How Would You Change Teacher Prep?

By guest blogger Leanne Link, communications assistant at the Center for Teaching Quality

This month's bloggers shared many ideas about how to improve teacher preparation programs. Looking for a quick recap? Below are some of the top suggestions that came out of the Roundtable discussion:

• Increase Field Experience: The sooner preservice teachers can start teaching, the better, writes Megan Allen. And Dan Brown, Anna Martin, Kate Mulcahy, and Ilana Garon agree that preservice teachers need at least a year in the field before they take charge of their own classrooms.

• Emphasize Mentoring: Never underestimate the power of one-on-one relationships, says Dan Brown. Ilana Garon notes that the most useful part of her teacher training was the six weeks she spent with her mentor teacher.

• Don't Sugarcoat It: Kate Mulcahy and Megan Allen stress the importance of preparing preservice teachers for education's tough realities, and teaching them to learn from mistakes.

• Add More Hybrid Roles: Linda Yaron, Anna Martin, and Megan Allen call for more hybrid roles allowing teachers to spend part of their days mentoring new teachers.

• Be Yourself: Ilana Garon learned the hard way that each teacher must develop a "teaching identity" that remains true to her own personality.

• Understand the Community: Ariel Sacks thinks that new teachers need to learn more about the communities, schools, and neighborhoods they'll be working in.

• Attract Top Candidates: Linda Yaron suggests raising starting teacher salaries to $100,000; Megan Allen wants to make sure that teaching candidates have the passion and perseverance that will allow them to thrive in the classroom.

Don't want the conversation to end? Add your comments to the bloggers' posts, and make sure to watch out for our February discussion on technology in the classroom.

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Ariel Sacks

There are some crazy practices out there in schools—these days the craziest include things like hours of test prep being called "English class" and no social studies or science education. Sounds sensationalist, but that's still a true story in schools all over the country. It is easy to lose your way in an educational landscape where people who don't understand how kids learn are writing policies. Teachers can't assume that what they're being told to do necessarily makes any sense. They therefore need to be prepared to think critically about practices they are asked to adopt that seem crazy or misguided and learn how to respond to such situations.

That being said, the new teacher should not come in ready to criticize everything that doesn't meet the utopian vision with which most of us enter teaching. We live in an imperfect world, where kids, teachers, administrators, and parents all do very important yet flawed work. As a new teacher I was extremely critical of everyone around me. We have all probably crossed paths with some individuals who should probably not be working with kids—whose practices new teachers should not copy. But I have also gained newfound respect for some of the teachers and leaders I looked upon critically in my early years. Now that I have spent more time in schools, I understand what goes into something that may look very simple to do, but is not—or the value of enforcing a silly little rule like no gum chewing (not my personal favorite, but I sure do get it by now).

Teacher preparation organizations need to prepare teachers for this double-edged reality: New teachers should be prepared to think critically and ask important questions. They should be prepared to advocate for students and themselves when necessary. There is craziness out there worth leaving a school over; and there are times to quietly rebel against harmful or unreasonable directives and do what's right for kids. But beginning teachers should also learn to withhold judgment for a period of time. Schools are complex places where multiple stakeholders come together to educate children. This usually can't be understood at first glance; it takes time to know what you are seeing.

Ariel Sacks teaches 8th grade English at a middle school in Brooklyn, NY, and is co-author of TEACHING 2030: What We Must Do For Our Students and Our Public Schools... Now and in the Future.

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Kate Mulcahy

It's a four-letter word, but it's what most teachers would say when asked to name the key factor in improving our profession: Time. We need more time to plan, learn, and collaborate, so that our time with students is more effective. And it shouldn't be surprising that (as my colleagues have stated in their responses below) preservice teachers need more guided time in classrooms.

Ideally, a new teacher should develop her own craft under the guidance of a mentor. As policy expert Dana Barlin states, "One of a mentor's chief jobs is to help a new teacher close the 'knowing-doing' gap by learning to apply knowledge of best practices to daily classroom routines."

