🔀 Working as a teacher is a peculiar work environment. Almost everyone in the organization is nearby, but isolated from each other as they interact with "clients" for a strictly defined period of time and then those "clients" rush to another employee for another isolated hour. Thirty-something people with one organizational representative are locked into the learning chambers for an hour. The employee cannot leave the clients alone. The clients cannot depart the room without express approval and can be denied departure from the room. Occasionally a disembodied voice makes an announcement. Small divisions of these employee groups meet to discuss policies and techniques monthly (sometimes more). The entire organization meets once a month with hopes of creating culture, enforcing norms, improving processes and hopefully some inspiration. The employees will then go back to their locked rooms for the clock, bell and then onslaught of teens who have just been released from 1 of their 6 mandatory learning rooms for the day.
New teachers are encouraged to ask for help, but there is a reason so many leave the field. There is not enough training or support in many schools. The new teacher just has to hang on. I actually work at a school that is very focused on student outcomes. We talk a great deal about supporting new employees. But, like most of our schools, we have not built a system that gives the enough training and support to the employees that need it the most. We have more coaching and the tide is certainly turning, but incremental change will not do the trick. The new teacher is thinking about ways to survive the observations by the administration and how to overcome their many classroom leadership failures that will occur before they learn to cope and find competence.
How can schools effectively improve, reform and perform at the high levels we need? It starts with these "newbies." This should be easy, since every new teacher has "been there, done that" as a customer for years. Yes, it should be so easy, but it definitely is not. Schools hire employees to teach that since age 6 have already spent thousands of hours watching people do the job they have been hired to do. As much as education attempts to reform, "new insights fail to get put into practice because they conflict with deeply held internal images of how the world works, images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting" according to Peter Senge in The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization. The factory system, the rows, the monotony, the grade-focus...why do they persist?
How can we help teachers remember to forget old habits and make today's best practices common practice?
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