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برچسب: Solve

  • Want to solve the teacher shortage? Start with increasing salaries

    Want to solve the teacher shortage? Start with increasing salaries


    High school students conduct a science experiment with their teacher, right.

    Credit: Allison Shelley for American Education

    It’s not hard to imagine why we are currently confronted with a crisis of teacher burnout. After decades of being severely underpaid while costs of living skyrocket, combined with heightened safety issues and the incredible stress of the pandemic, it’s no wonder why countless teachers across the country are fleeing the profession.

    It has resulted in a national teacher shortage that we are experiencing acutely in California. According to the California Department of Education, there were more than 10,000 teacher vacancies during the 2021-22 school year, particularly concentrated in rural communities, communities of color and low-income communities, as well as a 16% reduction in new teacher credentials, the first decline in nearly a decade.

    Even when people decide to make the courageous decision to become teachers, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to ensure they stay in the profession. A recent nationwide survey found that 1 in 3 teachers say they are likely to quit in the next two years.

    It’s a dire crisis that must be addressed with urgency, coordination and innovative solutions. As state superintendent of public instruction, I have partnered with educators and legislators across California to craft teacher recruitment and retention policies that comprehensively confront this momentous challenge.

    SB 765, which Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed, will help develop a statewide recruitment strategy that’s never been seen before, incentivizing longtime, qualified educators back in the classroom to provide short-term help and removing financial barriers to those attempting to enter the profession.

    The financial incentives include expanding the Golden State Teacher Grant Program to provide a $20,000 scholarship for anyone who wants to be a teacher or school mental health clinician, as well as a $10,000 undergraduate scholarship for any student who is enrolled to become a tutor in our College Core program. It also offers people who complete the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards certification a $5,000 annual grant for five consecutive years of their teaching career.

    These measures are invaluable tools to provide bonuslike incentives for people from marginalized communities looking to enter the profession, which many believe is critical in hiring more teachers of color across the state to ensure that our classrooms actually look like California — something that greatly benefits every student.

    We’re also working to expand outreach to specific communities that may have an interest in teaching in our state, including recently retired educators, the spouses of military personnel who have teaching backgrounds in other states, as well as recruiting from the ranks of the classified staff and expanded learning educators.

    Teacher recruitment has historically been a disparate process that is executed at the individual district level. But due to the overwhelming scale of the crisis, we’ve made creating a coordinated statewide effort under the California Department of Education a top priority, including developing a one-stop portal that’s a resource for teaching credentials, scholarships and teacher openings throughout the state.

    In addition to building a comprehensive teacher recruitment system, California must invest in providing desperately needed raises for educators. AB 938, which was introduced this year by Assembly Education Chair Al Muratsuchi but didn’t make it through the state Legislature, would have increased teachers’ salaries across California 50% by 2030, aiming to close the existing wage gap between teachers and similarly educated college graduates in other fields.

    At a time when costs of living in our state, including the skyrocketing cost of a four-year degree, are greatly outpacing the rate of stagnating teacher pay, it’s absolutely essential that we fund a significant increase in pay so educators, including classified employees, can remain in the communities they teach in.

    It’s one thing to recruit teachers to teach in local schools, but it’s another to retain them for decades in our communities. The best way to do that is by providing a living wage for educators in every California neighborhood. That’s why ensuring that teachers are properly compensated for their tireless work next year through the budget or a bill like AB 938 that would significantly increase their salaries is so important.

    Ultimately, the best way to combat our teacher shortage crisis is by developing a coordinated recruitment strategy, increasing compensation and providing additional financial incentives to build a sustainable pipeline of educators in our communities. In California, we’ve invested in bold recruitment and retention strategies that, if paired with the doubling of teacher salaries, will be a comprehensive solution to this overwhelming crisis.

    •••

    Tony Thurmond is California’s superintendent of public instruction and a candidate for governor in 2024.

    The opinions in this commentary are those of the authors. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.





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  • Strategic, sustainable residencies can help solve the teacher shortage

    Strategic, sustainable residencies can help solve the teacher shortage


    Teacher candidates in the Claremont Graduate University teacher residency program spend an entire year working with a mentor teacher in Corona Norco Unified classrooms.

