Research about Teacher Retention and Mentoring/Induction
So far what I have found suggests that teachers are more likely to remain in the profession and more likely to remain in the same school and district when they receive high quality, frequent mentoring from a colleague who teaches the same sort of assignment on their campus, whether the mentoring is officially required or informally offered, but all the studies have serious flaws in methodology, data collection, interpretation… In short, a consensus of opinion of any 25 third-year teachers would probably be equally likely to be valid and reliable.
Now my concern is to look a little beyond theoretically well-designed mentoring programs (such as TxBESS) which appear to have helped a little, and consider the somewhat larger and less precisely defined context of what factors weigh most heavily in the minds of teachers in causing them to leave or encouraging them to stay and become leaders and mentors of coming generations of teachers.
Your advice and insights are welcome in this task! I have been preparing teachers, being one, mentoring a few, mentoring a few teacher educators and continuing to learn about teaching for most of the past forty years and hope to continue doing so for another twenty or so. Thus, I have some relevant knowlege and experience, but I have a lot to learn about doing this well in the twenty-first century. This is our profession; we should think and care deeply about how to make it one that builds a better world without using up the primary resource that creates culture, civility and knowledge–the teachers.
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This is something I would like explore more about. I am taking an evaluations designs class and there are a few questions I have:
1. Will changing teacher training improve teacher retention or can the problem be solved with teacher training?
2. What were the flaws in methodology, data collection, etc. in the previous projects, and if we could improve these errors, could the program make a difference?
3. What are the main reasons for teachers leaving the field?
Here are my biased opinions with regard to your questions:
1. When teacher training truly prepares teachers for the real world classroom with sufficient time in classrooms participating and shadowing excellent teacher role models, it helps novices avoid the bad experiences that new teachers often have. However, it does not diminish the need for a trusted and trustworthy mentor teacher close at hand who knows the campus culture and history and who truly wishes the new teacher well.
2. From what I can recall (I haven’t looked at that research for awhile), the criticisms of most of the existing research were that it was often done to justify continuation of a particular program and thus had inherent positive biases and that it often depended on responses from “volunteers” who were more likely to volunteer if they either wished to support a program or person associated with a program, or needed to vent frustration due to individuals and specific situations that were not as expected. In short, anytime you ask someone why they left a job where they were either unhappy or not well received you are not too likely to get an objective analysis of the underlying causes of the situation.
3. I think it would be very difficult to come up with foolproof and useful categories of reasons for leaving teaching or a particular teaching situation.
To the extent they have accurately stated their reasons, I have found the following reasons to be fairly believable when told to me by teachers:
A. Done in by the green-eyed dragon or the school barracuda: a teacher’s professional reputation is trashed by one or more envious colleagues or threatened administrator/supervisor(s) in a manner which makes the environment too hostile for that teacher to continue there. This sort of casualty often occurs when new administrators want to demonstrate their resolve to be a “new broom” that will turn a school around by firing or (more often) making life there unbearable for any teachers whose style or experiences differ from the new administrator’s agenda. Sometimes these teachers merely transfer and lick their wounds in another setting or thrive in a happier place, but sometimes they completely abandon the profession.
B. Great teacher; wrong assignment: (1) A teacher whose natural abilities suited him/her for teaching young children tried to teach upper grades and was uncomfortable with either the students and their developmental characteristics or with the attitudes and behaviors of colleagues, (2) A teacher with a natural bent for teaching adolescents became a primary grades teacher based on advice from others rather than trusting his/her own comfort zones. (3) A teacher who is comfortable in a middle-class suburban or a rural school feels uncomfortable and/or unable to succeed in an urban environment. (4) A teacher who is successful in urban or rural settings is frustrated by the expectations of parents, students and staff in a suburban school. It just isn’t always feasible to “blossom where you are” if you find the habitat inhospitable to who you are as a teacher. Sometimes finding an appropriate transfer or moving to another area or adding different certifications or specialties solves these situations, but not always; sometimes the pain of feeling inadequate or rejected goes too deep.
