Melanie Asmar, writing for Chalkbeat, recently explored Denver’s new experiment to make the first year of teaching more bearable. Excerpts from the piece appear below:
Next year, Denver is piloting the role of “associate teachers” in Denver Public Schools. These teachers will teach part-time in a high-poverty school and spend the rest of their time planning, observing, and learning.
The small pilot is part of a new district strategy to better prepare new teachers to work in Denver’s many high-poverty schools, which tend to hire more novices. The students in those schools are more likely to be behind academically and in need of top-notch teachers.
Denver officials hope that investing in novice teachers will allow the teachers to hone their craft faster and to stay at high-needs schools for longer.
“We know how challenging that first year can be for a new teacher, even when they’ve had high-quality training,” said Laney Shaler, the district’s director of new teacher pathways and development. “We want to extend that developmental runway.”
The teachers aren’t the only ones who stand to benefit. Some research shows high teacher turnover is detrimental to student learning, especially in high-poverty schools. For districts, it can be time-consuming and costly to hire more and more teachers each year.
Three [schools] – North High School, McAuliffe Manual Middle School, and Goldrick Elementary School – will have associate teachers this fall. They will be paid slightly less than regular first-year teachers: $38,000 as opposed to $41,689. The cost will be split between the schools and the district. In all, the district will spend $325,000 in 2018-19 to get the teaching academies up and running, with $150,000 going to associate teacher salaries.
Emily McNeil will be an associate math teacher at North. She’s already familiar with the school, having done her residency there while earning her teaching license. As an associate teacher, she’ll be teaching on her own for the first time, but for three periods a day rather than five. She and the other associate teachers will spend the rest of their time planning, observing other teachers, attending training sessions, and getting advice and feedback from mentors.
Experts said the approach seems promising. Having a gradual on-ramp for new hires is a common-sense approach used in many other professions, said Richard Ingersoll, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, who has studied teacher preparation and remembers his own sparse training as a first-year teacher.
But the experts warned that not all high-poverty schools are fertile training grounds, especially since such schools tend to have higher turnover of teachers and principals.