A new teacher should see educational theory applied in real time by a skilled veteran and not have to guess what it's supposed to look like in her own classroom. The knowing-doing gap can be disheartening for a new teacher who is comparing her chaotic classroom to the ideal classrooms of her teacher-education textbooks, and she could easily settle on blaming herself for her classroom short comings, questioning whether she should be a teacher at all.

Skilled veterans can also benefit from mentoring experiences. My own mentor told me that having a new teacher in her classroom kept her teaching "fresh." In my own experience, I have seen the pendulum can swing to the other extreme: after several years of teaching, even the best teacher can lose his or her connections with new techniques or technologies. A new teacher will bring new ideas.

Finally, as Anna pointed out, if new teachers had the time to develop their skills under the leadership of a mentor, students might not suffer the growing pains. Right now, most new teachers (62 percent, by one estimate) feel underprepared. Consider this next to the fact that 50 perce3nt of teachers leave the profession after only five years (nice—if sobering—stats, Linda!). By not taking the time to fully prepare our new teachers, it's clear that we are setting them up to fail.

Now, I'm no statistician, but I know that this situation adds up to trouble for our kids—who matter most, and would most benefit from new teachers having more quality time in a mentor's classroom. They would have confident, capable teachers who would be there—more than a year or two—to support their students. The only question is will our profession move itself out of the current broken teacher-educational model? Seems like only time will tell.

Kate Mulcahy, a Boettcher Teachers Program graduate, has taught for five years as an English & English-Language Learner teacher at Northglenn High School in Colorado.

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Anna Martin

My colleagues and I seem to agree on the following:

Creating opportunities for master teachers to spend part of their day mentoring new teachers is a must. Post after post extolled the value of such a system. Such hybrid roles would spread teacher leadership, ensure a "quality teacher in every classroom" even for classes assigned "first-year" teachers, and reduce new teachers' workloads to provide more time for practice and acclimation before fully taking the reins of a classroom. (Again, I'd encourage all who care about this idea to take a look at the Bay Area New Millennium Initiative report released last week—we came up with a great graphic for how teachers' career paths could change.)

The Teaching Ahead participants agreed that such roles would benefit both teachers and students. But how can we help convey this idea to policymakers and others, justifying the potential costs and risks of such a systemic change?

Absent a magic wand, in other words, what justifications will ring true with decision-makers?

Here are some thoughts:

• The costs are already too high! The national cost of teacher attrition is estimated at $4.9 billion dollars per year for the nation.

• What if we could set aside a chunk of those dollars to fund in-depth preparation that provides preservice teachers with the skills and practice they need for sustained success? Savings in retention could be applied to loans and grants for teacher candidates. This could aid promising teacher candidates who might otherwise feel compelled to opt for alternative-certification programs that pay teachers to begin teaching before they are fully prepared.

• If districts collaborated with preparation programs to develop such residencies, they would have the autonomy necessary to meet local schools' and students' specific needs. Districts could also build residencies into their pay scales. For example, apprentice teachers might initially earn less than a full teacher salary—and accomplished teachers might have the ability to earn more by taking on hybrid roles (like being a mentor teacher).

• We can't fix what we don't recognize as a problem. Stereotypes of "bad teachers" have eclipsed the more realistic issue of "underprepared teachers." Let's help the public learn about why funding for teacher preparation is vitally important to our society, our families, and our students.

The fact that my Teaching Ahead colleagues have consensus around this idea gives me hope that it can happen: the sooner, the better... for new teachers and, most importantly, for their students.

Anna L. Martin holds National Board certification and is the resource teacher at Lee Mathson Middle School in San Jose, Calif.

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Ilana Garon

A common thread of this week's roundtable seems to be the importance of "fieldwork" to teacher prep—specifically, spending time in a classroom in an apprenticeship setting, and the mentoring of new teachers by more experienced ones. In many teacher prep programs, this all-too-critical step is lacking; as blogger Kate Mulcahy pointed out, one of the strengths of her program was a good balance of theory and practice, while many programs err on the side of theory with too little time spent in actual classrooms.