    Courtesy: Claremont Graduate University School of Education Studies

    Public schools in California are facing historic staffing challenges: rising rates of dissatisfaction and burnout within the current workforce and unprecedented shortages of future teachers, as increased housing and education costs deter potential teachers from entering the field. 

    But university teacher preparation programs and school districts can create more effective partnerships to meet these demands.

    Historically, the partnerships between teacher preparation programs and school districts have been transactional: teacher preparation programs place student teachers in districts for short periods of time without considering district needs. To change this dynamic, teacher preparation schools launched residency programs to ensure new teachers better understood the communities they were serving. Residencies are similar to student teaching models, but differ in that they are for a full year. Within a residency, aspiring teachers take on increasingly more responsibility in the classroom alongside a mentor teacher for the entire year, gain familiarity with the ebbs and flows of the school year, and assume full teaching responsibilities by the end of the year. 

    Over the last five years, California has dedicated more than $350 million for teacher residencies to better prepare future educators and help diversify the workforce. Research shows candidates who go through a residency become more effective teachers more quickly than those launching their careers through other pathways, and they are likely to remain in the profession longer. It costs a district roughly $20,000 to hire a new teacher; by reducing turnover, residencies are not only good for new teachers and K-12 students, but also for school district budgets. 

    Unfortunately, budget cuts and day-to-day needs have limited districts’ capacity to develop residency programs, and aspiring teachers have avoided them because the full-year commitment and small or nonexistent stipends offered by many programs renders them unaffordable to most. 

    One promising avenue to meet these challenges is by creating mutually beneficial partnerships between university teacher preparation programs and school districts to help place and nurture new teachers in the field. These partnerships require transparency, a clear vision, and shared investments. With these elements in place, they have the opportunity to meet districts’ staffing needs and teacher preparation programs’ enrollment goals while surrounding new teachers with systems of social and professional support. These partnerships also provide stipends and embedded professional development that enrich existing teachers’ work with new avenues for leadership as mentors to new teachers.

    One example of a creative and effective partnership can be found between Claremont Graduate University and Corona-Norco Unified School District. The university and the district had worked together for many years, with Corona-Norco hiring many Claremont alums, but they had never formalized a partnership. With a foundation of mutual trust and understanding, the district shared data about their current and anticipated staffing needs, and the faculty of the Claremont teacher education program shared insight into their students’ experiences, strengths and needs entering the profession. Understanding the benefits that a residency program provides to veteran teachers, students and the district as a whole, the district committed to paying residents a living stipend from reallocated budget dollars. 

    A shared vision is key to a successful partnership. For example, both the university and the district have a strong commitment to diversity. This is visible in the diverse participants recruited by Claremont’s teacher education program, who are drawn to its deeply rooted commitment to social justice and humanizing relationships. It also reflects Corona-Norco Unified’s mission to foster the wellness of their students by cultivating an educator pool that better reflects the diversity of its students and communities. This mutual commitment to what teaching can and should be created pathways for recruiting experienced mentor teachers from the district interested in professional development with the university that leveraged and built from their knowledge and expertise. Research shows that grouping mentors in community with other experienced teachers and giving them opportunities to engage not only as practitioners but also as intellectuals helps fend off burnout and gives them a renewed sense of purpose.

    The teacher residencies that have come out of this partnership buffer participants from the overwhelm and burnout so many other new teachers face by embedding them within a community of support that includes university advisers and faculty alongside mentor teachers and advisers at the district. The residents not only learn from their university classes and experiences in their mentor teachers’ classrooms, but also from opportunities to work with colleagues to support students who are struggling academically, working with small groups of students, analyzing students’ work with department teams, and interacting with parents and caregivers at drop-off and during teacher conferences. The breadth and depth of these experiences give residents confidence that when they step into their own classroom, they’ll be ready to meet the needs of students and have colleagues to call upon when they need support. 

    District leaders are ready to hire their residents after they earn their master’s degree and credential and eager to have more residents at their school sites. School principals note that residents provide data-driven, hyper-personalized instruction to students that they otherwise would not be able to offer. Students love residents, often running up to them during lunch and recess for hugs. And parents and caregivers appreciate having more people around who care about their kids. Having more adults on campus who know and are known by more students benefits everyone. 

