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entered the teaching profession in 1994 on the heels of what was her-alded to be an era of unprecedented teacher shortage. While that may

have been true on a national level, in the suburbs of a large metropolis like Chicago, teaching posi-tions were scarce. Yet, even in an area renowned for its bounty of prospective teachers, retaining new teachers proved problematic.

In 1999, I joined the English and Commu-nications Department of Downers Grove North High School. In a department of just 18, I was the twelfth new teacher hired since 1997. By the spring of 2000, over 40% of that number had left the rela-tively comfortable and privileged suburban school district. Those who remained sometimes joked about the intense pressure that only a few could withstand, but more often they asked themselves and one another the central question that has domi-nated the national conversation: Why do so many new English teachers leave?

unrealistic expectations

For some, the answer may lie in the image of teach-ers carefully cultivated by Hollywood. For decades, the industry has promoted an unrealistic vision characterized by teachers who become successful despite the systems in which they find themselves, whether they are motivated by personal gain or more altruistic intentions.

The 1994 movie Renaissance Man featured Danny DeVito as Jack Rago, a man who chooses to become an educator to avoid financial ruin. With

elaine Simos

Why Do New Teachers Leave? How Could They Stay?

An effective mentor program matters a great deal. Such a program must focus consistently on professional development, extend the work begun at the university, and connect newcomers to a professional learning community.

I

no training and little support, Rago helps to em-power a motley group of US Army recruits whose academic skills are deemed lacking by their com-manding officers. By the end of the course Rago teaches, the recruits conduct impromptu perfor-mances of Henry V and even pass a rigorous exam. Comedian Jack Black donned the identity of teacher Ned Schneebly in 2003 to earn money to reinvigorate his failing music career in The School of Rock. Much of his students’ subsequent success in musical, not academic, performance was predicated upon the foisting of his personal vision of success on his students despite the scrutiny of an easily be-fuddled principal.

Closer to home, many English teachers, for instance, cite as sources of inspiration the film por-trayals of educators whose personal investment in their students’ lives in and out of the classroom

Danny DeVito in Renaissance Man (1994, Walt Disney Video; dir. Penny Marshall).

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actor was hired to teach at Philadelphia’s Northeast High School. Danza’s single tenth-grade English class proved challenging in terms of daily prepara-tion, student instruction, and classroom manage-ment. The series chronicled Danza’s struggles to meet the needs of his 26 students, including his ef-forts to reach students by volunteering as a football coach and a band assistant. Unlike most new teach-ers, however, Danza benefited from daily meetings with teaching advisor David Cohn and the caution-ary supervision of Principal Linda Carroll.

An exacting reality

The experiences of Hollywood’s budding teachers contrast sharply with those of the corporeal variety. The latter face a host of demands to which their celluloid counterparts only allude: multiple prepa-rations, in some cases as many as six in one year; in-structional assistance that veers sharply from none to a dizzying overabundance; and, finally, uneven preparation for the rigors of teaching more than 100 students each day.

University teacher education programs face a challenge. They must empower preservice teach-ers as they gain familiarity with and understand the implementation of a wide variety of teaching strategies designed to meet the needs of a widely varying student population while at the same time monitoring prospective teachers’ mastery of con-tent knowledge and their professional dispositions. As an adjunct faculty member of Roosevelt Univer-sity’s Department of Secondary Education, I have witnessed many of these challenges. Over the past five years, the secondary methods in language arts course I teach has undergone many incarnations. Each year I have reworked the course syllabus, changing core texts (most recently to Kelly Gal-lagher’s Deeper Reading: Comprehending Challenging Texts, 4–12) and redesigning assignments (shift-ing the unit plan to a Grant Wiggins and Jay Mc-Tighe’s Understanding by Design–based project) to reflect the constantly shifting educational climate; the syllabus is further adjusted during the semester to meet the needs of the specific preservice teachers enrolled in the course. These needs are as diverse as the student population itself: one prospective educator might request resources on conducting an effective reading workshop while another might