My own program, NYC Teaching Fellows, required trainees to teach summer school for six weeks under the supervision of an experienced teacher. Mine was a five-foot-tall, middle-aged woman who had been teaching 20 years; despite her diminutive stature, she maintained a sort of Machiavellian control over the class. The kids simultaneously loved her enthusiastic explanation of homoerotic undertones in John Knowles' A Separate Peace, and feared her propensity for giving low grades on essays, and for marking absent any students who weren't paying attention. Her no-nonsense reputation caused the students to inform her, laughing, that the novel's protagonist should be punished for pushing his best friend out of a tree by being made to sit through her summer school class.

I now recognize that my time under this woman's wing was by far the most useful aspect of my training; the six weeks I spent in her class were all too short. Further, summer school students were a relatively cooperative bunch by nature; if they even bothered to show up, it meant someone at home cared enough about their passing English to insist that they came, homework in hand, to those un-air-conditioned Bronx classrooms during the months of July and August. Having only co-taught for six weeks, and to particularly obliging students at that, left me insufficiently prepared for managing my own rowdy classes in the fall. I loved my "apprenticeship" training; I only wished there had been more of it.

Ilana Garon has been teaching high school English (and math, in emergency situations) in the Bronx since she graduated from Barnard College in 2003. She is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post and Dissent Magazine

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Linda Yaron

If we are to achieve different results in America's classrooms, restructuring teacher preparation is essential. But the best structure in the world will be insufficient unless we attract a new generation of emerging talent to the profession. I believe there's an efficient and effective way to do this: Raise the starting teacher salary to $100,000.

We invest time and money in the things that are important to us. If education is truly important, then we need to value teachers the way we value doctors, lawyers, celebrities, athletes, or countless other professionals. A New York Times article last year stated that teacher salaries are currently on par with a toll taker or bartender, averaging $39,000 to start and topping $67,000 after 25 years in the profession, hardly enough to comfortably raise a family today. And hardly a salary competitive enough to attract top college graduates to the field.

It's said that the quality of an institution cannot surpass the quality of the individuals within it. This is true for a football team, organization, or school. Yet, in contrast to high-performing countries like Singapore that recruit 100% of their teachers from the top third of college graduates, a report from the Department of Education states that only "23% of all teachers, and only 14% of teachers in high-poverty schools, come from the top third of college graduates." Considering that about half of America's teachers are expected to retire in the next ten years, and that college students and recent graduates are craving security in a difficult economic climate, we are at the footsteps of an opportunity to transform who considers teaching as a career.

Many will say that we simply can't afford to do this, but we can't afford to keep doing what we're doing. The truth is that, ultimately, we are going to invest one way or another in something. One-quarter of American children drop out of our schools, thus dramatically increasing the likelihood they will wind up in prison. Meanwhile, prison costs are skyrocketing. What if we invested in educating individuals as children rather than incarcerating them as adults? What will it take to recruit, train, and support a workforce that can better meet the needs of our students?

Increasing teacher salaries alone will not fix education. This must be combined with a systemic approach that holistically addresses the needs of students, teachers, and schools. It is not enough to get an amazing individual in the profession, but we must heavily train and support new teachers with clinical preservice training and ongoing development. It is necessary to not just say we value education, but to truly match what we want with what we do.

Linda Yaron is an English teacher in an inner-city high school in Los Angeles. She holds National Board Certification and served as a Teaching Ambassador Fellow for the U.S. Department of Education.

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Megan Allen

In my last post, I shared a wish list for teacher-preparation programs, asking the "mirror, mirror, on the wall." The truth is, we can't wait for the mirror on the wall—we must act now. To that end, I'm working as Educator in Residence at the University of Central Florida this year, and I'm advocating publicly for specific changes to teacher preparation.

