Unfortunately, there are few things tougher in teaching than getting started: that first year at that first job is almost always the hardest.
No matter how good the training and/or the student teaching experience and/or the new school, new teachers face a hectic year of ‘firsts’ in an environment that’s new, and they can really only go through that alone. It’s not good for the teacher, and it’s certainly not good for his/her students. And it’s not good for the profession.
Most teachers emerge from that first year, having survived and having learned a lot, and ready to take that experience and move forward, already knowing that future years will be much better.
But not all. In an already retention-challenged profession, this first year is sometimes the way-too-early ‘final straw’. Some statistics (see article below) show that one in ten teachers leave after the first year, with the figure being as high as one in three in urban schools.
Nevertheless, this situation is an unavoidable hurdle, it seems. Or is it? Enter Elizabeth Moje, the dean of the school of education at the University of Michigan.
Back in 2010, Moje was contacted by Dr. Jonathan Zimmerman at Beaumont Hospital – Dearborn, who was seeking advice on a better method to evaluate medical residents. As the two of them began to work together and began to visit schools and hospitals together, they both noticed distinct differences in how teachers and doctors get their training and preparation.
“A third-year medical student is almost always paired at the hip with an intern,” Zimmerman said. “It’s much easier to learn from a peer that’s one or two years ahead of you and it’s much easier to teach if you are teaching somebody one or two years behind you. You have a better sense of where they’re coming from and they’re not so scared.”
Moje wants to institute this kind of longer term training with U of Michigan’s future teachers, as early as Fall 2019, with a school or district in or near Detroit.
Much of this discussion is summarized/taken from a much longer Chalkbeat article, which may be seen at https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/detroit/2018/07/18/how-a-doctor-inspired-a-new-way-to-train-teachers-and-how-that-is-leading-to-a-new-kind-of-school/
Briefly, Moje’s new approach features a K-12 teaching school, similar to a teaching hospital, where future teachers — called interns — will train together under a single roof. They’ll complete their student teaching there. Then, instead of heading out in search of a job in another school, they’ll stay on for three more years as full-time, fully certified teaching “residents.”
Residents won’t be trainees. They’ll be real classroom teachers working with real children and making a real salary — the same as any other first-, second-, or third-year teacher. But, unlike their peers in traditional schools, they’ll continue to learn from their professors and will work closely with the veteran teachers — called attendings — who will make up most of the school’s teaching staff.
Once it’s up and running, she said, she expects that between half and two-thirds of the faculty will be veteran teachers. The rest will be residents.
Many more details, and much more background, can be seen by reading the article, and it is worth a visit to the link.
This is a promising approach which is worth keeping an eye on. Finding a more efficient model to help get teachers more fully prepared can only be good for the new teachers, their schools, their students, and the profession itself.
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