Early Career English Teachers in Action

Learning from Experience, Developing Expertise

Robert Rozema, Lindsay Ellis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415743419
• eBook ISBN: 9781317802150
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Education General
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The first few years of teaching are critical to the professional development of effective English teachers. In these crucial years, new teachers establish their identities, learn the ins and outs of the curriculum, acclimate to unfamiliar communities, and cope with student behaviors that they never expected. All of this can be daunting for novice teachers. This book can help. The stories within are written by English teachers in the early stages of their careers. In their carefully crafted narratives, teachers offer practical strategies, professional insights, and a wealth of tips for surviving the first years in the classroom. The narratives are grouped into thematic chapters with brief introductions of key terms, helpful learning activities, and provocative discussion questions, all intended to foster critical conversation about beginning a career teaching English.

In a time when many teachers leave the profession too soon, Early Career English Teachers in Action gives voice to those who have decided to stay. More importantly, this book validates teacher narratives as a powerful way of understanding what happens inside of the classroom—a way that provides more authentic evidence of learning than standardized test scores will ever supply.

1
Introduction

Why Early Career English Teachers?

Robert Rozema

I left high school teaching over a decade ago, just a few months after terrorists struck the Twin Towers on September 11. That singular day was my most memorable as a teacher. Though I cannot recall the names or faces of the students in my class, I do recollect that the poetry of Wilfred Owen was on the agenda for the day, but discarded when the South, then the North Tower shuddered and collapsed. Another unforgettable moment of that day was an exchange that I shared with my principal in the dim hallway outside my room. Only minutes after the attacks began, he was walking from room to room, checking on his teachers and their students. When he came to my door, he said, “Robert, the world will never be the same.” He was right, of course, and his judgment bears testimony to his years teaching history and to his wisdom in recognizing the importance of geopolitical events. Well over a decade later, long after the death of Osama Bin Laden, American soldiers grind on in Afghanistan, and I know that he was right.

My stay as a high school English teacher was just eight years—a brief candle amid the long, illuminating careers of many of my colleagues. But despite their brevity, my teaching days gave me many stories, and while none, thankfully, are as harrowing as September 11, they are nevertheless reminders of my teaching life. A ninth grader runs me down in the hallway, jumps on my back, and demands a piggyback ride. A clueless but enthusiastic sophomore volunteers “Pronoun” as the theme of “The Road Not Taken.” A pregnant senior has her water break during class.

All teachers—and perhaps English teachers especially—traffic in these kinds of narratives. As entertainment, these stories can make the trip to the lounge worthwhile. As therapy, they can keep teachers from burning out or blowing up. But they do more: stories help us think through our practices and make changes for the better. As we listen to stories and narrate our own, we take a step toward reflective practice, the cycle of action, reflection, and adjustment that is at the heart of effective teaching. We know that reflective practice occurs during teaching (reflection-in-action), when we respond to unexpected situations, and before and after teaching (reflection-on-action), when we anticipate or look back at our teaching (Schön, 1983). Storytelling is a natural form of reflection-on-action and plays an important role in our professional practice. Schön notes:

Storytelling represents and substitutes for firsthand experience. Once a story has been told, it can be held as datum, considered at leisure for its meanings and its relationships with other stories…. By attending to a few features which he considers central, the [professional] can isolate the main thread of a story from the surrounding factors which he chooses to consider as noise.

(p. 160)

For new teachers in particular, the stories told by colleagues can offer a rich data source to help shape their own practices (Elbaz, 2005). And yet, we know that too few teachers are staying in our profession long enough to learn from these stories and their own. The attrition of new teachers is itself a story that we can and must learn from: recent research finds that about ten percent of beginning teachers leave after their first year (Kaiser, 2011). More troubling, the most academically gifted teachers are also the most likely to quit, as are teachers working in schools with high poverty populations (DeAngelis & Presley, 2011). New English teachers are not immune to this trend, though they are slightly less likely to leave after their first year than their colleagues in other content areas (Hahs-Vaughn & Scherff, 2008).