We must think beyond the typical student-teaching requirement of only one semester. We must embrace residency models. Preservice teachers must have time to roll up their sleeves and practice the pedagogy that they've learned about, with a strong mentor teacher supporting them. Note: Let's start talking about mentor teachers rather than supervising teachers ... After all, the role is not just to watch over an intern, but to guide a young teacher in identifying and practicing effective classroom strategies, as mentioned by Ilana Garon.

We need a match.com-type system for pairing mentors and preservice teachers. For their work together to be effective, mentors and preservice teacher must develop strong relationships, based on trust. I'm picturing a match.com type profile match-up to increase the odds of successful placements and ensure the mentor and mentee have chemistry. And we must carefully select our mentor teachers and provide them with thorough training and support, realizing that an effective teacher doesn't always equate to an effective mentor.

We must continue to offer support after pulling the ripcord. Once teachers take on their own classrooms, let's not just sit back and watch, hoping they land on their feet. We must provide ample, effective support during the first few years. Universities and districts: I'm talking to you! Let's get creative about some hybrid roles to offer this support ...

We must regulate alternative routes to the classroom. This golden thread has been woven throughout the blogs on Teaching Ahead. I was floored this week to learn there are over 200 ways to become a teacher in this country ... 200! We need to ensure that all of these routes to teaching are adequately—scratch that, effectively!—preparing educators. Every student deserves to have an effective teacher, in every classroom, every day.

We need to get creative with recruitment. Universities, listen up! We need to be more selective with our recruits (gasp) and more ambitious with our recruitment. Singapore has interviews to ensure that candidates have the right aptitude for the classroom. Beyond just raising GPAs and looking at SAT scores, we need to make sure our candidates have qualities such as passion and perseverance to thrive in classrooms. And to make education alluring, we'll need some policymakers to help ...

Lastly, we need to take on retention as a critical issue. Policymakers, pay attention! Many top-performing countries that consistently outperform the U.S. on PISA had to create regulations that increased teacher pay and/or find ways to elevate reverence in the teaching profession. Better working conditions. Multiple leadership paths. Competitive pay. That takes a forward thinking and proactive government. I challenge you to take the plunge!

Megan Allen, a National Board-certified teacher, was the 2010 Florida Teacher of the Year. She has taught for seven years, all at Title 1 schools, and now serves as the educator-in-residence at the University of Central Florida.

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Dan Brown

Strong teachers aren't mass-produced.

During my turbulent induction via the New York City Teaching Fellows, I ran straight from mornings observing summer school at the Bronx's P.S. 85 to four-hour "Fellow Advisory" afternoon sessions in a cramped elementary school classroom several stops away on the 4-train. The classroom, used primarily for 2nd graders, was built to handle about 25 2nd-grade-sized bodies. We were 35 adults. It was uncomfortable and by the end of the interminable scripted sessions on standards and benchmarks, we fled the place. I had no personal rapport with the facilitating "Fellow Advisor," an adjunct teacher who resigned from the Department of Education later that year.

Rootless, I relied on my wits when I re-entered the classroom in September, this time to lead a 4th grade homeroom. It was a disaster.

Several years later, at a full-fledged M.A. program at Teachers College, I found myriad one-on-one opportunities to reflect and learn the craft, and I realized what I'd missed during that initial crucible in the Bronx.

For my student-teaching placement at DeWitt Clinton High School, I was paired with an exceptional mentor, Ray Pultinas, who wrote me daily longhand letters from the back of the classroom while I taught. The letters encompassed a range of reactions, suggestions, and lesson-related musings, and they were invaluable to my growth as an educator. Even more importantly, we had time each day to talk through my decisions and ideas. Like a great teacher, he never ordered me to do things his way, but rather guided me to become a better version of myself. This one-on-one time made all the difference in building my skill and will to stay in the classroom and thrive.

In a valuable assignment for my TC "Teaching of Writing" class led by Erick Gordon, I wrote a New Yorker-style profile of another educator. I interviewed a middle school teacher and single father who had emigrated from Jamaica to teach in Harlem named Mr. Phillips, a colleague from my student-teaching placement. The experience of shadowing Mr. Phillips, interviewing him about his teaching life, and attempting to do him justice in prose sharpened my understanding of so much that I could never glean from sitting in a grad-school classroom.

