U of Ideas of General Interest -- March 1999
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Contact: Craig Chamberlain, Education Editor (217) 333-2894; [email protected]
TEACHER SUPPORT University, schools working together to keep teachers from quitting
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Teachers will tell you the first year of teaching is the hardest. Yet many teachers must face that first-year challenge almost alone.
It's likely one reason an estimated four of 10 new teachers aren't teaching three years later.
Some educators at the University of Illinois and in three Illinois counties, however, are finding that a rare form of university-schools collaboration -- which pools expertise, resources and the novice teachers themselves -- can be a key to getting those teachers some of the support they need.
It's called the Novice Teacher Support Project, and April Bailey, a second-year math teacher at Hoopeston Area High School, knows her first year would have been much harder without it. "It was nice to have a place where you could talk with people who are in the same position as you," she said, "and without that, I don't know what I would have done." She has no plans to leave teaching.
Sharon Chubbuck, the U. of I. doctoral student who coordinates the program, said many evaluations after the program's first year came back saying, in effect, "I had no idea how much I would need this." More than half of the 38 first-year participants, including Bailey, have continued into a second year with the program.
The novice-teacher project was formed from a three-way partnership among the University of Illinois; two of the state's regional offices of education, covering Champaign, Ford and Vermilion counties; and the school districts in those counties. Teacher's unions also lend their support.
The program centers on Saturday sessions during which teachers get practical advice from experienced educators and university experts, a chance to share their experiences with other first- and second-year colleagues, and time to reflect on their teaching and how to improve it. It also includes a new mentoring program that uses recently retired educators, and this summer will add a summer institute. And regular feedback is built in, through routine evaluations by the participants.
Bailey's principal, Joanne Allard, has played a part in helping to develop the program, partly because she still remembers the "hell" of her first year teaching. "You're just not prepared for the amount of time and emotional and psychic energy that teaching takes," she said.
She also sees particular benefits for smaller districts, like her own, where there are few new teachers added each year, and the district can't justify the time or resources to organize its own support program. "Having a place to go where they're meeting people from all different schools across the three counties gives them the big picture of what new teachers are going through and what teaching is."
A program such as the Novice Teacher Support Project takes on added importance, noted Marty Barrett, the regional superintendent for Champaign and Ford counties, as Illinois and other states anticipate mass retirements during the next 10 years. "When you think about that, when you think about the shortages that we have already begun to see, this program just cries out to be duplicated."
-cdc-
RSS