New English teachers face significant challenges that are unique to our field: heavy grading loads, challenging content, and high-stakes testing in reading and writing. All of these put extraordinary pressure on early career English teachers. The novice teacher today also begins her career in the era of corporate reform—a time when giant publishing-testing companies such as Pearson and McGraw-Hill have unprecedented influence on standards, curricula, and assessment. Supported by powerful lobbies, wealthy foundations, and politicians on both sides the aisle, educational corporations have crafted and profited from No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. One signature element of Race to the Top is the requirement that teachers be evaluated based on the test scores of their students, another crushing pressure for new teachers. As Diane Ravitch (2013) notes:

Certainly teachers should be evaluated, but evaluating them by the rise or fall of their students’ test scores is fraught with perverse consequences. It encourages teaching to multiple-choice tests; narrowing the curriculum only to the tested subjects; gaming the system by states and districts to inflate their scores; and cheating by desperate educators who don’t want to lose their jobs or who hope to earn a bonus.

(p. 111)

A perverse consequence of test-based teacher evaluation, of course, is that our profession becomes far less inviting for newcomers. Indeed, teaching can seem a world away from Dead Poet’s Society, with far too little poetry and far too many test booklets. This fundamental mismatch between what new English teachers expect and what they actually experience can contribute to their decision to quit (McCann, Johannessen, & Ricca, 2005).

Despite these challenges from within and without, the vast majority of new English teachers do stay in their classrooms beyond their first year. They stick it out for many reasons, but one of the most significant predictors of teacher retention is the presence of a mentor teacher. Mentors offer novice teachers a combination of personal support and professional guidance. Mentorship varies from school to school and is often bundled within larger induction programs that provide professional seminars for new teachers, time for planning with colleagues, regular communication with administrators, and guidance from an experienced teacher in the same field. Such induction programs have grown in popularity over the past two decades, with proven results: new teachers who participate in formal induction programs are about half as likely to leave teaching than those without such programs (Smith & Ingersoll, 2004).

New English teachers also stay when they like the way the school works and feels. In a healthy school, teachers are engaged, friendly with one another, and willing to collaborate; administrators are supportive and communicative; and there is a collective sense that the school is a positive learning environment. In these kinds of schools, the rituals and routines that accompany education—issuing report cards, disciplining students—are carried out with a clear purpose and with the consensus of the faculty. In contrast, an unhealthy school has little teacher collegiality, festering distrust between administrators and faculty, and an overwhelming sense that the school is failing. Lindsay and I believe that school health is comprised by both school culture and school climate, and we discuss both of these ideas in the upcoming pages. Unfortunately, many new teachers begin their careers in unhealthy schools, and these teachers are more likely to leave the profession (Hancock & Scherff, 2010).

Whether the school is unhealthy or healthy, starting any job can be an isolating experience, and this is particularly true of teaching. Novice English teachers may be afraid to ask for help from their colleagues, fearing to be judged incompetent. Or they may be buried under papers and prep work, with little time to talk to their colleagues down the hall. New teachers are often asked to teach outside of their expertise area, further distancing them from colleagues. Whatever the cause of isolation, it is clear that when new teachers feel disconnected from their colleagues, their chance of leaving increases (Rogers & Babinski, 2002).

In short, it is tough business being a new English teacher. This book cannot change that fact, at least not in a conventional way. You will not find ready-to-use lesson plans, fail-proof classroom management strategies, or the secret formula to first-year success. What the book does contain is stories, compelling accounts of first-year teaching, told by early career English teachers just like you. We believe these stories are vital to surviving what can be a brutal initiation into our profession. Reading them, we know we are not alone, even as we see situations well outside of our own experiences.

Lindsay Ellis is Associate Professor of English, Grand Valley State University, USA. She directs the Lake Michigan Writing Project.

Why Teacher Narratives?

Lindsay Ellis

Grand Valley State University, USA

The stories that follow may seem like ones that you would hear if you shared a cup of coffee with these teachers. We wanted it to be that way, yet this familiarity is partially deceptive. Stories can be enjoyable reading because they provide familiar structures: readers meet characters, experience their dilemmas, and long for resolution. Such structure, however, is something that our contributors constructed over multiple drafts.

Turning life into a written story is difficult. Every hour, every day, we receive complex information through our five senses. Days within school are particularly complex, where hundreds of lives are lived out in close proximity. Conversations overlap. Bodies collide. Learning takes place in multimodal and individually particular ways. Teachers hear students’ voices and read their faces. They think about curricular content.

