This tipsheet is a complement to TNTP’s latest report, Leap Year: Assessing and Supporting Effective First-Year Teachers, which shares what TNTP learned after radically evolving the way they train and evaluate new teachers. It is based on a simple idea: The first year is the most important year of a teacher’s career—a critical window of opportunity for school leaders to help teachers develop essential skills.
TNTP’s findings include three key principles about first year teachers:
- New teachers perform at different levels and grow at different rates—and these differences may appear even in the first few months of teaching.
- Teachers who start strong are more likely to remain successful over time. Those who struggle to improve despite getting useful feedback and support in the first year tend not to improve in the second.
- Certain characteristics seem to set the most successful new teachers apart. We found that first-year teachers who are purposeful, responsive and focused on student understanding develop more quickly.
Based on these three findings, TNTP suggests five key strategies that school leaders can adopt right away to treat the first year of teaching with the care it deserves:
- Set clear expectations for performance and growth.
- Pay attention to first-year teachers’ performance, starting on the first day.
- Use multiple measures to assess performance.
- Focus on the most essential teaching skills.
- Make honest decisions about retention.
For more details, please visit: http://tntp.org/ideas-and-innovations/view/leap-year-tips-for-principals
