue.

This assumption, experienced teachers like Karen Jensen believe, can short-circuit some valuable learning opportunities. Many new teachers, she notes, come out of excellent preparation programs and arrive with good, practical ideas.

Jensen's new colleague, Allison Dan, is a case in point. Her training included a year of immersion in France, followed by two years of an intensive teacher prep program. In each of the two years, Dan had a semester of coursework combined with classroom observation, followed by a semester of full-time student teaching. While student-teaching, Dan also took night courses. All along, she got plenty of help from skillful, cooperating teachers.

Not all teacher education experiences, of course, come close to matching the rigor of Allison Dan's program, one reason why NEA is working closely with the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education to upgrade teacher education. (See FYI)

This NEA-backed effort is making a difference. Kelly Sedgley, a graduate from an NCATE-accredited program at the University of New Hampshire, is living proof. Last year, her first, Sedgley won the prestigious Sallie Mae award for beginning teachers, an honor given to only one teacher per state.

At UNH, Sedgley learned to combine science with the rest of the primary curriculum, a background that enabled her to make a big contribution last year to the work of veteran New Hampshire teacher Sue Mason.

Mason and Sedgley worked as a team at the Epsom Central School near Concord. Sedgley, says Mason, helped the team integrate dinosaurs, beavers, and reptiles with math, reading, and poetry.

"Our minds were always feeding off one another," says Mason. "Kelly helped us get a fresh start on everything."

When partnerships between new and veteran teachers click, it can be hard to remember where good ideas come from. In Glendale, Arizona, high school teacher Bart Bondeson started his career with an orientation toward keeping objectives clear, something he learned at Florida International, an NCATE-accredited institution.

Bondeson begins each lesson with a short activity that students work on as soon as the class bell rings, which gets them straight into the topic of the day. Each lesson has one objective.

"If you have eight objectives," he notes, "you're likely not to reach any."

Bondeson says his mentor, veteran teacher Donnis Deever, strongly reinforced this approach.

For her part, Deever, a 30-year teaching veteran, says she has learned a great deal from her younger colleague about the importance of seeing each lesson through the eyes of the students.

But Bondeson insists he learned that from his experienced colleague.

Who's right? It really doesn't matter. Add a well-trained new teacher to a school where veterans are eager to share what they know--and learn what they don't--and good things happen.

Unprepared New Hires An Unacceptable Reality

NEA Today this month is featuring some great new teachers who received excellent preparation from their teacher education programs.

Not all beginners in the profession are so fortunate.

Some 50,000 individuals who lack appropriate training enter the teaching force annually on emergency or substandard licenses, according to the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future.

These unprepared teachers make up more than a quarter of newly hired teachers. About 15 percent are hired with emergency, temporary, or provisional licenses, and another 12 percent are hired with no license at all.

These unprepared teachers are not distributed evenly across the country. High-poverty schools are much more likely to have unprepared teachers in front of their classrooms than schools in more affluent areas.

The pressure to hire still more unprepared teachers is growing, as student enrollments rise and enormous numbers of experienced teachers reach retirement age. Education Secretary Richard W. Riley estimates that America will need more than 2 million new teachers over the next decade.

Also adding to the growing demand for new teachers: the growing realization that children learn better in small classes. California needed 20,000 additional teachers to meet its goals for reducing class size in grades K-3.

Currently, according to Education Week, 30,000 out of California's 270,000 teachers are working with emergency permits.

NEA and NEA affiliates are working on many fronts to promote high standards for teacher preparation and to help new teachers through the difficult first few years.

Here's one innovative approach: The Texas State Teachers Association recently won passage of a state law that requires school districts to tell parents when their children are taught for more than 30 days by someone who lacks full teaching credentials.

Tips for new teachers

How can you get respect for your ideas without making everybody think you're incredibly arrogant? We asked NEA members who won the Sallie Mae First Class Teacher Award for beginning teachers in 1999. The award goes to one teacher in each state.

Demonstrate your ideas instead of talking about them. As a first year or new teacher, your actions speak louder than being vocal.

Lisa Wilson
Smyrna High School
Smyrna, Delaware

Don't go in thinking you're better than everybody. Take suggestions and constructive criticism. Don't take criticism personally. Even after 30 years, you'll still be learning.

If you hear teachers talking about something they're doing in class and you have something to suggest, you might say, "I did this in college. If you want to try it, I have information." Leave it to them to come to you.

Jennifer Renda
Macopin Middle School
West Milford, New Jersey

Have an open mind to see what veteran teachers are doing already. Ask questions. Say, "What do you think of this idea?" You can get benefit of their experience. They'll feel valued and you'll be sharing your ideas.

Kelly Sedgley
Epsom Central School
Epsom, New Hampshire

Tips for experienced teachers

NEA member Susan Walters, a former English teacher, coordinates the work of University of Southern Maine faculty, mentor-teachers, and student-teachers at Wells Junior High School near Concord, New Hampshire. Here's her advice to experienced teachers on how to get the most from the good ideas of newcomers to the profession:

• Approach your work with new teachers from a position of curiosity, not with an attitude of knowing all the answers.

• Build trust through active, empathic listening and questioning.

• Invite new teachers to observe you and give you feedback.

• Explain what you do and why. Or ask a new teacher to tell you why they think you did something. Talking about it will help both of you.

• Be willing to support and experiment with a new teacher's ideas.

• Recognize new teachers' areas of expertise. Many have useful career experience or interests.

• If you are going to be a formal mentor, enroll in a course designed for that role. Being a good teacher of children doesn't always translate into working well with adult learners.

• As teachers work with new teachers, they gain a deeper understanding of the complexity of what they do. Value your expertise and be proud of the contributions you are making.

Rx for Teacher Isolation:
The Professional Development School

In what kind of institution can you see university professors going on rounds with aspiring young professionals, teaching them how to handle real-world situations?

One answer is the teaching hospital, the site where almost all young doctors truly learn their craft.

Another answer, considerably less familiar, is the "professional development school"--or PDS for short. Professional development schools are high-quality public schools that feature a teacher education program modeled on the notion of a teaching hospital.

In a PDS, advocates of professional development schools believe, everyone learns better--student-teachers, beginning teachers, veteran teachers, university faculty, and, certainly, school children.

The main idea behind the PDS model: Student-teachers can and should do much of their learning on-site in schools, even before they're ready for practice teaching.

In a PDS situation, some of a student's collegiate education classes are held at the school itself. Professors come over from the university to the public school to teach their classes.

Veteran teachers who work at the school, meanwhile, are on hand to give the student-teachers the benefit of their solid, practical knowledge. To see a teaching idea in action, student-teachers can often just walk down the hall.

Student-teachers at a professional development school, school faculty, and university faculty "go on rounds" together, observing classes and discussing what they see. The PDS model, in short, bridges the gap between theory and practice.

And because teachers in a professional development school get used to watching and talking about each other's work, a PDS also helps bridge the gap between classroom and classroom.

To build a PDS, you need three partners: the school district administration, a postsecondary education program, and local teachers, according to NEA member Robert Pines, a professor of education at Montclair State University in New Jersey and coordinator of a PDS network sponsored by NEA's Teacher Education Initiative.

NEA member Richard Clark, a researcher with the National Network for Educational Renewal, has studied the cost of running a PDS.

Clark, who works at the University of Washing-ton in Seattle, says launching a PDS usually costs $25,000 to $50,000 per school. Beyond that, a PDS doesn't cost significantly more to operate than traditional teacher ed programs.

"If you're spending the money to do it right, a professional development school shouldn't cost much more," says Clark. "You just reallocate the money you've been spending on snake oil consultants."