Out of the jumble of visual, auditory, physical, and emotional memories of days in school, our contributors have drafted narratives. These narratives are constructions of reality that emerged as our contributors sifted, selected, and ordered their memories from their first years in the classroom. This act of creation was itself a learning process. Not only have our contributors created stories from which others can learn, they have created understandings for themselves in the act of storytelling. These constructions exemplify what is called narrative learning (Goodson et al., 2010).

In their study of narrative learning, Goodson and his colleagues observe that while all humans understand their lives through storytelling, some narrativize more than others. Of the ones who live an “examined life,” some are able to mine their narratives for wisdom about how to live with skill and happiness. On the other hand, some of us live with such “high narrative intensity and elaborate analysis” that reflection “can be a ‘narrative maze’ imprisoning the individual in learning without empowerment” (Goodson et al., 2010, p. 125). Writing, we have found, helps us to use narrativizing to our advantage—to avoid the maze. Writing stories down helps us to escape endlessly rehashing “How could I have done that better?” because it forces us to move through a beginning, middle, and end of the swirl of our thoughts. Writing also gets the events out of our brains and onto paper. We can then revisit and reconsider them later with specific questions in mind. In this book, then, we privilege a particular kind of narrative—the kind that leads to well-informed action.

To assist new teachers with this construction of meaning, Rob and I held several writing retreats for our group. We shared what we knew about composing written narratives out of remembered experience. Together, our group reviewed the Guided Reflection Protocol recommended by Simon Hole and Grace Hall McEntee (2003) in their book At the Heart of Teaching: A Guide to Reflective Practice. After taking the time to write brief stories about “what happened” during one significant memory, teachers shared their stories and discussed “why did it happen?” and “what might it mean?”—questions provided by the Protocol. These questions helped the writers not only to develop narratives, but also to begin to analyze and evaluate the meaning of their stories.

During another Saturday writing retreat, we studied a text rich with both narrative detail and analysis. Todd DeStigter’s (2001) ethnography, Reflections of a Citizen Teacher: Literacy, Democracy, and the Forgotten Students of Addison High, alternates between plot and commentary. For our writing group, DeStigter’s work served as what Katie Wood Ray calls a mentor text (Ray, 2006). By studying and discussing his graceful step from dialogue to exposition, we began to understand the thinking that gave birth to that form. This led to informed discussion of the differences between narrative and expository modes. While we were not asking the teachers in our writing group to write ethnographies, if they wanted to communicate some of what they were learning as they composed, then they, too would have to craft smooth transitions between modes in their work.

It is our hope that these chapters may, in turn, become mentors for others. We believe that this can happen on several levels. As DeStigter did for us, we hope to model thinking and writing processes that you may follow as you make meaning of your memories of teaching. We also believe that reading these narratives can foster a wisdom that comes from reflection. While these early career teachers would not claim to be wise beyond their years, their stories offer readers vicarious experiences that can be discussed critically. This offers two benefits. First, by describing years of work in a variety of settings, this collection is a supplement to firsthand experience. Second, by prompting and facilitating critical reflection and discussion, this collection offers a hold on the pace of teaching, which in life is so fast-paced and multilayered that reflection is difficult (Dolk & den Hertog, 2008).

As we wrote, we considered the possible critiques of a collection of personal narratives. We know that the national education pendulum has swung toward the analysis of data to inform best practices. I have experienced this firsthand. For many of the last six years, I annually visited Washington, DC, to talk about the future of the National Writing Project with policy and lawmakers. Teachers who had completed a National Writing Project Summer Institute often came with me to testify to the power of the program and to describe the positive changes that resulted from the federally funded scholarships that they had received. Many of the representatives with whom we met were eager to discuss teachers’ stories of transformation.

Then, it seemed, the winds shifted.

On my last visit to Washington, representatives from the Department of Education clearly articulated their growing commitment to experimental research and quantifiable data. As we discussed the thirty-year history of “teachers teaching teachers” during NWP summer institutes, the Department of Education employees told us something like this: we know that teachers love the National Writing Project institutes, but we need more than satisfaction surveys. We need solid research that proves that the work of the National Writing Project improves student learning. That sounded reasonable. Indeed, the National Writing Project has conducted not only rigorous research on participants’ program evaluation (Stokes, 2011), but also such research on the effects of its programs (“Research Brief,” 2010; Swain, Graves, & Morse 2007; Blau, Cabe, & Whitney 2007). ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 School Culture
• 3 School Climate
• 4 Curriculum
• 5 Teacher Identity
• 6 Student Behavior
• Contributors
• Index