Rising student enrollment, escalating teacher retirement, and high teacher turnover all contribute to a significant teacher shortage now vexing schools in the United States. The “revolving door effect” of new teachers signing on enthusiastically only to leave the teaching field quickly is a major culprit. Studies show that as many as 33 percent of new teachers leave the classroom within three years, and 46 percent leave in the first five years. Why do so many new teachers leave?
Many people blame such factors as inadequate salary, student discipline problems, lack of administrative support, and limited faculty input into decision making. One factor often overlooked is a disconnect between the goals new teachers bring to the profession and the goals favored by the shapers of public education. By informally polling my teacher education students, I have found that most of them go into teaching wanting to connect with children as individuals, to create a sense of community with students, and to help students develop their personal creativity—goals very different from the reality of what most teaching assignments entail.
More new teachers will stay in the classroom if administrators give them time, space, and support to foster human connections and creativity. When teachers feel empowered to create personal meaning and community at school, they stay.
A Clash of Goals
- Citizenship. Schools impart political values, rules, and the history of the surrounding civilization and government.
- Socialization. Schools teach students communication skills, the centrality of community and social order, interpersonal cooperation, and conflict resolution.
- Economic efficiency. Schools inculcate students with essential skills and content to help them sustain and contribute to the economy as adults.
- Self-actualization. Schools treat students as individuals and challenge them to form unique identities and personal paths of development.
I emphasize that there is no hierarchy to these goals; each is equally important. I then explain that I believe a healthy system of education balances these four goals by leading students in activities that range from highly student-centered to more teacher-directed. When I ask my students to choose a single goal on which they hope to focus their teaching, the results are amazingly consistent. I have polled approximately 1,000 students since 1999, and every year, except for a tiny handful, my students are almost evenly split between the goals of self-actualization and socialization. These future teachers enter the career of education because they want to connect with students personally. They want to reach the hearts and minds of students and to help students get along, build friendships, and understand one another.
But then I ask another question: Guess which goal the education system in the United States currently favors? Hands dart up. Students reply quickly: economic efficiency. These future teachers understand that standardized testing, accountability, and predetermined content objectives dominate U.S. schools. They know that the primary aim of education policymakers and administrators is to impart the skills necessary for graduates to uphold our increasingly pressure-filled and technologically directed economy. And with a sigh of awareness, they recognize that their bent toward community and creative expression does not necessarily match what's happening in schools.
Balancing these four goals is inherent to giving students an inclusive and effective education. It's my job to help future teachers find ways to insert their humanitarian desires into a school system too often focused on preparing students for materialistic goals. Teachers who keep students' humanity in mind bring creativity and personal meaning to learning. Every year I explain to my education students that although most standardized tests focus on rote knowledge and comprehension, good teachers push forward with imaginative application, analysis, and synthesis activities. And in their best moments, excellent teachers toss out automated behavioral objectives altogether to craft a student-centered environment through such methods as circular seating, cooperative learning, game playing, active parental involvement, and multicultural education.
Clearing a Path for Creative Learning
Because my teacher education students observe classes in local schools during their training, they see how veteran teachers carve out time to nurture students' emotional health and creativity, even in schools that rely on fill-in-the-bubble worksheets and tests as a staple of the daily diet, like the processed chicken nuggets served in the cafeteria. Working with such teachers, students engage in critical thinking and creative expression through cultural exchanges, role playing, environmental projects, story writing, literature-based learning, integrated physical education, and other ventures.
Unfortunately, approaches that work smoothly for veteran teachers are often more difficult when attempted by novices. Veteran teachers who operate outside the box have professional leeway that novice teachers don't. Many of the best veteran teachers have built up a lively (and expensive) classroom resource base with their own money. They are survivors who, having accepted bureaucracy to the extent that is necessary, have found a way to push through red tape incrementally and tenaciously.
Educators who are committed to slowing the revolving door phenomenon need to help new teachers find those ways, too. If teachers have enough chances to do what so many of them truly want to do—nurture students as people and engage them in imaginative learning—they are more likely to embrace teaching as a career. Administrators must help teachers secure time and space for this kind of learning, even if it is as little as an hour a week. We should arrange scheduling and resources to enable teachers to interact with small groups of students with just one goal: helping students relate well to one another and be as creative as possible. During this time, teachers should have no apprehensions about district assessments, standardized testing, or other strings attached to learning; this time is just for communication and discovery.
Administrators can arrange for teachers to take a weekly or biweekly break from the regular classroom routine and devote that time to imaginative learning, turning to volunteers or school staff for help. Teachers—and students—need this kind of respite from pressure to cover content and prep for tests.
A Model of Quality Enrichment
As an example of reworking schedules to set aside time to enhance students' creativity, consider a pilot project started this year at an elementary school in rural northern California. Every Tuesday from 9:40 to 10:25 a.m., 65 5th graders empty out of their regular classrooms to participate in one of the following enrichment activities: band, computer exploration, the Buddy Program (in which 5th graders help 1st graders with their reading), tutorial remediation, or literary circle. Students rotate into a different enrichment activity each trimester. Enrichment groups are purposely kept small so that students can strengthen personal relationships while learning.
In literary circle, 12 students of mixed reading abilities select readings democratically from an anthology. The teacher dramatically reads each story aloud, taking frequent breaks for students to discuss the story in pairs. Students analyze and synthesize what they heard through such activities as writing poetry, inventing new story endings, drawing, creating time lines, playing kinesthetic games, and translating parts of the story into Spanish.
In literary circle, teachers do not grade or assess students on their participation. Students show few discipline problems or signs of boredom in most sessions; instead, they engage in the kind of serious analysis and imaginative exploration that cannot and should not be tested.
On a typical day in literary circle, students sit cross-legged in a tight circle (because the school lacks space, the group meets on the floor in a tiny multipurpose room). Before launching into Doctor Dolittle, the students excitedly plan a walking field trip to a nearby bookstore that has given the group a significant discount. They decide they will bring pillows to school and after the field trip will read their new novels silently for part of the time; then the teacher will read aloud selections from each novel. “That way we can hear the books the others picked and find out why they picked their books. Maybe we can find events and conflicts that are similar in all our novels. We can do that Venn diagram thing,” offers one boy.
As the teacher reads an excerpt from Doctor Dolittle, she stops at the part where the doctor begins to learn animal language and asks the students to speak animal language. They go around the circle braying and hooting until they get to one girl who lives with a foster family at a ranch. This girl, although bright, is shy and hesitant during most discussions. This time, however, her eyes flash and her nostrils widen as she lets out a loud, realistic horse neigh. Everyone gives her a round of applause and, smiling widely, she teaches everyone how to neigh and snort. Using literature as a lead-in to creative exchanges allowed this child to connect a book to her personal life and drew out her personality and spontaneity.
Connection as the Key
Letting new teachers connect meaningfully with their students is key to supporting these professionals. Our teachers need plenty of opportunities to build human connections and to help students connect with others. Making space and time in the education system for community and creative interaction is the only way to meet new teachers' essential expectations—and to keep them in our schools.