have long-lasting effects. Robin Williams’s por-trayal of the passionate and charismatic John Keat-ing in 1989’s Dead Poets Society, Michelle Pfeiffer’s vision of the fiercely nontraditional army veteran LouAnne Johnson in 1995’s Dangerous Minds, and Hilary Swank’s interpretation of the compassionate and dedicated Erin Gruwell in 2007’s Freedom Writ-ers are models of teachers who build relationships with students that permanently change lives, again despite the limitations of the educational system(s). Interestingly, the long-term effects of these semi-fictitious teachers on their students’ lives are care-fully omitted from the final film versions audiences enjoy. Otherwise, the ramifications of a young man’s suicide, a young mother’s inattention to her child in an effort to complete schoolwork, or the destruction of a young educator’s personal relation-ships might become a part of the national conversa-tion about the role of teachers.

Cable network A&E produced the 2010 series Teach: Tony Danza, in which the erstwhile television

Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society (1989, Touchstone Pictures; dir. Peter Weir).

Hilary Swank as Erin Gruwell and Jason Finn as Marcus in Freedom Writers (2007, Paramount Pictures; dir. Richard LaGravenese). Allmoviephoto.com.

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dent teacher, she persevered in the teaching profes-sion only because of the assurances of new teachers of her acquaintance that “when it’s your own class-room, it . . . [will] be night and day” (Carroll et al.). However, authentic collaboration has increasingly become a fundamental expectation in the practice of teaching, for example, the widespread imple-mentation of the Professional Learning Community model. The ability to collaborate effectively must be fostered by teacher preparation programs in which preservice teachers are paired with cooperating teachers who will support their development (Con-derman and Johnston-Rodriguez 242–43). Many effective programs utilize techniques such as recip-rocal peer coaching, in which “students practice new teaching methodologies, master techniques, utilize shared problem-solving skills, and receive feedback from a peer evaluator” (Trautwein and Ammer-man 192). Reflecting on the understandings gained from the peer coaching sessions while continuing to practice a wide variety of techniques in the class-room elevates the model into one that assists preser-vice teachers in achieving true professional growth (Trautwein and Ammerman 192).

Preservice teachers further highlight the need for “sequential, purposeful, and well-connected field-based assignments to courses in which pre-service teachers have authentic opportunities to observe and implement research-based strategies under the supervision of experienced and success-ful mentors” (Conderman and Johnston-Rodriguez 241). An interesting variation on the traditional student teaching experience was recently detailed in Phi Delta Kappan’s “Mapping the Teacher Edu-cation Terrain for Novices,” in which the authors explore the results of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor’s teacher education program transforma-tion into an internship model similar to that of the medical field complete with “attending teachers,” “rotations,” and “rounds”; the authors conclude that this shift in philosophy might well represent “a good first step toward drawing the maps teach-ing interns need” (Bain and Moje 62–65).

retaining New Teachers

Understanding why teachers leave is of vital impor-tance to the profession as a whole. In “Hold On to Your New Teachers,” Paul M. Hewitt’s discussion of

search for methods on reaching students through classical poetry. Moreover, in recent years, the uni-versity’s College of Education has greatly expanded

its use of electronic portfolios such as TaskStream to not only serve as a means for prospec-tive educators to share unit and/or lesson plans and for faculty members to assess that work, but also as a means for students to establish their un-derstanding and mastery of a recognized set of professional dispositions. These demon-

strations are designed to showcase a prospective teacher’s aptitudes in devising instructional plans that directly correlate to student achievement and in working to develop effective interactions with both students and colleagues.

