The first few months for new teachers provide opportunities to teach them complex skills that will help improve student learning.

Last month, I introduced the power of a dress rehearsal for rookie teachers. The next step comes when students show up and new teachers have to figure out what to do when challenges arise. What happens when students don’t follow a classroom routine? What about when they don’t understand directions? What if a student simply gets an answer wrong?

Let’s pick up with the journey of another rookie teacher, Allison Kelly. Now, it’s January, and Kelly has been teaching at Clinton Hill Middle School in Newark, N.J., for about three months. Kelly is meeting with principal Jesse Rector to discuss her recent lesson on subject-verb agreement.

This particular lesson has left Kelly with a sense that students might not have learned what she wanted to teach them. She frowns at the video of the lesson that she and Rector are reviewing. “So right here,” she murmurs, pausing the video, “I called on Anajah. And I think she was the right one to call on.” Rector nods, but Kelly still looks troubled. “Even after that, I still don’t think she really understood the answer.”

“So what gives you that doubt?” Rector asks.

Kelly reflects a moment. “She said Justin’s answer had been incorrect because it didn’t have subject-verb agreement,” she answers. “That’s all she said.”

“Right!” says Rector. “So she identified the major issue, but she just kind of said what you’d said three steps back.” The problem with that, Rector and Kelly agree, is that Anajah never actually demonstrated that she had learned the skill of correcting the subject-verb agreement in a sentence.

The first 90 days

Studies show that teachers improve significantly in their first two years but rarely improve much more after the first five (Atteberry, Loeb, &Wyckoff, 2013). That means the earliest days in a teacher’s career present a critical opportunity to help them get better faster.

In his work with rookie teachers, Rector has to guard against an all too common and counterproductive pitfall: pushing them to master every element of great teaching at once. To succeed at getting rookies up to speed, Rector has to narrow his priorities to what rookie teachers most need to know in the first 90 days to drive learning in their classrooms.

The earliest days in a teacher’s career present a critical opportunity to help them get better faster.

So, to hold his rookies (and himself) accountable for focusing on the right skills, Rector has worked from a scope and sequence of those skills — from establishing classroom routines to shifting higher-order thinking to students. Sticking to the scope and sequence won’t make a teacher like Kelly an expert in 90 days, but it will make her proficient enough that her students are learning what they need to know — just as they would in a more experienced teacher’s classroom.

Rector’s scope and sequence for rookie teachers is too long to cover in one article. The chart at right shows a small sample of it.

By the time we meet Kelly in her meeting with Rector, she already knows how to write data-driven lesson plans, assess student comprehension, and preplan responses to student error. The next step then is responding to student error in the moment. Returning to Rector and Kelly’s meeting, we see how that skill building looks in action.

Getting better faster

Role playing as Anajah, Rector prompts Kelly to ask the same question Kelly had asked Anajah in her classroom. “Anajah,” she begins, “why is ‘weren’t’ the error in this sentence?”

“Because the subject and the verb have to agree,” Rector replies.

“What’s the subject in the sentence?” Kelly asks, knowing she needs to hear more. As Rector continues to give incomplete answers, she breaks down her question further: “Is the subject singular or plural? So what does the verb need to be? Give me the actual word, not just ‘singular’.”

“Excellent,” Rector affirms, once Kelly has gotten Anajah to explain properly why “weren’t” is the error. “You just asked me a series of very clear questions that got me to that articulation. So let’s reflect on why that worked so well.”

“I broke down the skill into questions, steps she should be taking to get to the right answer,” says Kelly. “And then I asked her to put it all together in one sentence.”

“Right!” Rector agrees. “So now, in about an hour, you’re going to be teaching again, and something like this is going to come up. What are you going to do?” Kelly writes down her new action step: Break down skills into a series of questions, ending with a question that requires the student to put it all together.

The process Rector has just followed — guiding Kelly to identify the skill she most urgently needed to master, practicing it with her, and translating it into a single action for her to implement in her classroom — is an incredible boon to rookie teachers. It empowers them to get to the bottom of nagging worries about how effectively students are really learning, to master those practices that will lock in student success, and to do it all while honing their own instincts about what will make their teaching great. Ninety days into her career, Kelly is swiftly moving from rookie to experienced teacher — and her students’ results will show it.

 

Reference

Atteberry, A., Loeb, S., & Wyckoff, J. (2013). Do first impressions matter? Improvement in early career teacher effectiveness.  Washington, DC: National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, 2013.  http://auth.calder.commonspotcloud.com/publications/upload/wp90.pdf

CITATION: Bambrick-Santoyo, P. (2013). IN PRACTICE | LEADERSHIP: Rookie teachers: The first 90 days. Phi Delta Kappan, 95 (3), 72-73.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Paul Bambrick-Santoyo

PAUL BAMBRICK-SANTOYO is managing director of Uncommon Schools, Newark, N.J., and author of Great Habits, Great Readers: A Practical Guide to K-4 Reading in Light of the Common Core