Imagine on your first day of work walking into a board room filled with 30 of your company’s most important clients. You’re expected to present on the company’s core products. Sounds scary, right?
Ironically, this is what new teachers experience on their first day. They enter a classroom filled with our community’s most important clients: students.
After the Minnesota Meeting event on Closing the Opportunity Gap (see Raising Expectations: Strategies for Reform post), about 40 practitioners convened to continue the dialogue around teacher quality and raising expectations. Creating and retaining high quality teachers kept floating to the top, with professional development as a key strategy. Let’s compare teaching, for a moment, to the financial industry. Setting out on a career as a financial advisor, you wouldn’t begin with the largest or most challenging clients. You might shadow another advisor for a while. Or perhaps you’d start with a small client list, take training classes, and work your way up as you master skills and demonstrate progress. Not so for teachers.
Dr. Rudy Crew spoke passionately about the need to create a system to support first and second year teachers. There is an assumption that they will just catch on. Yet, according to Crew, emerging teachers don’t have the “repertoire” of teaching strategies necessary to reach the diversity of student needs in their classroom. In addition, most teachers that early on in their career are also only given a one year contract; creating a short window of time to “figure it out.”
A quest for mentorship, a desire for professional development opportunities, a need to develop a depth of skills, are common topics of conversation among my peers, regardless of the specific profession or field. It is important for all “young” professionals to have a support system to guide them on their career path.
Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: | Education, Minnesota Meeting, Professional Development, Teacher Quality
