Supporting and Retaining the Next Generation of Teachers

Presenter: Susan Moore Johnson, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, MA

This session is presented in separate parts. Use the buttons at the end of the transcription to navigate between each part.

Part Two

SUSAN MOORE JOHNSON: Tone of the most striking features of the school site that our teachers talked about was their relationship with other professionals, their fellow teachers in the school, what we have come to call the professional culture of the school, the collegial norms and practices that the new teachers would encounter in their schools. It is one of the most important factors in teachers’ accounts about their work as novice teachers, and that is what I want to focus in on right now.

The teachers, as we talk with them, talk about their colleagues in smaller groups than the whole school. They talk about their cluster or their team or the people in my department. They talk about the people that they work most closely with. Even in relatively small schools, they are talking about their grade level teams. I think it is very important to realize that new teachers come in kind like this, looking for their students and looking for a few people to help them out. And so they do not necessarily see the larger school. But there is a way in which you can see patterns in the school-wide character of professional culture.

As we talked to the teachers about their colleagues, what the norms were, what the expectations were, how they interacted with them, we came to call the kinds of professional culture that they described by three different names. The first one was veteran-oriented professional cultures. This occurred primarily in situations where there was a high proportion of senior teachers.

For these senior teachers, patterns of practice were well established. They defined for the particular group, whether it was the school or the cluster or the team or the department, how work was done there. They were not organized to engage new teachers or to acquaint them with the practices of expert teachers.

Often, these are not the old dead wood people who do not know how to do their job. These are often people who are absolutely experts. They are so expert they do not need to talk about what they do because they have done it so long. So, typically, they were friendly. They would ask how things are going, but they would not say, come to my classroom. See how this is done. I will help you out.

In some occasions, the veteran teachers actually deliberately kept the novice teachers at bay. And if the novice teachers asked for help, they were basically told that is not the way I learned to teach and you can go it alone. But, for the most part, veteran-oriented professional cultures were polite and distant, and novices were kind of on the edges.

Brenda said who worked in such a culture: Other teachers I found sometimes to be supportive. I think there is only so much they can do, though, as far as being supportive, because they all have their own classes and their time is so busy also. It is hard to be able to talk to other teachers more than just like passing or in the lunchroom. Like some teachers are just gone at 2:30. They are gone. And they have set things in such a way that maybe, like after years and years of doing it, they do not have to plan. They have their systems down for homework, and it is just easy.

We have many stories like that, where the novice teachers, either as individuals or as small groups, were at the edge of the important work of the school.

The second type of professional culture we came to call novice-oriented professional culture. And it existed most often in two types of schools. One was the startup charter schools. And for us, they were both State-sponsored charter schools and district-sponsored charter schools. And the second were reconstituted schools or low-performing, high-poverty schools, with a very high turnover of experienced teachers. So, where teachers would come, stay for a year or two, and then say, oh, I can work at another school that is functioning better and I will move there.

So, in these schools of both sorts, there was lots of energy and visible commitment to these schools, particularly in the charter schools. Those of you who have worked in startup charter schools and know about them know what I mean. But, unfortunately, there was very little professional guidance for these new teachers about how to teach, about how to think about curriculum, about how to think about classroom management.

Mary, who taught in the project-based charter school, said: “It is a new staff. I would say we are all a young staff, not that many experienced teachers. It is sort of an intense kind of energy there. People are really committed to the children. There is a big focus on creating your own curriculum, because there is a sense of nothing else out there works, that all those other schools have failed. I have talked to really experienced teachers from other schools. These are people who have worked in the classroom for a long time and not everything they do is perfect in what they do but a lot of what they are doing is working. We reject all of that. And as a new teacher in a new school, I feel we reject it too easily. So, we do not benefit by that, you know, and as a result you are sort of left floundering.”

So, those are the veteran-oriented and the novice-oriented schools. And sometimes you find within the same school a department that is very veteran-oriented and a department that is very novice-oriented, but it tends to be a kind of school-wide orientation to one or the other.

The third type, which we found much more effective in the way that the new teachers talked about it, was the integrated professional culture. The characteristics of the integrated professional culture are that there are sustained support and exchange across experience levels. There are not these separate camps of veterans and novices. There is an easy exchange of experience and advice and request for support. And so, for a novice teacher, you have a kind of recognition that you are in a novice status and that you do have both the opportunity and the expectation that you will ask for help.

The second is that these schools generally had structures for mentoring, for observation and for meetings that were deliberately organized to be useful and supportive to new teachers. Meetings are a really interesting thing, because what has happened in the last 30 years is that meetings became kind of vestigial organs in schools. And so a school meeting would be the principal typically running through the agenda very quickly so that the veteran teachers could get out. And as a new teacher coming in, it was impossible to ask the kinds of questions that would open up the mysteries of how a school worked, why they did things certain ways.

In integrated professional cultures, meetings are meant to bring everybody together and everybody up to speed and the school to move ahead. In these schools, teachers share collectively in responsibility for the school and for the education of all students. There is not a notion of, I take care of my kids during my time in my classroom, but, rather, that we have to work together to make this school work for our children.