Individual attention unlocks the best in people. It's something teacher-prep programs must emphasize—and something their graduates in the field must remember with their charges as well.

Dan Brown teaches high school English in Washington, D.C. A National Board-certified teacher, he is the author of The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle.

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Kate Mulcahy

When it comes to teacher-training options, I consider myself lucky because I graduated from the Boettcher Teachers Program. Below are my three "must haves" for teacher training that made my teacher residency program so successful, with a final suggestion for improvement included at the end:

1. High bar to get in: The process to get into Boettcher was difficult. I had to prove I had extensive experience working with kids, write countless essays, gather recommendation letters, and pass the GRE and Praxis, just to name a few steps. Once I passed the initial screening, I participated in a grueling interview process conducted by a panel of interested parties and then discussed educational issues with other applicants as the interviewers observed. By the time this program accepted me, I had an immediate respect for my fellow teacher candidates because not only was this a selective program, but also I knew no person in their right mind would go through this process without being fully dedicated to the profession.

2. Good balance of practice vs. theory: Boettcher required us to observe and co-teach in a mentor's classroom for a full year as we took our graduate courses. As I entered my first official year of teaching, I realized that my experience was invaluable. This feeling was reinforced as I spoke with struggling new teachers who came from other teacher-education programs that were heavy on theory and light on practice. These teachers wished they'd had more guided time in the actual classroom before they went off to teach on their own.

3. Strong and varied support: If the first two elements are what made me a strong teacher, this last part is what kept me a strong teacher. I firmly believe in continual support for teacher growth, especially new teachers. Boettcher tailored an induction program for our district and helped create a natural support network. I ended up working with fellows from my program, and being able to work with familiar and like-minded people was critical to my growth as a teacher.

What I would still like to see: More acknowledgement in teacher ed classes of the grit and grime of teaching. Teaching isn't always wonderful; students aren't always likable; and coworkers can be difficult. Too often, it seems like teacher candidates are supposed to ignore the negative aspects of teaching, only to meet them head on when they enter the "real world." Teacher ed programs need to help their fellows have open, honest, and supported discussions about these subjects from the get-go. That way, the young teachers don't feel the need to hide these frustrations when these issues arise—and they will—and the teachers will have a better idea of how to deal with these problems in a productive manner.

Kate Mulcahy, a Boettcher Teachers Program graduate, has taught for five years as an English & English-Language Learner teacher at Northglenn High School in Colorado.

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Linda Yaron

If we are to achieve different results, one way to restructure is through the creation of hybrid positions that will enable current teachers to work in teacher-preparation programs. A recent report from the Department of Education states that 62% of students who went through teacher-preparation programs felt "unprepared for classroom realities." We can bridge this gap by both bringing amazing teachers to programs to teach effective instructional methods, and also through guided observations and clinical experience for novices at school sites. Creating these contact zones requires us to restructure teachers' schedules and roles so that a teacher might teach half the day in his or her school, and work the remainder of the day at a teacher-preparation program.

The traditional structure of the teaching profession currently provides insufficient time for teachers to effectively teach, grade, plan, reflect, collaborate, lead, forge parent and community relationships, and help train new teachers. Restructuring time within the profession is necessary if we are to help prepare new teachers to address classroom realities.

Although some may argue that funding and budgets will not allow such a restructuring to occur, we cannot afford to keep doing what we are doing. We must consider creative options, like how states can leverage projected federal teacher-preparation program funds in such ways.

Things will not get better by simply shifting the pieces of the puzzle, by incremental change, or by working twice as hard in the same structure. We need to dramatically redesign and restructure how we think of teaching and learning and what spaces teachers are in. A report by the Asia Society on last year's International Summit on the Teaching Profession, describes deliberate, systemic approaches employed by high-performing countries such as Singapore and Finland. There is no magic bullet. However, utilizing hybrid roles (as part of a systemic approach to how we recruit, train, and retain teachers) can maximize on the window of opportunity as a wave of new teachers enter the profession. Rather than hoping for the best, we have to create the best structure to make it possible.

