Supporting Beginning Teachers. Tina H. Boogren
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The Unique Needs of Beginning Teachers
In order to successfully address the issue of teacher retention in their schools, school leaders must develop an understanding of the unique perspectives and needs of beginning teachers. Ellen Moir (1999) identified a series of specific mental and emotional challenges that usually occur during the first year of teaching. She organized these challenges into five phases: (1) anticipation, (2) survival, (3) disillusionment, (4) rejuvenation, and (5) reflection, with beginning teachers returning to the anticipation stage at the end of the first year. Figure 1.2 depicts the typical progression of these phases during a teacher’s first year on the job. Of course, not every beginning teacher progresses through these phases exactly as shown in figure 1.2. Still, understanding the phases can help those who support beginning teachers understand the challenges they face. Here, we briefly describe each phase.
During the first anticipation phase, beginning teachers feel excited to enter their own classrooms and make a difference in the lives of their students. Their concerns during this phase may include setting up their classrooms, locating curriculum materials, and establishing relationships with colleagues, school leaders, students, and parents. Not surprisingly, this phase often coincides with the beginning of the school year.
In the survival phase, new teachers begin to realize the realities of day-to-day work. Teachers in this phase have little time for planning or reflection—they simply struggle to stay afloat. Even in the face of challenges and difficulties, most beginning teachers attempt to maintain their energy and dedication to students, though they may find themselves falling short. This phase often occurs around the second to third month of school.
New teachers often “hit the wall” during the disillusionment phase. At this time, they may begin to question their commitment, capability, and self-worth, and they sometimes even become ill from stress. The disillusionment phase often presents the greatest challenge for the first-year teacher to overcome and typically falls between November and January.
Source: Republished with permission of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, from “The Stages of a Teacher’s First Year,” Moir, 1999, p. 21; permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.
Figure 1.2: The phases of a first-year teacher’s attitude toward teaching.
The next phase—rejuvenation—often arrives shortly after winter break, once new teachers have had the opportunity to rest and spend time with family and friends. Time away from the stresses and pressures of the classroom can give beginning teachers a new outlook on their profession and a new sense of their own accomplishments. Teachers in this phase feel more hopeful and begin to focus on their students’ academic performance and their own teaching competence. Rejuvenation can last into the spring.
As the school year comes to a close, new teachers enter the reflection phase. In this phase, they look back on all they have learned throughout the year, including which strategies were effective, which strategies were ineffective, which strategies went untried, and what they could do differently next year. At the end of the year, many teachers also feel powerful emotions related to saying good-bye to their first group of students.
As they close out the school year, beginning teachers typically re-enter the anticipation phase. During this time, they begin to think ahead to the following year. Having had the opportunity to reflect, beginning teachers usually feel ready to enter the next school year with new ideas, streamlined procedures, and different strategies to try out in the classroom.
As the first few stressful phases in Moir’s (1999) model illustrate, beginning educators face a steep learning curve. School leaders, parents, and students normally expect significant growth from new teachers within a very short period of time. As Breaux and Wong (2003) pointed out, new teachers are expected to develop an understanding of the school culture, form relationships with their students and colleagues, and find balance between work and personal life within a few short months. Further, beginning teachers are expected to be completely prepared to begin teaching on the first day of school and to improve their performance each and every year thereafter. Ellen Moir, Dara Barlin, Janet Gless, and Jan Miles (2009) noted that “regardless of the quality or duration of the teacher preparation program, new teachers assume the full range of teacher responsibilities only on the first day on the job” (p. 58). Because the first day of school brings unexpected challenges, “everything before that might be considered a simulation” (p. 58).
For many of the tasks that teachers perform daily in the classroom, expertise develops over time as practitioners gain exposure to a wide variety of classroom occurrences. David C. Berliner (1988) identified the following six dimensions in which expert teachers perform more adeptly than novices.
1. Interpreting classroom phenomena
2. Discerning important events
3. Using routines
4. Making predictions
5. Distinguishing between typical and atypical events
6. Evaluating performance
According to Berliner (2000), anecdotal reports from teachers indicate that developing skills in these dimensions requires three to five years of experience. Berliner (1994) also asserted that beginning teachers require five years to move from the novice stage of teacher development to the competent stage.
Despite these differences between beginning and experienced teachers, school leaders often expect new teachers to immediately perform the same—or similar—tasks and duties as teachers with years of experience but with relatively little support. This expectation does a tremendous disservice to new teachers. Skills that appear simple and automatic for experienced teachers are often the result of years of careful practice, work, and reflection.
Deliberate Practice to Develop Expertise
While most professionals maintain average levels of performance once they reach them, some continue to improve their craft and eventually reach “the highest levels of professional mastery,” or expertise (Ericsson, 2006, p. 683). While extensive experience is necessary for achieving expertise, experience alone does not “invariably lead to expert levels of achievement” (p. 683). Rather, reaching the highest levels of performance requires deliberate practice, or a concentrated effort to improve one’s abilities (Colvin, 2008; Ericsson, 2006).
When people think about practicing a skill, they typically think of repeating an action over and over again until it becomes automatic. For instance, a teenager preparing for a driving test might drive so frequently that the various elements of operating a vehicle become second nature. Similarly, a basketball player might shoot fifty layups every day until he or she develops muscle memory to make the skill automatic. People who engage in deliberate practice, on the other hand, try to avoid automaticity because they want to correct errors at finer and finer levels of detail. During each practice session, they identify problems with their technique and work to correct them, always seeking to attain a higher level of mastery.
Because deliberate practice requires