Building A Teacher's 'Repertoire' Takes Time, Training | New Teachers

Building A Teacher's 'Repertoire' Takes Time, Training

Seattle, Washington— When Patricia Wasley embarked on her career in education 30 years ago, teachers didn't get much in the way of mentoring, on-the-job training, or even hand holding. "On the first day of school," she recalls, "the principal would say, 'See you at lunch.' At lunch he'd say, 'See you in the spring.'"

Today, as dean of the College of Education at the University of Washington, Wasley is working to reinvent induction so that new teachers not only get off to a good start, but can continue expanding their skills and knowledge over the course of their careers.

University of Washington is working with school district partner sites in Seattle, Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Portland, Maine, to develop "a more coherent continuum" of support for new teachers that includes mentoring and professional development through their fifth year in the profession. The initiative, called Sustaining and Strengthening Teaching, also includes Bank Street College where Wasley was dean of the Graduate School of Education before joining UW a year ago. Other partners are the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, the Teachers' Union Reform Network, and the Center for Educational Renewal, also based at the UW.

Such partnerships can go far toward breaking down the isolation between university-based teacher preparation programs and the classrooms where teachers practice their craft. "Too often new teachers hear that old saw, 'Well, you might have learned that in the university, but you're in the schools now,'" says Wasley. "I'd like to see more of a link so that we have a coherent pathway into teaching."

This means making changes in the schools of education, the dean acknowledges. "We're redesigning our teacher preparation to focus on getting our candidates ready for the first two years of teaching," she explains, rather than trying to prepare them for a lifetime in the field.

By their third year, most teachers are comfortable with the routines of their job "and are ready to go deeper into subject areas. They're ready to master content and learn new ways to present it." That's the time to bring them back to the university for summer institutes and other forms of professional development that will help them build their repertoire of classroom skills, Wasley says. By the end of the fifth year, she expects, teachers who have been through the program should be ready to pursue certification by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards "and see coherence in their profession."

Within the UW College of Education, this new approach to teacher preparation is getting nods of approval from the faculty. "We've known for a long time that induction has been a problem. We know that many new teachers have a hard time," Wasley says. "For our faculty, it's a relief to consider a different way to prepare teachers. They no longer have to try to cover it all in one year. We recognize that new teachers need extended preparation and support," she says.

It doesn't hurt that Wasley has been down this path before. At Bank Street College, she led the faculty through a comprehensive redesign of the teacher education program and built new school-university partnerships with school districts. Previously, she focused on school change as a senior researcher at the Coalition of Essential Schools and Annenberg Institute of School Reform at Brown University.

As the UW teacher preparation program evolves, Wasley hopes it has lasting value for educators. "We hope our alumni will cycle back to us" for the support they need at different stages of their professional development. "We want the university to be a place that prepares, sustains, and supports teachers through the life of their careers."

This year, for example, 10 first-year teachers are meeting regularly in a beginning career network, facilitated by Keiko Kawasaki who recently completed her master's degree at UW. "She gathers them as a group every couple weeks, and she also meets with them individually" to provide additional collegial support, Wasley explains.

The university can also play a key role in training mentors to work with new teachers. "We know from research that mentors need training to be successful," Wasley says. For starters, mentors need to know "what new teachers learned while they were here at the university, so that they can build on that knowledge," she says. "A mentor should be able to tell a new teacher: 'OK, I know you learned these two ways to teach reading while you were at the university. Let's work with those methods until you're comfortable using them in the classroom, then I'll show you something new to add.'" Mentoring that is infused with intellectual content becomes connected to professional development and goes well beyond "showing someone where the erasers are kept," Wasley says.

In her own career development, Wasley frequently returns to the classroom when she wants to master a new skill or try out a new approach for delivering instruction. Early in her career, she taught high school in rural Washington. "It's powerful," she says, to be back in a classroom. "It keeps me fresh. And it's good to remember how hard it is to teach — how wily kids are!" What she likes best is finding a public school teacher willing to take her on as a temporary classroom partner. "We can decide together what skills we want to add to our repertoire. Then we can coach each other." She hopes to be teaching ninth-grade English part time next year.

"Expanding the repertoire" is something all teachers need to do throughout their careers, Wasley believes, whether they work in the elementary grades or teach graduate students. "It's our professional responsibility." Without change, teachers fall into predictable patterns that fail to excite students about learning. "Kids figure out routines quickly. They need greater variation, and not just in the curriculum. I'm also talking about pedagogy and assessment. We need to switch it up on them, keep them fresh." The saddest scene in any classroom, says this veteran educator, "is when we don't ask enough of kids, when we don't push them, when we don't keep them on the edge of their seats."

—Suzie Boss