Attrition
Over the last six weeks two of the first-years have quit their job teaching and, obviously, the Teacher Corps. This is a pretty rare occurrence, but frustrating nonetheless. I have some thoughts on why a person quits, but let's go to the numbers first...
Since I began as Program Manager in 2003 I have recruited four classes to the Teacher Corps (I haven’t double checked these numbers with the records at the office so I may have missed someone):
Class of 2004 (22 initial participants)
1 quit during summer training
0 quit during the year
2 quit after the first year
Class of 2005 (28)
0 quit during the summer training
0 quit during the year
3 quit after the first year
Class of 2006 (32)
1 quit during the summer training
2 quit during the school year
1 quit after the first year
1 quit during the second year
Class of 2007 (26)
2 quit during summer training
2 quit during the school year
I think it is normal to have people drop-out during the summer training. Actually, I think this is a good thing. Sometimes people don’t realize how intense teaching, and Teacher Corps, actually is. And I don’t have a problem with people dropping out of the program at the end of the first year. Again, teaching is not for everyone. Nor do I have a problem with someone leaving the program during the year but continuing to teach. But what really hurts the program is when people leave in the middle of the school year. School districts are depending on Teacher Corps, and we have a reputation of providing high-quality, outstanding teachers. Even worse, when a participant quits during the year, the students are left without a teacher. In most cases, the district cannot find a replacement and the kids will be taught by a permanent sub who does not know, and cannot teach, the material.
The sample size of the classes is too small to draw any real conclusions, but it is frustrating that every year we have (I feel) a more rigorous selection process, an improved training program, and a better mentoring system and yet, the attrition rate during the school year is increasing.
As I told the first years on Saturday, the only reason (other than unexpected health or personal issues) someone in the program quits during the middle of the year is classroom management. If you have classroom management down (and it takes about a year and a half to really get it down) teaching is a great job. If you don't have any classroom management, and are not making the attempt to manage your classroom, teaching is a miserable job. There are many challenges to being a first-year teacher but, in my experience, classroom management is the only one that is a deal breaker.
MTC spends a good deal of time during the summer training preparing our teachers to manage their classrooms. We cover the basics of rules, consequences, procedures, and rewards. Each teacher creates a classroom management plan. We do a week and a half of role-plays… But sometimes I feel we need to do more. Or, perhaps, we need to make the summer school experience tougher, less organized, so that our first-year teachers have experience dealing with issues that will come up during the school year. Or something else...
What are your thoughts?
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Comments
unfortunately i dont think there is any way to get summer school to compare with regular school. The kids will not be disrespectful, will not refuse to do their work, will not cause chaos, torment eachother or get angry/upset with the teachers. They are forever in the "honeymoon" period (since the sessions are so short) they dont have friends in the class (since they all come from different schools) and they know this is their one shot. Maybe the only way would be for holly springs to start requiring all students who have failed to go to summer school. Then we would be teaching a bunch of frustrated kids who didnt want to be there -- and THAT is a simulation of what we deal with during the year.
How do you react when a student says (in a disrespectful tone) "why are we doing this?" or another one says quietly, "this is stupid" when they are handed a worksheet. Or "I ain't working today". Or one that just stares off into space and refuses to answer or look at you when you ask them to get started. I still dont know how to respond effectively to these situations -- clearly i am not responding with effective motivators and rewards (though i try), because my students still do these things EVERYDAY.
Are any of these a violation of your class rules?
I think the role-plays are mostly silly.
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I think the role-plays are mostly silly. I'm sure a lot of this preparation helps, but only a bit, and the variation you get from MTC class-year to class-year, from placement school to placement school, and even from particular class-load to particular class-load within one school, are going to be the most widely varying, almost uncontrollable, generally unmeasurable, and pervasively influential variables.
