Retaining Teachers

In the April edition if Educational Leadership, there is an article called Mission Possible which focuses on recruiting and retaining teachers in a North Carolina school district. As we discussed in class, one of the reasons that so many people leave teaching is because they do not have the support that they need to succeed. This article confirms these ideas. Although these problems are true in all kinds of school districts, they are especially true in urban districts and, unfortunately, in the districts that need the most help and consistency. When the researchers who wrote this article asked other teachers in the state what it would take for them to teach in these challenging schools, they said they would want:

1. A great principal
2. Incentives
3. Compensation for results
4. High-quality professional development
5. Instructional Coaches
6. Small class sizes

Although in this article, the district was able to provide monetary rewards for student performance or incentives for recruitment and retention, it is unrealistic to think that this can happen everywhere. What can happen, however, are districts can develop thought out and meaningful professional development to help create a feeling of security for new teachers in all types of school districts. One of the lessons that the district involved in this study learned was that, "a one-size-fits-all approach [to professional development] will never work. Teachers will engage in the improvement process if they help to create it."

I really feel that this is what we are focusing on in our New Teacher Development UbD groups. In my group, we are working on using professional development such as critical friends groups and peer coaching and in both of these approaches teachers are submerged in the process rather than just being presented to and sent back to the classroom.

Although the North Carolina district is still in the midst if the Mission Possible program, they have noticed positive results (only 10% of the new faculty members left after their first year and many of the new teachers improved their teaching skills and received monetary rewards. Creating meaningful professional development is something that every school district needs to do to support their teachers and I intend to share our UbD group information with my school district when out project is complete.

NT Curriculum Development Process

I am, by nature, a bit of a skeptic and even up through the last week or two I truly did not believe that the New Teacher plan would make sense by the end of the semester. All of a sudden, however, it clicked! I think that it was at the point when we did the 15 session layout when I finally said, "aha!"

Talking about the mission, the big ideas, essential questions, and assessments was all well and good, but at this point in our lives most of us are still teachers and possess that burning question...what are we going to do with the students? Finally, it all makes sense. This process has been a bit like learning to ride a bike. I was very shaky at the beginning but now that I have the hang of it I'm excited to go out and do it again.

One of the biggest things that my group, as New Teacher curriculum developers, has focused on is the importance of self reflection. During this process I think that we have really all done a lot of self-reflection ourselves. I know that I have questioned a lot of things that are going on in my district in terms of curriculum development and I have also contemplated a lot of the assessments and goals that I have in my own classroom. In my district, the teachers have a lot of freedom (not sure whether this is good or not!) in terms of what really goes on in the classroom. This is nice in the sense that I can try some new assessments and activities on my own without getting nabbed for it by my principal.

My NT group really worked together well and I was able to see how a curriculum committee in a school district could really create a very functional UBD curriculum for a given subject area. This would of course be assuming that all members are working towards the same goal. Creating curriculum is a big task and it's easy to miss things here and there, so having this group to collaborate with is a great way to submerge yourself in the process for the first time.

Hopefully the baby steps that we have taken to get through this NT process will now make it easier for each one of us to individually take this information back to our own districts so we can try to get teaching back on track as teachers and maybe one day as administrators.

Assessment Dilemma

Since we have been working in our UbD groups, I have been thinking a lot about assessment and how it relates to student learning. The section that I am ultimately responsible for in my group is the assessment portion and working on it has really made me question some of the assessments that I have in my classroom. I am not afraid to admit that I am guilty of two things that we have talked about making sure NOT to do in our group:

1. I definitely lead my third graders towards doing well on assessments in order to ensure that they walk out of my room as "successful" students when really all they proved was that they can memorize and take a test.

2. Although I know that the rote information that students need to know for some tests is not useless, I have recently asked myself "What is the purpose of the kids learning this information?" I'm finding that things don't tie in the way that they should

So after realizing that the way that things work in my classroom may not be the best (although I really do believe that my kids are learning and walking away with more than they came in with), I also am realizing that changing the way that you approach assessment in the classroom can be really hard! In our class, it's easy to see that we need those essential questions to drive student learning and all our activities need to be focused on addressing them, but I'm noticing that it's a lot easier to create a UbD unit from scratch than it is to change what we're already used to. I have certainly tried to incorporate some more "real world" applications with my students since I have been more aware, but coming up with them at the spur of the moment is not as easy as it sounds and creating projects that reflect application is time consuming...especially when you teach elementary school and must address multiple subject areas. Right now our Language Arts Committee is rewriting the curriculum and they are using UbD as a model. This, I suppose, is a better way to go about instigating change than one or two teachers trying to rewrite things for their own classroom. I am looking forward to what they come up with and I am also looking forward to the day when I get to sit on a curriculum committee and voice my opinion and help initiate change.