Keeping good teachers in the profession

Attracting people to the profession of teaching, training them to be effective once they commit, and rewarding them if that effectiveness is consistently proven—all of these are areas of considerable focus in education today, perhaps more so than at any other time in recent memory.  A somewhat controversial review of teacher certification programs around the United States lamented the state of educator preparation.  Federal grants and waivers from the No Child Left Behind Act from the Department of Education incentivize states to use evaluation systems that assign each teacher a score based on “value-added” to student learning (measured only by a single test score) and use those scores to dole out monetary bonuses to high-scoring teachers in merit pay plans.  Frequent studies try to explore the reasons why nearly 50% of all new teachers will quit the profession within the first five years on the job.  Even Malcolm Gladwell has written about teacher training and retention, a sure sign of the topic’s place in the mainstream.

There’s no doubt that our approach to teacher preparation and retention in general could use some improvement.  But many of the proposed solutions to better identifying, training, and retaining teachers mentioned above rely on simplistic and misguided notions about what’s at the root of the problems.  It’s not a need for more or different classes to gain more knowledge or financial carrots to try harder—variations on those themes have been tried and have failed many times over in the history of K-12 education.  What needs greater emphasis is how we build schools in which teachers meaningfully collaborate to create a supportive and reflective network of professionals working collectively to improve their own practice and school.

In a blog post last year I shared an article from the Stanford Social Innovation Review that focused on research about the role of “human capital” (formal education and training) and “social capital” among teachers in schools.  This article deserves repeated re-readings, especially this explanation of the differences between human and social capital:

Social capital, by comparison, is not a characteristic of the individual teacher but instead resides in the relationships among teachers. In response to the question “Why are some teachers better than others?” a human capital perspective would answer that some teachers are just better trained, more gifted, or more motivated. A social capital perspective would answer the same question by looking not just at what a teacher knows, but also where she gets that knowledge. If she has a problem with a particular student, where does the teacher go for information and advice? Who does she use to sound out her own ideas or assumptions about teaching? Who does she confide in about the gaps in her understanding of her subject knowledge?

The article goes on to explain that “when the relationships among teachers in a school are characterized by high trust and frequent interaction—that is, when social capital is strong—student achievement scores improve.”

When thinking about new teacher support and induction as a part of our school’s New Teacher Residency Project, a multi-year residency program for early-career teachers, the need to strengthen social capital is as important as cultivating each teacher’s human capital.  This happens in several ways—each teacher resident works with both a teacher in his or her classroom, but also has the benefit of a mentor teacher who serves as an additional coach; each resident participates in a “critical friends group” with other teachers to explore issues of teaching and learning together in an ongoing way.

The residency model of new teacher preparation like we have had in our NTRP for the past three years is being raised up as another possible solution to the “crisis” in teacher training and retention.  Arguments for teacher residencies have been published of late by the president of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (“Residency: can it transform teaching the way it did medicine?”) and The New York Times (”As Apprentices in Classroom, Teachers Learn What Works”).  Let’s hope, though, that these residencies do not become a vehicle through which to focus mainly on imparting knowledge to new teachers—human capital.  For real impact, they must also be seen as a way to build a culture of  “high trust and frequent interaction” among all teachers in a school, for then you’ll have a school that is supportive of teachers—new or experienced—and a greater likelihood that they’ll be effective and stay in the profession.