Yet, despite the many teacher preparation pro-grams that have worked diligently to adopt a model of professional growth rooted in current educational theory and practice, a trend has emerged in recent years that underscores the perception of some school districts and cooperating teachers that prospective student teachers have a widely varying degree of preparation both in terms of content-area skill and pedagogical knowledge: a lengthy application pro-cess in which preservice teachers must submit a ré-sumé and transcript before enduring an exhaustive interview in which they are asked to demonstrate their knowledge of and ability to implement a wide range of teaching strategies to meet the needs of the school and/or district’s student group. Not surpris-ingly, many new teachers with whom I have worked recall that the process of obtaining a student teach-ing placement was nearly as stressful as that of ob-taining their first teaching positions.

While developing a constructive and support-ive relationship with cooperating teachers is another key element to a successful teacher training pro-gram, unfortunately some early-career teachers still recall clinical experiences characterized by openly antagonistic relationships with their cooperating teachers (Carroll et al.). Still another reflected that “I came up with everything on my own” and received no assistance in curriculum development or imple-mentation (Carroll et al.). One teacher recalled that after an exhausting and difficult experience as a stu-

Many new teachers with

whom i have worked

recall that the process

of obtaining a student

teaching placement was

nearly as stressful as that

of obtaining their first

teaching positions.

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Yet, there is also strong evidence that many of these new teachers might choose to remain in the classroom, provided that an environment conducive to their growth is fostered. Focused, well-supported new teacher induction programs have proven their efficacy by accelerating the “effectiveness of new teachers, fast-tracking their progress to exemplary teachers with the ability to positively impact stu-dent achievement” (Moir 16). These induction pro-grams incorporate a wider variety of collaborative instructional supports than ever before, includ-ing mentors, learning teams, and literacy coaches. Katharine Burn, Trevor Mutton, and Hazel Hag-ger assert that “the role of coaches” in particular “is crucial . . . [and] needed in the context of par-ticipants’ working environments, with the coaches not merely observing and providing feedback on participants’ teaching, but organising a range of [in-structional techniques]” in “Strengthening and Sus-taining Professional Learn-ing in the Second Year of Teaching” (656). In “Not Another Trend: Secondary-Level Literacy Coaching,” Patricia Gross describes coaching as a “reciprocal learning process that is meant to foster teacher independence and flexible thinking” (134). One of the individual coaching model’s greatest strengths lies in its fundamental principle of intervention and assistance based on each teacher’s needs and not on a more uniform ap-proach (Gross 136).

The increasingly common use of the Pro-fessional Learning Community model has been a boon to novice educators. This model allows new practitioners to work in concert with veteran staff members to more precisely focus their efforts on de-termining what practice(s) is and is not successful in the classroom; the conversations that proceed are centered on student learning and the practices that best support it (Routman 58). These conversations enable all teachers, novice or veteran, to improve their practice over the course of the experience (Yost, Vogel, and Liang 430).

Developing supportive and constructive re-lationships between new practitioners and mentor teachers is also of vital importance. The role of ef-fective mentors is complex: they must “be skilled

the growing need for teachers is directly contrasted with the nearly 50% rate of attrition; this contra-diction is particularly startling in consideration of the estimated 1.7 to 2.7 million new teachers this nation will need in the next 20 years (12). Moreover, each loss costs a school district thousands of dollars in hiring and training, a fact that cannot be ignored in a climate of fiscal uncertainty (Hewitt 12).

Many new teachers leave their positions be-cause of the dissonance between their expectations of “an extremely high level of success” in their first year of teaching and the frustration they experience in the realities of the high school setting (Hewitt 13). Novice practitioners are required to attend lengthy, often-unpaid orientation sessions that are designed to impart the major expectations of the school and district. Then, upon taking the reins of their own classes, many novice teachers discover they have been assigned some of the most challeng-ing classes with students who likewise fit that cat-egorization (Long 318). New teachers further find themselves quickly enrolled in various building or district training programs, some instructional in nature, others simply managerial, all of which con-tribute to their overburdening.

