Rookie teachers get extra help in the classroom

Published 9:00 pm Thursday, September 14, 2006

RAYMOND – There’s a gap between what teachers learn in college and what happens in the real world, said Derek Rask, a newly-minted sixth-grade teacher at Raymond Elementary School.

“In college, we had to write these big, long lesson plans in our books,” he said. Each lesson could easily be several pages long for each subject.

“And in the books here, you might have two pages for the week,” finished Allison Anderson, a kindergarten teacher with 10 years of teaching experience.

There are more surprises in store for novices: the bare walls of a classroom a new teacher probably has not collected years of materials to cover, figuring out how to use sick time, managing communications with parents. It’s not easy entering a new school or a new profession, and incoming teachers often don’t know who to ask for help.

Rask and Anderson are taking part in a new program at Raymond that aims to give newbies like Rask a colleague to answer their questions and listen to their concerns. Anderson was paired with Tammy McMullen, in her third year of teaching but her first year at Raymond, and Rask was paired with Terri Webber, a first-grade teacher in her 17th year of teaching.

Anderson and Webber spent a week at the Mentor Academy in Yakima, training offered by the state Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction. Their session was funded by a portion of a $750,000 New Teacher Initiative. Offered by the Center for Strengthening the Teaching Profession, the initiative is funded by a grant from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.

Jeanne Harmon, the center’s executive director, said the nonprofit initiative was especially interested in offering funding to smaller districts to implement their own teacher retention programs.

Rural districts used to attract teachers by, essentially, teaching their homegrown children, Harmon said. Today, with many young people leaving small towns for metropolitan areas, school districts need ways to get and keep quality teachers. Having a strong support system at work can be a key factor in a young teacher’s decision to stay in a small community.

“The state of Washington produces enough teachers” to meet the overall demand, Harmon said. “It’s a district issue.”

Raymond faces some particular challenges, said Superintendent Steve Holland. With a work force of not quite 50 teachers, he said nearly half of them will be eligible for retirement in the next four years. That means the district will likely be hiring more teachers than usual in the near future.

Already the district has seen unprecedented turnover.

“Last year we had six new teachers,” Holland said. “That’s huge.”

Those retirees also represent a huge loss of institutional memory, Holland said. That’s a vital resource for any school, and with 25 percent of new teachers in Washington state leaving the profession after their first year – the nationwide average is 50 percent – the district faces a potential shortage of teachers who are comfortable with the school and the community, and vice versa.

Holland said keeping those new teachers around for the long term is a district priority. The mentoring program is part of the district’s plan to retain teachers, which they submitted to the center. With the plan, the district will be able to assess how they are meeting the needs of their new teachers.

Raymond isn’t alone in finding out how to keep those new teachers. The center works with six other small districts, including the Mary M. Knight School District in Matlock, and it can afford to pool data from all of their individual programs to determine what works for small, rural districts. These sorts of analyses are routine for larger school districts, but their results are not necessarily applicable or useful to districts such as Raymond or Mary M. Knight, Harmon said.

At the elementary school, the mentors feel good about creating a “safety zone” for their new colleagues, and Rask and McMullen are glad to have a sympathetic ear to bend.

“You don’t know what you need to know,” Webber said.

“There are all these little details at each school,” McMullen said. “It’s nice to have somebody help you through them, as well as somebody to talk to.”

Anderson said as a teacher, she is accustomed to helping little minds grow; being a mentor just gives her the same opportunity.

“We’re all lifelong learners,” she said. “This is one way to branch out and learn something new.”