Frequently Asked Questions The Novice Teacher

This is a question I hear often from my students and I can sympathize with their frustration. There is some romantic or noble appeal in taking the role of the martyr and refusing to administer the tests. Unfortunately, you may lose your job as a result, without making a difference. One principal in Georgia even committed suicide in part due to the low test scores in her school. Still, the test craze goes on. What is a caring teacher to do? For some of the better suggestions I have heard, I refer you to Alfie Kohn.

Many of you probably attended the 2003 Convo and heard Kohn’s impassioned warning against the excessive use of standardized, high-stakes tests. In his book, The Case Against Standardized Testing (2000), he suggested that teachers work on two tracks to address this serious threat. In the short term, Kohn (2000, 51) said that we must “protect students from the worst effects of a given policy.” Instructionally, this means only doing the test preparation that is absolutely necessary, and teaching in the most creative and worthwhile ways possible. Research shows that relatively little direct preparation is needed to show effective results.

It also means absorbing the pressure to do well as much as possible without passing it on to your students. One graduate student, who also is a parent, told me of an incident where her high-achieving, third-grade daughter was told by a teacher that the school needed her to do well to help the average scores in her classroom. In my opinion, that was a morally reprehensible act for which a teacher should be disciplined or released. Sadly, that approach was encouraged by the school culture. As a teacher, you must absorb the pressure and deflect it back to your principal and school board by challenging their thinking on the matter. Never pass that pressure on to your students.

Kohn recommended that teachers work for long-term change within the system. He provided a list of tactics that range from attending school board meetings, to writing letters, to educating parents and urging them to take a stand against the testing movement.

Resources
Kohn, A. 2000. The case against standardized testing. Portsmouth, NH: Heineman.
Ohanion, S. 2002. What happened to recess and why are our children struggling in kindergarten? New York: McGraw-Hill.

“Why, in our teacher education classes, do we have to write so many long, detailed lesson plans when all the teachers I know say they never do that in the real world?”

Your teacher education program is probably part of a state or national accreditation process that demands evidence of certain types of thinking and the effects of your course work. If lesson plan requirements recently have become more strictly prescribed and tied to specific performance standards, that’s probably why. I believe, however, there are more important and meaningful reasons for writing thorough lesson plans.

As part of your professional preparation, you should begin to think about your teaching in more intentional and sophisticated ways. You should be able to prove your instructional decisions are closely aligned with the needs of your students, your community, and what research says is effective. You should be able to demonstrate that you are now thinking about educational considerations that never would have occurred to you when you began your preservice preparation.

Much of your professional growth would not be apparent simply by watching you teach. Further, the opportunities for teacher educators to actually see you teach are few and far between. Therefore, for teacher educators to determine whether you have grown as a professional, they need to see your thinking. You need to make your decision-making process visible. Serious teacher educators believe they have an obligation to the profession and the children served. That obligation includes helping to develop the most competent, caring, and creative teachers possible. They need to see if you are moving in that direction. They need to know that your most successful lesson was not a fluke, or that if a lesson did not go well, it was not due to laziness or lack of preparation or competence. Lesson plans are a useful tool in this evaluation.

Putting your thinking on paper also should be a reflective and educative experience for you. It should help you to consider the complex factors in your classroom more intentionally. If you write enough plans and engage in the type of thinking required for preparing them, eventually this preparation will become second nature and you will not have to do them as often. Be aware, however, that if you stop thinking in this manner, your professional growth also will cease. A few years ago, I realized that I had become complacent after 25 years in elementary, middle, and higher education. Since then, I have committed myself to revisiting and revising my teaching philosophy at least once each year and to rewriting my lecture and discussion notes every semester. I think it has made a big difference.

“How do I determine what is real and right when I enter the classroom?”

When you walk into your first field experience, even if just for a one-hour observation, you’ll quickly discover that you are working in three different but co-existing worlds. First, there’s the “real” world, or the immediate classroom in which you are observing or working. This world can be filled with uncooperative students, cynical teachers, complaining parents, and overwhelming expectations. This is the world where you are often told to “forget all that stuff you learned in college.” Ah yes, college—a world where teacher educators are telling you that you must honor and teach to the diversity in your class; provide hands-on, active learning opportunities in all subject areas; be an agent of change in your building; and reflect on everything, all the time—preferably in writing. Finally, there is the world of teaching that you created in your mind in the 12 years of classroom experience that preceded college. That is the world in which your second-grade teacher told you that you would make a wonderful teacher someday and, from that point on, you knew you were going to be a teacher. This is the world that, if you are like most preservice teachers, was one of positive and successful school experiences.

These worlds are not always compatible and, in fact, can make your transition into teaching even tougher. Determining what is “real” or “right” is not easy because what you thought was true (your past experiences) and what you would like to try (teacher education) often do not make sense with what you see happening.