Linda Yaron is an English teacher in an inner-city high school in Los Angeles. She holds National Board Certification and served as a Teaching Ambassador Fellow for the U.S. Department of Education.

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Ariel Sacks

I'm certainly one of the lucky ones. I can proudly say that my teacher preparation included a strong background in developmental theory, curriculum design, and student-centered pedagogy at Bank Street College. I spent a year student teaching in both private and public schools under the mentorship of an experienced teacher; and through a partnership between my first school and Bank Street, I received continued mentorship through my first two years of teaching.

Still, I found my first full-time teaching position in New York City startlingly separate from the world of Bank Street. In particular, I did not know the communities of which I was now a part. The school community included teachers, counselors, administrators, and the mysterious district and state higher-ups; then, there were the families and communities of my students—and finally, the space where we all intersected, in hallways and classrooms.

I loved the complexity of these worlds, but I was frustrated to navigate them mostly alone. If I could change even the best teacher preparation program, I would add a process by which teacher candidates prepare for the specific context of their first full-time positions. After a variety of preservice exploration, teachers should be supported in making a deliberate choice about where to begin their careers.

New teachers must prepare to become members of their school communities. Coursework should include acquiring knowledge about the resources, history and people of the neighborhood where they will teach. Teachers should be incentivized to learn the language of their students' families, where applicable.

Knowledge of students' backgrounds is a key component in building relationships with students and engaging them in meaningful learning. As this understanding grows, new teachers can better reflect on the unique resources they themselves bring to their classrooms. If new hires are teaching in communities where they are already members, they should plan to leverage their knowledge in their classrooms and as members of the teaching staff for the benefit of students—and also anticipate the challenges particular to teaching in one's own community.

For all of this preparation to count, commitment matters. Three years after starting my first position, I transferred to a different school. I had no idea how much work I'd need to do, getting to know another community, and finding my role within it all over again. If I had understood the weight of this, I might have thought more carefully about the move.

I've seen clearly the devastating effects of teacher turnover on the efficacy and trust among members of a school community. While there are significant working condition factors involved, changing this cycle should begin by preparing new teachers to make a more serious, informed commitment.

Ariel Sacks teaches 8th grade English at a middle school in Brooklyn, NY, and is co-author of TEACHING 2030: What We Must Do For Our Students and Our Public Schools... Now and in the Future.

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Anna Martin

Every teacher, at some point, has the dream. The one where it's the first day of school and you're not ready, or the students won't listen, or you forgot to wear pants. That dream.

I have had some version of this dream nearly every year before the first day of school. Even now, eight years later and National Board certified, I still have it occasionally. Inevitably, I wake up, go to school, and teach without the dreamed-about incidents coming to fruition.

But I used to wonder if the dream was my psyche's punishment for beginning my teaching career as an intern in my own classroom.

As a Teach for America recruit, I co-taught five weeks of summer school before being handed 70 middle school pupils and 6 periods of teaching with 3 preps. That year, various support providers occasionally observed me as I completed my credential during night classes. Looking back, I see how underprepared I was, but, ironically, how much "field experience" I had in comparison to traditionally prepared colleagues. I just wish it wasn't my own students who were the guinea pigs. Now, as I continue to teach and coach new teachers, I am appalled by our willingness to allow the least prepared teachers, like I once was, to teach and bear sole responsibility for our most needy students.

Unfortunately, I don't believe that my route was necessarily worse than the traditional preparation model. To me, "the dream" is not just natural anxiety, but symptomatic of the under-preparation most American teachers receive prior to our "first day." The weeks or months of "internship" that constitute most preservice classroom experience are woefully insufficient.

I now believe that working under a master-mentor teacher for two to three years (from the first to the last day of school) in a similar teaching situation should be a minimum requirement for all teachers. I am a member of the Center for Teaching Quality's New Millennium Initiative, a group of forward-thinking teachers who advocate for transformative policies. In our recently released policy report, we propose a new system of preparation and retention with just such a residency model as its base.

