How much does experience matter in teaching?

I got my first teaching job at a large, suburban public high school, standing in front of a room full of high school juniors about two months after I’d graduated from college.  Thinking back to that first year of teaching, I cringe at how little I knew about what I was doing (and the fact that I was probably making a fool out of myself with students I was barely five years older than).

I was reminded of those struggles when reading an article in the New York Times last week about the trend of inexperienced teachers at charter schools across the country.  The article prompted a debate on the newspaper’s website about why many charter schools tend to have less experienced teachers, what the impact is, how to address the issue, and the like.  The discussion was interesting, but there were a few points that I found to be underemphasized or wholly missing from what I read, points that I think are worth noting:

Charter school teachers who leave the classroom sometimes do so to start new schools or lead changes at existing schools: As incubators of innovative education (whether actual or imagined), charter schools often seem to attract educators who are interested in reshaping the way teaching and learning traditionally happen in schools.  As a result, many successful charter schools see some members of their teaching faculty leave to start their own charter schools, take on leadership positions in traditional public schools undergoing transformations, or begin work at non-profits centered on education reform.  Whether this type of turnover in a charter school is better or worse for a school in the long run can be argued, but, it is a trend that should be a part of this discussion, I think.

The relationships among educators in a school matter just as much–if not more–than the individual experience level of educators: Not long ago, research published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review (I’d highly recommend reading the piece in its entirety) brought to light the importance of social capital in improving schools.  As opposed to “human capital” (defined as a teacher’s skills, training, and experience), “social capital” is focused on the way teachers relate to one another collectively.  In short, the research found that when high levels of trust and interactions exist among teachers in schools, those schools tend to produce stronger student achievement.

In my own experience, the power of social capital in schools has certainly shown itself.  Just a few years after my stumbling first experience in the classroom, I landed at a public school in Massachusetts that emphasized professional collaboration among teachers and structured time during the day and week for that collaboration to happen more readily; my teaching improved greatly as a result.  At ANCS, the average teaching experience is just under 7 years, a figure that I suspect is high compared to many charter schools but lower than many traditional public schools.  Yet our focus on working together across classrooms and grade levels with common purposes–strengthened by our use of the practices and protocols of the School Reform Initiative–builds greater capacity among all of our teachers, regardless of experience level.

That these two examples are from charter schools is really besides the point.  All schools–traditional, charter, private–can harness the collective skills and abilities of their teachers, but only if time and space is created and thoughtfully-used to do so.