Revised Rough Draft

Lisa Miller

Dr. Sonia Apgar Begert

English 101

19 March 2013

Increase the Support, Increase the Performance

Good, bad or mediocre, with very few exceptions everyone has had an experience in school K-12. Those experiences determine not only what a student learns, but shapes the attitude and relationship that a student has regarding learning and school. A good teacher can be a saving a grace. A beacon that stands out and inspires us to to learn while challenging us to push ourselves to do more than we thought possible. By introducing and opening new worlds to us teachers shape our futures and determine the adults that we become. Yet there are few really great teachers. Increasing the amount of support that we give in the training of new teachers and the sustaining of experienced teachers is the change that I would make to our K-12 educational system.

Beyond the training that a new teacher will have received in order to complete a teaching certificate, a newly hired teacher needs to be paired with one who is more  experienced, who acts as a mentor. No matter how naturally gifted one might be, having someone there to talk to who has been in the trenches would be of value. Teachers may start off with great enthusiasm for teaching, yet fifty percent quite within the first three years of teaching (Chalk). Creating a mentoring program that effectively trains and supports a new teacher could prove to be invaluable in creating great teachers and retaining them. Being paired up with a mentor and teaching either a reduced load and/or co-teaching with a more experienced teacher would allow the new teacher to learn the ropes of classroom management while being able to observe that teacher and have daily access to feedback.  Dan Brown argues that “great teachers can’t be built without seeing others in action”. In the movie, Chalk, we see a great example of this in the history teacher, Mr. Lowry, where we observe him in his first year teaching. Mr. Lowry had recently been divorced and though he had a career as a computer engineer, he evaluated his career and made a change. After taking two different aptitude tests that indicated teaching might be a good fit, he pursued a new career as a teacher. Though we are not told of the process that he underwent to get a teaching job, through observing him in the classroom we can guess that there was little classroom management training. He was unprepared to teach and as such he was miserable and made his students miserable. It was not until he himself went to the library and checked out a book on classroom management did the situation in his classroom begin to improve, yet the student teacher relationship had already been damaged. Sadly, he also received good advice from one of the mothers of a student in his class which also seemed to make a difference, but this advice should have come from a mentor at the school. 

In addition to classroom management, a mentor would provide a new teacher with advice on lesson planning. A statistic that is presented in the movie, Waiting For Superman, is that a bad teacher will cover only fifty percent of the curriculum whereas a good teacher is able to cover one hundred and fifty percent. Which means that students who are lucky enough to have a high performing teacher will progress through the material three times faster than those with a low performing teacher, which is equivalent to one academic year. This is important because once a student starts falling behind it is next to impossible to catch up. An example of a poor performing teacher is Mr. Stroope also from the movie, Chalk. Mr. Stroope is still new to teaching and each scene that we see him in he is working hard at being a buddy to his students. He is determined to win the “Teacher of the Year” award. So compelled is he to win that he takes up valuable class time enlisting his students in his campaign. Unfortunately, we do not see him teach, instead class time is taken bolstering his self esteem. There is a scene where he is coming down on two students who are using too big of words in class, which makes Mr. Stroope uncomfortable because he does not know what they mean. In another scene Mr. Stroope is meeting with a woman in some type of an evaluation. The woman brings up the goals that they had set the last time they met; one of which is lesson planning and the importance of turning in his lesson plans on time. Mr. Stroope does not  appear to take the conversation seriously and they agree to talk about these items again next time. What a disappointment that the students in his class are being subjected to his inability to plan and present a lesson plan and sadder still that no one was truly checking to see how or what he was doing in class. Having someone guiding him through the process in a supportive manner would have made a big difference in his abilities and confidence and improved the outcome for his students. This mentoring relationship could also boost and inspire the mentor by giving them a fresh look at teaching and helping them to feel valued.

  A principle should be looking for supportive ways to encourage their faculty so that they remain inspired and confident, yet all too often they take a passive position. In Chalk the assistant principle is seen doing all of the interacting with the teachers and students. When she goes to the principle for advice, he does not address her issues and offer her any solutions or support. Instead he begins talking about himself, leaving her just as frustrated as before. The lack of interest and leadership provided by the principle created an environment where people were not working to their potentials and were getting really stressed because they did not get the support they needed. Another example from the movie Chalk that shows a lack of leadership is when the , the P.E. teacher, Ms. Webb began acting as the overseer of the other teachers and began pointing out what they were doing wrong instead of acting as a team member and working together. 

As we saw in the cases of Mr. Escalante and Ms. Watson, it is possible to be a great teacher without leadership and support from a principle and colleagues. In both cases, these teachers own passion and high expectations propelled them to be great. When Mr. Escalante announced that he wanted to teach calculus to the students, he was met with a great deal of resistance from the head of the math department. Mr. Escalante even very boldly said that if he could not, he would quit. It was the head of the department who stepped down instead because, though she was opposed to what he was doing, she recognized that they needed Mr. Escalante as a teacher. With obstacle after obstacle, Mr. Escalante persevered even at the risk of his own health. Similarly, Ms. Watson stepped into a teaching job at school where the traditions of the school were so thick that it was nearly impossible to cut into them. The cost of fitting into those traditions was to squelch your own sense of creativity and uniqueness in order to fit into roles that have previously been set and expectations that have nothing to do with your own hopes, dreams, or abilities. In the tension of tradition and expectation, Ms. Watson led by example, proving herself a great educator and mentor, but because she was true to herself, she resigned at the end of the year. She was an excellent teacher and even though the other faculty began to regard her as such, the alumni board had so much control over the school that it made it impossible for the head of school to make decisions on behalf of the school. 

Increasing the amount of support that we give in the training of new teachers and the sustaining of experienced teachers is the change that I would make to our K-12 educational system. By increasing the amount of support that we give to our teachers to truly be the best they can be, we are increasing the odds of a child being in the classroom with a really great teacher. Those teachers will likely be retained by the school which in turns bolsters the schools ability to effect the community it serves.