More extended field experience with gradual release of responsibility emphasizing observation and reflection on excellent teaching would allow new teachers to hone their craft before embarking into their own classrooms. It would also likely help retain many teachers that currently leave the profession early on. Further, experienced teachers could spread their expertise beyond their own classrooms and help ensure that all children have a highly trained professional responsible for their learning and success every day.

And, maybe, if this kind of model was instituted, I could finally sleep through the night before the first day of school.

Anna L. Martin, who received her National Board Certification, is the resource teacher at Lee Mathson Middle School in San Jose, Calif.

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Dan Brown

Before becoming a teacher straight out of NYU at 22, I'd enjoyed a successful career as a student. Recruited by Teach For America and the New York City Teaching Fellows, I was convinced that I had this school thing figured out. I joined the Teaching Fellows because they could guarantee me a placement in New York, and then embarked on a seven-week summer training prior to teaching a 4th grade homeroom at the Bronx's P.S. 85.

That frenzied summer was a blur of mornings in summer school classes and afternoons of deciphering standards, writing lesson plans, and hypothetical classroom decorating. When the first day of school came I was nervous, but I leaned on a foundation of self-confidence built upon all of my successful years in school. Pretty much everything else has worked out when I've given my all; how wrong could this go?

My classroom in the first months in the Bronx earned choice adjectives: volatile, disjointed, adversarial, even violent. I struggled at every turn to lead a stable place for learning; most of the battles I lost. I left P.S. 85 after that year, armed with a desire to learn the craft and return to the classroom, but aware that an educational travesty had just occurred. For my students, that was their 4th grade year—time they can't recover.

Looking back, my ignorance was staggering. I had bought—with the help of my alternative-certification program designed to plug chronic staffing shortages—the most insidious myth about teaching: anybody smart and dedicated can swoop in and rock it.

A learning curve for teaching's complex set of responsibilities is inevitable but it needn't be so steep. Supporters of programs that offer only a summer of preservice training must understand that those rookies' first classes will largely be unsatisfactory learning environments and their unwitting students will suffer the collateral damage. The arrangement facilitates perpetual attrition of would-be good teachers.

The most important baseline that preparation programs must provide incoming teachers is substantial time in a variety of classrooms before those rookies assume the reins. An entire school year of structured observation and apprentice-teaching must be standard.

The two semesters of student teaching I experienced in an M.A. program at Teachers College, Columbia University, laid the groundwork for me to find a sustainable path forward as a reflective, community-involved, and recently, National Board-certified teacher. TC's top-quality program is cost-prohibitive for many ($1,231 per credit plus fees for a 38-credit degree), so investment from foundations and government grants in subsidizing and replicating high-quality teacher prep is also desperately needed.

I wish I had known just how clueless I was that first day in the Bronx. The quickie training abetted my hope that I could paper over my lack of knowledge of the teaching craft with my wits and will. Ultimately, reality—26 children with many needs—stared me in the face and saw my ineptitude.

Dan Brown teaches high school English in Washington, D.C. A National Board-certified teacher, he is the author of The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle.

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Ilana Garon

During my "preservice training" the summer before I began teaching in the Bronx public high schools, one of my instructors, a decorated veteran teacher, advised me not to smile during my first month in the classroom.

"At all?" I asked in disbelief.

"Don't do it," he said. "You'll regret it." He explained that by smiling, I'd be showing weakness, which the kids would take as license to walk all over me. He further admonished that, even when I didn't actually know the answer to a question, it was imperative that I respond with a firm yes or no—"Are we having a fire drill today?" "No!" "Will we have to take a state-mandated exam at the end of this course?" "Yes!"—and then make corrections in the future as needed.