And, finally, the particular needs of new teachers are recognized and met. You know, there are some schools that still provide for reduced teaching loads for new teachers that really see quite deliberately that they do not teach the most difficult classes. But, for the most part, that does not happen, and the explanation is budget. But in the integrated cultures there was always a recognition that new teachers need something special, and that it is ridiculous for us to expect them to hit the ground running and, just because the veterans were expected to hit the ground running, that they should be able to do it as well.

So, sometimes teachers would say to us, well, my principal told me, you know, you will fall on your face. Do not worry about it. We expect it. When it happens, we will provide some support.

So, it is both an informal and a formal recognition that new teachers need special things.

Fred was someone who worked in an integrated professional culture and he said: “So, we have a nice blend of veteran teachers who have been in the system for a long time and know the art of teaching. Then we also have a nice core of four or five young teachers like myself, with less than five years of teaching experience. And that creates a really good atmosphere. So, I think the young teachers learn from the veteran teachers. And I think the veteran teachers get sparked a little bit from the young teachers coming in. You know, a fresh, new attitude. So, it is mutually enriching in that sense. So, you cannot have a school that is too heavy either way, I don't think.”

Among our 50 teachers, as we looked very closely at what they said about their professional cultures and tried to figure out were they working in one that seemed veteran-oriented, one that seemed novice-oriented or one that was integrated, we had 20 in veteran-oriented cultures, 12 were in novice-oriented, and 18 in what we would call integrated professional cultures. What I have to emphasize is that we were not looking at the schools ourselves. We were often visiting the schools and trying to see, does this fit with what the person is saying. But, for the most part, we were looking through these schools, through the teachers’ eyes at these schools.

One year later, we looked back to see where the people were, because we tracked them by the year. And these percentages, though it is a small sample, I think are pretty interesting. Of the teachers in veteran-oriented professional cultures, 75 percent were still in teaching and only 55 percent were at the same schools. The novice-oriented professional cultures did a bit better. People were happy in those schools. These are the 24/7, till I die, kind of workdays that they have, nonstop, a mission. We are about something very important. So, there is a very positive feeling among the novice teachers in these schools. So, they retain 83 percent in teaching, but 67 percent only at the same school. People had moved from these schools.

The integrated professional cultures had a higher retention rate, both in teaching, 89 percent, and in the same school, at 83 percent. And we thought that that was really quite important to pay attention to. That something so very focused as how I get along with the colleagues in my immediate work area might have a kind of long-term effect on whether I chose to stay in this school.

That said, I fully recognize that the schools that are able to build and maintain these integrated professional cultures have other features that are working at the same time. This is not an isolated kind of phenomenon. At the same time, I think we often expect that the answer for all this has to come from the State, with big bucks, with large programs, packaged cassettes, whatever, when in fact helping people who work with the new teachers understand the importance of working with them closely is probably a big piece of the answer.

At the end of three years, Brenda had left teaching. She left actually in her second year. Mary moved in her second year to a more traditional school, where she could get better supervision. And Fred has stayed at his school.

Now, I want to talk a little bit about the challenge of building these integrated professional cultures. One of the things that I did with some schools that I was working with was ask them to chart the faculty in their school by experience. Because I think one of the things that happens is that people work in a school, particularly veterans, for a long time, and they are not really aware of how the composition has changed over time.

So, I want to show you just three different schools and the way they charted themselves. This was one, and the chart reads at the left zero to five years over to 30 to 35. They put the plus there, and then they created an extra column, called "the last three years," which I thought was interesting. These are the people about to retire.

This actually looks a lot like the national demographic distribution of teachers. And so, if you can imagine, during the middle of this period, not many new teachers came in or, if they did, they did not stay long. And now there is an increasing number of new teachers coming in, but there is a kind of gap between the new and the experienced that is not necessarily bridged by those mid-level experienced people. So, that is one school.

This is another school. Dramatically different. You have one teacher with 30 to 35 years of experience. Now, these are all urban public schools. These are not charter schools at all. And so you have a large number of entrants, and then it drops off. And it is not quite clear whether it drops off because they just have not yet moved into the middle level of experience or whether it is has dropped off because people leave out of dissatisfaction in the fourth or fifth years.

But here we have the third school. And this is an urban middle school. This is one of these low-performing, high-poverty schools that really has an incredibly difficult time retaining new teachers. They are staffing their school one year at a time with large numbers of new recruits and with very, very little in the way of induction or support. And because the school itself is not well organized, there is no good discipline system. There is no good way of being introduced to curriculum, and mentoring kind of happens at the edges.

So, I want you to look at these as a way of thinking about just the challenge of, how do you integrate the experiences of so many new teachers with these experienced teachers at the other end who, for the most part, have not been engaged with the new teachers over time.

What contributes to an integrated culture? What are the factors that promote it?

One, I would argue, is school-based hiring that leads to good matches. We do not pay enough attention to hiring in this field. And sometimes it is inevitable, because the budgets are not passed and we do not know how many people can be hired and we do not know what the bumping rates of the senior teachers will be, and so we blame it on the contracts and we blame it on the budget. But far too many teachers enter schools in August or September not knowing what they will teach, not knowing where they will teach, not knowing who the students are they will teach, and certainly not having any time to work closely with their colleagues.