Moreover, in this era of strong accountability in the fundamental areas of literacies, English teach-ers have proven especially vulnerable to succumbing to these pressures (Hahs-Vaughn and Scherff 22–23). Today’s federal mandates require that student achievement is measured in just two academic areas: mathematics and reading. States have the option of requiring testing in other subject areas as well; how-ever, that option is exercised unevenly. In Illinois, for instance, at the secondary level fully one-half of the state’s accountability measure, the Prairie State Achievement Examination (PSAE), has been laid at the language arts teacher’s door: student achieve-ment in reading is measured solely on scores earned during a student’s junior year on the reading por-tion of the ACT test administered on the first day of testing and on the ACT’s Work Keys Reading for Information test given on the second day of testing. The state has also recently adopted measures requir-ing that teacher evaluation be connected directly to student achievement (Illinois). In this climate, who can evince surprise that these added pressures facing novice English teachers might factor into their deci-sions to leave the classroom?

The increasingly

common use of the

Professional Learning

Community model has

been a boon to novice

educators.

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searching for its next blockbuster. I’m certain that The Adventures of a Second-Year Teacher would draw record crowds.

Works Cited

Bain, Robert B., and Elizabeth Birr Moje. “Mapping the Teacher Education Terrain for Novices.” Phi Delta Kappan 93.5 (2012): 62–65. Print.

Burn, Katharine, Trevor Mutton, and Hazel Hagger. “Strengthening and Sustaining Professional Learning in the Second Year of Teaching.” Oxford Review of Education 36.6 (2010): 639–59. Print.

Carroll, Sam, Chloe Cooper, Elizabeth Levin, Britni Mitch-ell, and Demetrios Pappageorge. Personal interview. 26 Apr. 2012.

Conderman, Greg, and Sarah Johnston-Rodriguez. “Begin-ning Teachers’ Views of Their Collaborative Roles.” Preventing School Failure 53.4 (2009): 235–44. Print.

Dangerous Minds. Dir John N. Smith. Perfs. Michelle Pfei-ffer, George Dzundza, Courtney B. Vance. Holly-wood Pictures, 1995. DVD.

Dead Poets Society. Dir. Peter Weir. Perfs. Robin Williams, Robert Sean Lenard. Touchstone Pictures, 1989. DVD.

Freedom Writers. Dir. Richard LaGraveness. Perfs. Hilary Swank, Imelda Staunton, Patrick Dempsey. Para-mount Pictures, 2007. DVD.

“Governor Quinn Signs Legislation to Improve Teacher, Principal Evaluations and Training Boosts Illinois’ Application for Federal ‘Race to the Top’ Funds.” Illinois Government News Network. 15 Jan. 2010. Web. 4 May 2012. <http://www.illinois.gov>.

Gross, Patricia. “Not Another Trend: Secondary-Level Lit-eracy Coaching.” Clearing House: A Journal of Educa-tional Strategies, Issues and Ideas 83.4 (2010): 133–37. Print.

Hahs-Vaughn, Debbie, and Lisa Scherff. “Beginning En glish Teacher Attrition, Mobility, and Retention.” Journal of Experimental Education 77.1 (2008): 21–54. Print.

Hanson, Susan G. “What Mentors Learn about Teaching.” Educational Leadership 67.8 (2010): 76–80. Print.

Hewitt, Paul M. “Hold On to Your New Teachers.” Leader-ship 38.5 (2009): 12–14. Print.

Long, Janette. “Assisting Beginning Teachers and School Communities to Grow through Extended and Col-laborative Mentoring Experiences.” Mentoring & Tutoring: Partnership in Learning 17.4 (2009): 317–27. Print.

Moir, Ellen. “Accelerating Teacher Effectiveness: Lessons Learned from Two Decades of New Teacher Induc-tion.” Phi Delta Kappan 91.2 (2009): 14–21. Print.

Renaissance Man. Dir. Penny Marshall. Perfs. Danny DeVito, Gregory Hines, James Remar. Touchstone Pictures, 1994. DVD.

Routman, Regie. “Mapping a Pathway to Schoolwide Highly Effective Teaching.” Phi Delta Kappan 93.5 (2012): 56–61. Print.