Perhaps it was due to my inability to follow his advice that my early years of teaching were so rocky; indeed, I smiled and even—God forbid!—laughed out loud. The kids correctly ascertained that I was a complete soft-touch, and far too green to be an old-hand at teaching, despite my insistence that I'd been at this 10 years and that my age was "somewhere between 20 and 40." And they did what the veteran teacher predicted: They walked all over me. I would endlessly shout over their chatter to gain control of the class, and then—when I got them listening—they'd interrupt to ask personal questions ("Miss, do you have a boyfriend?"), and generally get off-topic.

But the thing is, the veteran teacher's suggestion would never have worked for me, even if I had tried to keep up the charade he recommended. I'm not the type to avoid smiling; it just doesn't work. And in fact, as I eventually learned, being the type of teacher who smiles, laughs, and is—for lack of a better word—a "cuddly" personality has been the mainstay of whatever success I can claim to have had in this profession.

In retrospect, I understand that the lesson I really needed was the importance of developing my own unique "teaching identity," and of addressing the various aspects of teaching—discipline, academic rigor, classroom management, etc.—in a way that was true to the person I really was. But beyond being made aware of that challenge, I'm not sure there was any way to learn except trial by fire; I had to gain experience teaching to see what worked and what didn't. Figuring out how to balance my own softness with the firm hand needed to manage a classroom of rowdy teenagers has been, for me, the steepest learning curve—but in the connections I've made with the students, it has also been the most personally rewarding.

Ilana Garon has been teaching high school English (and math, in emergency situations) in the Bronx since she graduated from Barnard College in 2003. She is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post and Dissent Magazine

Posted by Ilana Garon at 1:00 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Megan Allen

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, let's make some teacher-prep changes, good for all!

If I were queen of the world (hey, a girl can dream, right?), these are the changes I'd make. Here's what the pixie dust would do as I wave my magic wand:

1. Have our most effective teachers teach our preservice teachers. It just makes sense, and our preservice teachers crave this kind of contact. A hybrid teaching role could split an effective teacher's time between a K-12 class and a preservice class.

2. Acknowledge that location matters. University classrooms are often beautiful spaces, but are they the best places to learn the craft of teaching? We need to be close to, if not inside, the labs where techniques will be applied: K-12 schools. Residency models are the way to go.

3. Let our preservice teachers roll up their sleeves early. The sooner they actually start working in real classrooms, the better. I would say from day one— and I'm not talking about their junior year.

4. Value the role of supervising teachers. How are we choosing them and supporting them in this integral role, particularly in this time of increased accountability?

5. We can't just wave goodbye at graduation and send new teachers on their way. We must blur the line between graduation and the first classroom, providing ample support in the beginning of a teacher's career.

6. Keep it real. Being an educator is a tough job. An amazing one, but a difficult one. We need to be honest with our preservice teachers, teaching them to embrace failure as a part of the job and to learn from their mistakes.

7. Regulate alternative routes. I'm coming clean here ... I am highly skeptical of alternative or short-cut certification routes. I do have alt-route colleagues who are great teachers, but they are also really smart, hard-working people who would succeed in anything.

8. Build an army of reflective practitioners. Preservice teachers must become familiar and comfortable with reflective practice, so increasing numbers of educators are open and honest about their teaching.

9. Model relationship-building (and allow opportunities for practice). Relationship-building is critical for motivating students. Refer to number 3.

10. Better prepare teachers to serve students with diverse-learning needs. I have heard this change championed time and time again. And we are moving towards inclusion models, so let's act quickly!

11. Use technology to enhance preservice coaching. Use Bluetooth, Skype, and avatar labs such as TeachLive to help preservice students get real-time feedback and practice behavior management.

12. Do it now. We must find a way to cut the bureaucracy and make changes that our students need, ASAP.

Let's make these changes soon—we owe it to the princes and princesses sitting in our classrooms and the heroes who will teach them in the future. It's not too late to live happily ever after, right?

Megan Allen, a National Board-certified teacher, was the 2010 Florida Teacher of the Year. She has taught for seven years, all at Title 1 schools, and now serves as the educator-in-residence at the University of Central Florida.

Posted by Megan Allen at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend