Viewpoint: New teachers need real-life experience to be ready

Tom and Scott looked at me balefully. I was visiting their classroom to support their teacher, Mrs. Lopez — a brand-new teacher straight out of her student-teaching experience.

She had just asked them to open Google Slides and make a Top 10 list of favorite music to create a “playlist of you.” And that was the end of the instructions. Students had endless questions about the assignment, but they weren’t sure they even wanted to bother asking questions in order to properly do this cringy activity. As their teacher sat at her lectern, they both swiped their screens on their laptops to the latest game.

This was day two of a brand-new school year, and this brand-new teacher had already started to lose the interest of what could be two of her brightest students. As an instructional coach, I was equally disheartened. It looked like yet another unprepared new teacher and this happened in 2019. What would have happened now during COVID with the ever-changing educational landscape of remote and hybrid teaching? Of course, teaching is a lot of on-the-job training, but the jump from new to successful is too wide — especially now with the extra challenges of navigating the pandemic. I see three key challenges for new teachers: the lack of practice with “real life” lesson planning; an absence of understanding of assessment; and an unpreparedness for dealing with the social-emotional landscape of the public school classroom.

Writing two to four lesson plans for university supervisors is a far cry from the complex task of daily lesson planning. Planning is the heart of good pedagogy — not just the act of writing objectives in a fancy form, but the thinking of planning. Good planning requires a teacher to understand the state standards, identify key success criteria, create aligned activities and assess with rigorous questions. Then, a good planner analyzes the student work and starts all over again — every day, every subject, every class. New teachers who have not mastered this cycle of thinking and planning will find their new classroom difficult to navigate. More rigorous requirements for planning while in a student-teaching experience along with mentor planning in the first year of teaching would make for more successful teachers who are able to immediately help their students.

Another important component of good teaching is assessment. No matter your view on standardized testing, good assessment is a key component of good teaching. How do you know what to teach students if you don’t know what they know? In Tom and Scott’s case, if their teacher had assessed where the students were at in the activity and recognized that she needed to give further instruction or just answer their questions, they might have reengaged quickly.Current demands of teaching leave very little room for growth and development, so many teachers are just surviving right now. How can we create the space for new teachers to develop? Reducing the new teachers’ teaching responsibilities to leave time for observation, mentoring, and co-teaching could leave the time for them to grow in assessment practices as well as many other areas of their professional practice.

Finally, all of this planning and assessing happens in the context of a challenging social-emotional landscape, especially now with COVID. New teachers often find themselves in challenging classroom situations with students who have many diverse needs. In March, Indiana increased the amount of social-emotional learning required in pre-service coursework. However, can professor-led instruction really replicate the social-emotional reality of the students in a classroom? We need teachers who are able to teach all students so that they grow and develop academically and not fall behind. Through experiencing a variety of classrooms, pre-service teachers can better develop the knowledge, strategies, and capacity to help all students.

Giving new teachers more space and experience to develop under the guidance of expert mentor teachers in a variety of classrooms supports their ultimate success. Successful new teachers are better for our students and for our schools. Student achievement and retention rates will rise, and students like Tom and Scott won’t lose opportunities to learn. Our students deserve strong teachers every year they are in school — not just the years where they don’t have a new teacher.