The School of Rock. Dir. Richard Linklater. Perfs. Jack Black, Mike White, Joan Cusack. Paramount, 2003. DVD.

at articulating teaching strategies, analyzing evi-dence, and supporting teacher growth every day” (Hanson 80). To accomplish these tasks, mentors and protégés are obligated to hold regular meetings during the already-hectic school year, participate in frank discussions about students and instruction, and maintain an understanding of school culture and associated expectations. The work of each part-nership possesses the potential to empower novice teachers to become “problem solvers, innovators, and leaders within the school community”; the more invested in achieving a school’s goals a new teacher feels, the more likely she or he will return to further expand on that mission (Long 324).

Coming Back Next Year?

The 2011–12 academic year marked an anniversary of sorts for the Downers Grove North High School English and Communications Department: it cel-ebrated its 20th new teacher hired since 2001. Over the past decade, more than ten veteran teachers re-tired and the number of faculty members increased; the department further expanded when the school incorporated reading specialist and literacy coach-ing programs into the language arts department.

As a member of the department, I had ob-served the changes in the local induction program with interest and even joined the process as a men-tor and as an instructional coach more than once. New staff members were required to enroll in a mentor program, to join a learning team (or two) in the district’s work in the Professional Learning Community model, and, often, to work directly with an instructional coach to further improve their classroom performance. Developing an envi-ronment in which novice practitioners can hone the skills they need to be successful was instru-mental in the success of the program. Finally, more and more new teachers felt they could an-swer in the affirmative when queried about their plans for the next year’s employment. In fact, the teacher retention rate had increased dramatically to nearly 85%.

The changes to this single suburban high school district’s teacher induction program had great results in just a few short years. Would that Hollywood might cast its net a bit wider when

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Yost, Deborah S., Robert Vogel, and Ling L. Liang. “Embedded Teacher Leadership: Support for a Site-Based Model of Professional Development.” Interna-tional Journal of Leadership in Education 12.4 (2009): 409–33. Print.

Teach: Tony Danza. Dir. Riaz Patel. Perfs. Tony Danza. A & E. 2010. Television.

Trautwein, Blane, and Sarah Ammerman. “From Pedagogy to Practice: Mentoring and Reciprocal Peer Coaching for Preservice Teachers.” Volta Review 110.2 (2010): 191–206. Print.

elaine Simos has taught in various public school settings, from urban to alternative to suburban. Currently, she teaches junior- and senior-level English students and functions as a literacy coach, working with colleagues from various content areas at Downers Grove North High School, in addition to her work with preservice teachers at Roosevelt University. Email her at esimos@csd99.org.

reADWriTeTHiNK CONNeCTiON Lisa Storm Fink, rWT

In “A Significant Influence: Describing an Important Teacher in Your Life,” students write a tribute to a teacher, someone who has taught them an important lesson that they still remember. The personal essays that students write for this lesson are then published in a class collection. http://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/lesson-plans/significant-influence-describing-important-824.html

Questions

Can I get a drink? yes.Can’t I just do it this way? yes.Will you stay and help me? yes.Do you think I’ll be able to get it? If. yes.Can I take a piss? yes.Why do they have to be like that all the time? Well. Growth. Stress. no.Will it ever change? It. Can’t. yes. Work. Hope.Can I change seats, please? yes.

Alcoholism is it handed down? Hereditary? Genetically? proven. but. choice. yes.Why are they handed life and I’m stuck stuck in that house no matter no matter how hard my parents work how hard I work?

Will it ever change?

Should I tell?

How can I make this work?

Can I take a piss? yes.

—Greg Overman

greg Overman has taught secondary English in rural Ohio for four years and currently resides in Bozeman, Montana where he teaches middle school language arts, high school English, and drama at Three Forks High School. When he is not teaching, reading, or writing he spends his time driving through the mountains of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, and Washington with total disregard to direction and fuel economy. Email him at goverman@threeforks.k12.mt.us.

© 2013 Greg Overman

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