To help deal with this confusion, you may want to write an educational autobiography. This can be a helpful exercise in critically examining what you believe about teaching, how you came to believe those things, and how you can overcome the negatives and incorporate the positives into your present teaching.

Discussion groups also can be very useful. If your teacher-education program does not provide ample opportunity to discuss your field experiences with peers, create your own discussion groups outside of class. If possible, find a professor or thoughtful, veteran teacher to lead your discussions.

"Am I a student or a teacher?"

Your first organized field experiences probably are going to include structured and unstructured observations, perhaps for an hour at a time. Most likely, you’ll sit in the back of the room and take notes about what you see. Your role in the classroom will be clear. You are a student and an observer. You’ll begin to make mental notes about the good and bad things in the classroom, and what you would do differently.

As you become more experienced and comfortable in classrooms, though, you’ll feel less like a student and more like a teacher. This is especially true if you’re a nontraditional, alternative certification student who is older than the teacher and has worked in educational settings for many years. You might even think you know more than the teacher and could be more effective. This feeling reaches its zenith during student teaching. You’ll want to make changes, but you’re not the “real” teacher.

In making an effective transition from student to teacher, it’s helpful to keep a few things in mind. In all field experiences and even while student teaching, you are still a guest in someone else’s classroom. Whether that teacher is brilliant or incompetent, you are the guest and there is a professional and personal etiquette and protocol that should be observed. There may even be times that you see something that is offensive or is not in the best interest of the students. At that point, you probably need to take the problem to your university supervisor and get his or her advice.

Think of yourself as a “student of teaching,” rather than a “student teacher.” Research on preservice teachers shows that they tend to enter teacher-education programs with certain beliefs about teaching and seldom change those beliefs, no matter what they learn or observe. Even more unfortunate is that most schools view it the same way and give new teachers all the responsibilities of veteran faculty members. The chances that your new employer will provide an environment in which you can continue learning are slim.
Your preservice years are a time when you should be able to experiment and take risks in a setting in which you are “fail-safe.”

Someone will be there to talk with you about the things that don’t work, head off potential problems, and help you refine and repeat things that go well. Don’t be in a hurry to get the cooperating teacher out of the room. Instead, solicit his or her ongoing commentary. Ask the teacher to take over the class again periodically, and be a student of his or her teaching.

“Are my teacher preparation courses useless?”

Ignore all that stuff they tell you in college! You’ll undoubtedly hear that from one of your cooperating teachers at some point. Sadly, many methods courses indeed might be irrelevant or unrealistic (Breault 1999). But more often than not, the relevance or irrelevance of your teacher-education courses is what you determine it to be. You must make the coursework relevant. That’s what constructivism is all about. Because an idea or theory proposed in a methods class seems unrealistic at a particular time or in a particular class does not mean it is always unrealistic. Maybe it needs to be adapted. Maybe it is something that has to wait. Maybe you need to hold your methods teacher to a higher level of accountability and press for a realistic application of the idea. Before you declare an idea to be worthless and discount it, be sure to examine the context, the cooperating teacher’s perspectives, and your own belief system.

You don’t have to take the ideas and theories presented in teacher-education courses or by practitioners on faith. Before you declare a teaching method to be effective or irrelevant, put it to the test. See whether there is any research to support the theory. Create your own research and test the idea in your classroom. Action research is an excellent way to explore your own beliefs and abilities as a teacher.

“How do I make the shift from self to student?”

Perhaps the most difficult transition for the novice teacher is to shift his or her attention from self or subject matter to what needs explaining to children (Feiman-Nemser and Buchmann 1986). As Highet (1966, 280) stated, “You must think, not what you know, but what they know; not what you find hard, but what they will find hard; then . . . explain what they need to learn.” As Lortie (1975) observed, teachers bring many years of informal apprenticeship to the classroom. They’ve been preparing to be teachers since they walked into a kindergarten classroom. These assumptions, beliefs, and misconceptions about good teaching do not change easily. In the end, however, teaching comes down to whether or not you understand the students well enough to provide an environment in which meaningful learning occurs. This requires that novice teachers “examine their own beliefs about the capacities and needs of different students and pay attention to the effects of different teaching strategies on them” (Feiman-Nemser and Buchmann 1986, 239).

References
Breault, R. A. 1999. The sound-bite curriculum. The Teacher Educator 35(1): 1–7.

Feiman-Nemser, S., and M. Buchmann. 1986. The first year of teacher preparation: Transition to pedagogical thinking. Journal of Curriculum Studies 18(3): 239–56.

Highet, G. 1966. The art of teaching. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Lortie, D. C. 1975. Schoolteacher: A sociological study. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Opportunities for Reflection