In all of the (probably important and often helpful) "take control and be consistent" rhetoric of the MTC, it can be too easy to forget that these schools can sometimes be deeply inconsistent and wildly oppressive places to be in at all, for teachers and students alike. Good management can go a long way to alleviate this, and bad management can absolutely make life unlivable, but even the best and most seasoned veterans, those few old saintly great teachers, have good days and bad days. I find that these management strategies aren't so much the magic bullets they're sold as, but are rather the things you have to do to prevent your life from going straight to shit. Wong himself would have trying days in some of these schools -- he may have fewer, but it would be no stressless cake walk, not for anybody.
And I'll agree that classroom management is the likeliest thing to make somebody leave in the middle of the year, but not that it's the only reason anybody would. Being consistently mistreated and abused by one's administration, if it reaches certain levels of base indignity (which it can), can be just as insufferable. And just today, almost three-quarters through year three, I very seriously fantasized about quitting though my room were a relative oasis of tranquility -- not because I was unable to manage my own classroom, but because I was unable to manage the hallway and the rooms nearest mine, and was essentially required to do so.
The role-plays during your training (summer of 2005) were weak. I don't even remember them, or who helped act them out. The role-plays in 2006 were good. The role-plays in 2007 were, in my opinion, outstanding. Week long, intense, lots of repetition. They were also consistently identified by most first-years as the most helpful part of the summer training (on the follow-up eval I gave last Saturday).
Agree that there are many factors that MTC has no control over. But I still feel that CM is the greatest reason (the only reason, other than exceptional outside factors) for why someone quits. You had a bad day, and you had to deal with disorganization and disorder, and you thought about quitting. But you did not quit. It is only when a person can't manage his or her own classroom that he or she gives up...
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And I loved the Obama supporter clip you put up.
Having taught in similar settings to some of the MTC members, I can echo Ben's assertion that classroom management is a key to teacher survivial and retention.
I must also add that sometimes it's not the classroom management, but the lack of campus leadership that lends to the defeatest attitude that precedes "quitting." A bad campus administrator can, and will, completely destroy a faculty.
For any first-year teacher, who may be an outsider in the community (at first), it may be very difficult to see light at the end of the school calendar and stay positive about reflection and professional growth when there is little or no administrative support for concerns of junior faculty.
If there is no "gatekeeper" to show a first-year teacher the how manuever the local system, then well... it's a long row to hoe til May.
I think that often in my classroom Mr.Amutah cares more about making a personal connection with a student than being the all-powerful teacher with a paddle and red pen that controls their physical pain or academic destiny (note: I don't paddle...philosophically opposed to it...I can get into why). I'm not comfortable with that role. I don't like or respect teachers who coarsely bark orders at their students and send them out of class for what I would consider relatively minor offenses. I think that the ageism in schools (i.e. "I'm the adult, you listen to me now and forever with NO BACKTALK because, as I shall reiterate, I am the adult.") is a big problem, especially in the Delta. Students feel that they don't control ANYTHING. Their grade is controlled by intangibles such as whether or not a teacher likes them, the degree to which they talk, or other things. We need to give students ownership within parameters of oversight (perhaps) and gradually take away those parameters until they run things.
I love each and every one of my students and it pains me to not only *force* them to do things that they don't want to do but things that I don't actually feel are important. The reality of today is that they don't need a college education. Period. Perhaps they need one if they want to be middle-class, financially stable, travel often (beyond the state), or what have you but they do not need a college education--or even a high school degree necessarily--to survive in Belzoni, Mississippi. It's a tough sale to students when I lecture about the importance of education and why they need to pay attention and how their life can be transformed through the attainment of an education when they can point to myriad examples of individuals in their household, neighborhood, or town that are able to support themselves and their families (perhaps while struggling financially) but who dropped out of 9th grade. Also, the truth of the matter is that students see people's successes educationally as foreign to themselves. I think that many of my students are so used to mediocrity and local drama and the local club every Saturday/homecoming every October being the biggest thing in their lives that they're content with that. Who am I to say that they should want more? They should decide.
I'm an autonomist. Sue me (and sorry for the randomness/verbosity/incoherence of this).