Providing a Coherent Conceptual Home Base
Peter Smagorinsky argues that teacher education programs need to provide prospective teachers with what he describes as “conceptual unity”; that is, they need to rein-force a consistent conceptual framework over several courses and field experiences. As he notes, programs with this kind of conceptual Breitling Replica coherence would provide an “extended, generative, synergistic set of [curricular] conversations” that would enable prospective teachers to “grasp and modify a conception of appropriate practice.”
In brief, having prospective teachers wrestle with case studies, along with the other strategies suggested here, in the context of a Classroom teachers can support the work of teacher education programs by establishing collegian relationships with new teachers, program with strong “conceptual unity” may provide university teacher preparation programs with some powerful tools to meet the daunting challenge of reducing the flood of good, new teachers leaving the profession.
It is important for schools and classroom teachers to understand the crucial role that they can and should play in fixing the hole in the bottom of the leaking bucket. First, classroom teachers spend considerable time helping new teachers, working to establish collegial relationships with them one likes to see a good new teacher leave a school; it can create a negative working environment. More important, when a new teacher leaves, then a department has to start the process of hiring and nurturing someone all over again. Furthermore, ensuring that good new teachers do not leave means that students get a higher quality of instruction, and this is better for everyone.
Classroom teachers can support the work of teacher education pro-grams by establishing collegial relationships with new teachers. Some ways that teachers can do this include the following:
(1) Invite new colleagues to join them at the lunch table. Making novices feel welcome and an integral part of the department and school can go a long way toward helping them fit into their new work environment.
(2) Engage them in conversations about what they are doing in their classrooms. Just giving them an opportunity to talk openly about what they are experiencing in the classroom can be enormously helpful to beginning teachers.
(3) Share materials and lessons with new teachers. New teachers can become overwhelmed with all of the tasks they have to do, and making the planning task a little easier can be an important way to help them cope and thrive.
(4) Ask new teachers their views on instructional issues and practices. New teachers need to be able to express their views to someone who is objective and nonjudgmental.
Perhaps with everyone in the educational Cartier Replica Watches community working together to develop and retain quality novice teachers, we can reduce the flood of those leaving the profession to a trickle. That would be quite a dream fulfilled.
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