We have done this four-state survey of first- and second-year teachers. And in the last two years, over 25 percent of the people reported that they were hired after the beginning of school. Twenty-five percent. Now, if you enter a new job that way, there is no way that you cannot be behind from the very beginning.

I would argue that good hiring practices are highly decentralized, they happen at the school site, and engage many people in the process of hiring. They do not happen in August, when everybody is on vacation and when someone is at the central office and being sent off to a school.

A really good hiring practice allows a new teacher to come in while school is still in session to see how their people teach, to see the school in action, to be interviewed by teachers, to have people find out what the new teacher can contribute, as well as what the new teacher needs. So that there is some sort of a match made and some sort of an agreement made that engages the experienced teachers in the commitment of hiring someone and then the commitment of induction.

There is a good deal of research to suggest that the initial placement of teachers matters a great deal in whether they stay in teaching. And so, if that initial placement is really haphazard and really isolates the new teachers from the experienced teachers, it is very likely that the match will be bad and the time in the career will be short.

One of the really interesting things that we have done is followed people who have moved. And actually, there is an article that will come out in the spring in Ed Leadership, called "The Schools That Teachers Choose," looking at what is it that people look for when they are more deliberate about choosing their schools.

Interestingly, most of the voluntary movers in our sample who chose their schools were mid-career entrants. These were people who had worked other places, and when they saw that their particular school was not really the right place for them to be, said, I know there are other places to work. I have worked at three different sites in my prior organization. I will find the right site.

Mary was one of these people. She left her charter school for a more traditional school, where she would receive more supervision. She had a supervisor there with 25 years of experience who as she said was really kind and supportive and experienced me. So, you cannot always count on people moving to find the right match. They may well leave teaching, but we certainly could do more to ensure that hiring is the first step of the teacher's induction into an integrated culture.

A second point that is often overlooked is it really matters what a first-year teacher is assigned to teach. If I am teaching ninth grade algebra, and I am teaching it along with four other people, some of whom are more experienced than I am, then I have the chance to find out how they teach, to look at their assignments, to observe their classes. But if I am teaching all sections of the bottom level of U.S. history, then I am alone. My assignment isolates me just by virtue of that assignment.

Often, new teachers, and this is no surprise, are assigned to teach the lowest tracts. They are assigned to teach the split grade that no one wants to teach. They are often assigned to teach the poorest children, children with more disabilities, the most challenging settings, the classes that the most experienced teachers really should be teaching.

They are also assigned to teach the tested grades. In Massachusetts, we have a very high stakes test called the MCASS. In fact, we have just learned the number of seniors in the State who will not graduate because they have not passed the MCASS. So, it is truly high stakes. And real estate agents also make it high stakes, so they array the schools by performance, and it is very visible.

Well, one would think that if you really cared about how your school would perform, you would put the greatest expertise in those classes. But in fact there is a shocking percentage of new teachers who are assigned to teach in the tested grades, because the senior teachers really would rather not have all that pressure and all that visibility on them.

In our sample, 19 of the 50 teachers that we had, or 38 percent, were assigned to teach tested grades or subjects. So, again, you tend to put people in assignments that do no allow them to work closely with colleagues with more experience, and they become isolated and often work in novice subcultures, where they are not closely aligned with skilled and experienced teachers.

So, having people work in teams, having people in work in clusters, having that really be a designated kind of interactive work assignment, really is an important piece here.

Fred said, Fred, who was very happy where he was: “For the most part, I work with the English teachers because of the notable connection in the humanities between social studies and English. So, I work closely with them often. Also, we do work very closely with the grade-level teachers. So, for instance, there is a team, five teachers, that teach the entire eleventh grade. So, you work very closely with them.”

The way he describes that is just remarkably different from the teacher who says: “I teach in my classroom with the door closed and, no, I do not talk to anybody else about my work.”

Another factor that promotes integrated cultures is that there are structures in the school that make exchange and joint work not just possible but likely. There are meetings to address curriculum and pedagogy. There are groups that review clusters, that review student progress, so that a new teacher can understand how other teachers think about working with students who are facing great challenges.

People are given coordinated prep periods. So many of our teachers said there is no sense to the schedule in this school. Why is my prep not aligned with this person who teaches this same subject? We could work together, but now the only place we can see each other is in the lunch line. That kind of a comment.

There are structures that make peer observations possible. One of the most interesting induction programs I have seen is in Brookline High School, right outside of Boston. They have a mentoring program and they have a number of features to their program. But one of the striking ones is that, over the course of the school year, the new teachers are given one period each week that they have to spend observing someone teach. They can move it around, so they can see different people. And they are encouraged to see particular people who teach in particular ways that they might learn from.

They observe their peers and they get feedback. And they have to account for this. They concentrate on this, peer observation is concentrated during the second and third marking periods of the high school, and they have to do 16 observations. Well, most new teachers we talked with observed no one, let alone 16 people. And so creating the structures for peer observations matters a lot.

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