C. Never really wanted the job. Some people go into education for the wrong reasons (steady employment, daytime hours, less direct supervision than some lines of work). Occasionally they find the teacher in themselves and become the professional that is needed; other times they stay without really wanting to be there, due to inertia—it’s just too much bother (and too expensive) to re-train for another career. Other times they recognize that it was not a match meant to be and move on to other roles, often in education-related businesses such as publishing, lobbying, or human service occupations that do not involve teaching children.
If we had perfect retention of teachers, things would be much worse than they are because everyone needs to grow professionally, and sometimes that means the old skin will no longer fit and needs to be shed.
I needed your input. For the needs analysis, I wanted to see if it was something that could even solved by replacing in-service with a teacher practicum. From everyone I know who was a former teacher, they all left for the first reason (the green-eyed dragon). I do agree that a teacher practicum is not enough because it takes time to groom a good teacher.
In terms of making a school and the students successful, the research I have read tends to support the following tenets:
1. Reform needs to be system or school-wide to produce significant and/or lasting results, and that requires…
2. Willing buy-in by all the players, which is only likely to happen if
3. It makes sense, doesn’t destroy anyone’s world-view, and can be effectively implemented by diverse individuals with diverse purposes and viewpoints.
That is why so much that is done as “in-service” or “staff development” is ineffective. Too often it is really just hype for the latest flavor of things we have seen and done before, trumpeted by authority using fresh jargon—-and that’s the nicest way I’ve ever heard it described by veteran teachers!
There is a lot more support for the use of coaches who work with teachers directly and who are held accountable for their impact on the work the teachers do and the results pupils obtain from instruction. It’s no good having coaches who are “snoopervisors” with no responsibility for the impact of their actions on others. That is a ready-made situation for institutionalizing “green-eyed dragons and barracudas” and creating a constantly hostile environment for teachers. Coaches have to be evaluated by those they coach, as well as by those they report to in the hierarchy of school management. There needs to be mutual respect and free give-and-take for interwoven teacher support/supervision to be supportive and not punitive.
That makes a lot of sense and that is normally how it works outside of education. Managers are held accountable for what their employees accomplish and they’re given incentives for it. Now I have to see if this is something that is in the scope of my project.
Believe it or not, I have actually heard even veteran teachers who have experienced this applaud well-implemented coaching approaches, when they were well thought-out and organized, employed respected and respectful veterans as coaches and focused on the students’ needs rather than on the teachers’ short-comings. Teachers who were not fully comfortable with the typically isolated role as “captains of their ships, masters of their souls” were actually pleased to have the support and interaction of shared thinking about how best to craft the learning experience for the children who actually showed up to be taught (rather than the hypothetical ones usually planned for). It does require very careful implementation though, to avoid becoming more stressful for the teacher rather than more supportive than doing the best one can without interference.
Sorry that sounds so convoluted!
You might recall my having said in class that teachers’ egos are very delicate and their concepts of who they are as “good and moral” persons are often so interwoven with their concepts of themselves as good teachers that ANY criticism is felt to be a moral judgment, rejecting them as persons. That is why many are happy to be left alone; not because they think they are perfect or “the best”, but because rejection is so painful.
Online training via webinars can be very positive because it is “private” learning where one isn’t exposed to public observation. Some teachers behave badly (don’t pay attention or participate fully) in public staff development because they don’t want their peers to think they are naive, in need of instruction, or currying favor with administrators/presenters.
I still recall and have lived to experience the reality of research done over thirty years ago on the impact of teacher evaluations done by students. Teachers who got no surprises didn’t change:
If they thought they were great and the students did too, they kept on doing the same things.
If they thought they were not so hot and the students said the same thing, they continued to muddle along.
However, those who were SURPRISED by their outcomes, changed in ways that made them more effective:
If they thought they were great, but students said “not really”; they got busy and tried to use the criticism constructively to prove the students wrong.
If they thought they were not outstanding, but students said they were pretty cool; they worked to live up to the praise.
The problem is just being strong enough to handle any criticism at all when trying to behave like an authority figure!
Incidentally, in case you are not already using that resource. I have found the webinars offered free by WestEd/Schools Moving Up to be very interesting and useful.
http://www.schoolsmovingup.net/cs/smu/print/htdocs/smu/home.htm