Like most first year teachers, I went in to my first year of teaching giving it everything I had. I had spent precious dollars on classroom decorations (of course I needed to create a full-blown tree in the corner of my room), amazing art supplies (because my school had no art teacher), and books by the box for my very first Language Arts classroom (because some short-sighted principal had decided to phase out the library in a nod to the digital takeover of the world - ha!).
Within six weeks I was losing sleep, crying on my drive home, and questioning my decision to become a teacher. It felt like the middle school students I was teaching were sharks in the water, circling and waiting for me to make a mistake. They knew the school better, they knew the other teachers better, they knew the rules better, heck - they knew just about everything better than I did at that point. But we'll come back to that later...
According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, I wasn't alone in those feelings as a first-year teacher. One in ten first year teachers will leave the classroom by the end of the first year. The National Education Association states that nearly 50 percent of teachers will leave the classroom in their first five to seven years!
National Public Radio first started following new teachers back in 2015 when they discovered the blog Love, Teach and this term:
"Hello. Sorry it's been so long. I seem to have fallen into DEVOLSON ... an acronym I invented that stands for the Dark, Evil Vortex of Late September, October, and November. It's kind of a homophone for "devil's son," which is intentional. I discovered that it's the time of the school year where teachers are the busiest, craziest, and, usually the saddest."
There isn't anything easy about being a good teacher. Most teacher prep programs require teacher candidates to spend a LOT of time learning pedagogy and methods through authors like Harry Wong and his First Days of School book. Which is a great book, don't get me wrong. I think all teacher candidates and early career teachers should read it and have it as a resource on their teacher bookshelf. Another good one that most teacher prep programs consider required reading is Robert Marzano's The Handbook for the New Art and Science of Teaching. Both are excellent resources. But you can't build a quality teacher just by reading books. There are a lot of other ingredients that loom large in helping a new teacher get it right and survive the first few years.
There are no easy terms for describing what that first year is like. I tried to tell my mom that I had a "steep learning curve" or I shared with my friends that it was an "arduous adventure". But call it what you will, there is no pretty description for what I was going through. I felt like I was failing at the most important job I'd ever held, that I, personally, was ruining the lives of every student in my classroom. Now, 18 years into this wonderful profession I know that all first year teachers are vulnerable, no matter how rich their innate classroom skills might be.
There are a variety of strategies that districts can deploy in support of their newly minted teachers. One of the most effective high leverage practices districts can have in place for their new teachers is a mentoring program, a robust and comprehensive mentoring program. The most successful mentoring programs assign a coach to a teacher for not just the first month, but the first two years. The mentor meets with the new teacher on a regular basis, during the first year it is recommended that the mentor meets with the teacher once a week to help the them build critical classroom management skills, navigate the tricky waters of inter-staff relationships, and survive their first classroom observations. After the first year many programs mandate that mentors meet with the new teachers once a month, some have quarterly meetings. There is no doubt that having a coach in your corner who is there only to support you, not report to administration about your shortcomings, is a valuable resource for new teachers and has been shown to monumentally help in retention of new teachers.
Even in a classroom filled with students, the new teacher can feel alone and isolated. In "Support, Collaborate, Retain" the authors studied how best to retain teachers in the STEM fields. Their research showed that providing rich and authentic opportunities for new teachers to collaborate with other teachers was a critical component that led to lower teacher turnover and higher retention rates of new teachers. I know that isolation was a big problem for me in those first years. Had I had the opportunity to network and collaborate, my journey would have been so much smoother and more fun.
There are more strategies that districts can use to help support their newest teachers and there are strategies that the individual teacher can do, all on their own, to help increase their success and alleviate the stress, I'll write more about those in Part 2. But I promised I'd come back to my first October in the classroom...
In October of my first year, I was saved by a seventh grade student named Ryan. Ryan told me I needed to loosen up and show the students I really cared, even doing what he called "raging" at them when they weren't giving their all to the work in my class. He shared what it was like in Dan's class (Dan was a veteran math teacher famous for keeping his personal Mr. Coffee turned on and brewing throughout the day leaving the classroom with a smell of burnt coffee beans). Ryan stated that Dan was terrific, super supportive of the students, great with hands-on math manipulatives and that he had a "cool guy" vibe. But what Ryan said was the most impactful was that when Dan felt a strong emotion about what was going on in the classroom, the students knew it - for better or worse. When Dan felt the students weren't giving it their all or were off task and goofing off, he let them have it, he "raged" at them going so far as to hurl whiteboard markers across the room, loudly shove chairs (unoccupied) around on the 100 year old oak plank floors, and pound on his desk to get their attention. Ryan said that when Dan behaved like this, "went off the deep end" according to Ryan, the kids knew he really cared about them, that it wasn't just a job to Dan. Dan wanted them to succeed, passionately.
I cogitated on this for a few days. I wasn't sure what to make of this and didn't feel like I could behave so emotionally in my classroom. I was certain the assistant principal would have been on my doorstep in a heartbeat and I'd have had a note in my file, possibly even faced non-renewal, if I'd really let myself "rage".
So I didn't "rage" at them, but I did slow down and re-prioritize. I had to look in the mirror and admit that I had been so caught up in being a teacher and pushing my students through the Language Arts curriculum that I forgot to tend the relationships. I forgot to get to know the kids themselves. I forgot to sit down next to them and get to know them as individuals rather than a class of 35 kids who had to get dialed in on how to identify the main idea of a reading passage.
And it paid off. To this day, that first class of middle schoolers are friends of mine on social media. Some of them even went into teaching and sent me messages to let me know that their experience in my classroom was part of why they decided to enter the teaching profession.
Next post we'll talk about some strategies and resources for new teachers to use that aren't district dependent. After all, you can't always count on the district to provide the support you might need.
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