    With more partnerships like this, the possibilities to innovate and strengthen learning for everyone at our schools grow exponentially. This story is just the beginning. 

    •••

    Rebecca Hatkoff, PhD, is the interim director of teacher education at Claremont Graduate University.

    Debra Russell works as part of the California Educator Preparation Innovation Collaborative team at Chapman University to promote strategic teacher residency models across the state. 

    The opinions in this commentary are those of the authors. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.





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  • Cellphone bans don’t solve the real problem — addictive social media

    Cellphone bans don’t solve the real problem — addictive social media


    Courtesy: Ednovate Charter School

    Recently, Instagram unveiled new policies designed to address what we all see: teenagers suffering the adverse effects of addictive social media apps. The new policies include making teen accounts private by default, stopping notifications at night, and including more adult supervision tools for parents. 

    While this is a first step, as school leaders and parents, we know the addiction is bigger than just Instagram. This is a larger reflective moment for us as educators, parents and caretakers of tomorrow’s leaders. We must go beyond platform-by-platform fixes.

    I’ve been an educator for more than 20 years. Now, as a school leader of seven high schools in Southern California, reaching nearly 3,000 students from historically underserved communities in Los Angeles and Orange counties, I see the impact that technology has had on our teenagers, and how captivating social media and gaming apps have become. It has taken a long time to teach myself the self-regulation skills to manage social media and more, and I am in my 40s. Now imagine trying to learn it at 13, unaware of all the tools working to hook us.

    Jonathan Haidt, author of the book “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” argues that girls who “spend five or more hours each weekday on social media are three times as likely to be depressed as those who report no social media time.”

    It is overwhelming for parents, teachers or anyone who cares about the future leaders of our communities.

    Just a few weeks ago, it seemed like every week another school district or state was announcing a sweeping cellphone ban, but no one was asking a critical question: Are America’s youth hooked on phones, or are they addicted to the social media and gaming apps that have become central to their social lives and to staying informed? How do we break the spell that these companies have cast over teenage minds?

    Cellphones themselves aren’t the problem. Notice that we don’t need to ban the Calculator, Camera app, Google search, or many other tools, because those tools don’t have the intentional captivating pull of direct messaging, new posts or endless scrolling.

    It seems to me that social media apps and games that are optimized for long-term addiction should be banned or significantly altered before banning cellphones, which are ultimately a great learning and communication tool. Cellphones can promote the development of a student’s necessary sense of independence. 

    This calls for collective action. We must work together and continue listening to our teachers, acknowledging the challenges and burden that cellphones present in the classroom for them. But the first step should be to tackle what is distracting students on their cellphones before banning the phone outright. Maybe our time as educators is better spent pushing for balanced policies that protect our kids rather than working tirelessly to police our kids and their phones. Instead of focusing on cellphone use or hoping for each platform to announce their individual fixes, school leaders from across the nation need to come together and demand answers from social media and addictive gaming companies. Instagram is the first company to make a move, but the rest of these companies are actively recruiting users as young as 13 years old with minimal verification, and watching these cellphone bans from a comfortable distance. Surely, educators and social media apps can partner to create an innovative solution to the real problem.

    As school leaders, we should call on social media companies and gaming companies to meet with us, to come up with practical solutions to the addictive technologies they have created.

    •••

    Oliver Sicat is the CEO of Ednovate, a network of free, public charter high schools in Los Angeles and Orange County. Ednovate primarily serves first-generation college-bound students from underrepresented and underserved communities.

    The opinions in this commentary are those of the author. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.





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  • How Doug Doblar Uses Cold Call to Solve the “Endemic Problems” of Group Work

    How Doug Doblar Uses Cold Call to Solve the “Endemic Problems” of Group Work


    The challenge is real…

     

     

    I’m pretty cautious about “group work.”

    It can be beneficial but the “can be” should be in italics because it has endemic problems that are often over-looked. One of which is the fact that it can be really hard to ensure that everyone is working, thinking and benefitting.

    The happy buzz of voices in the classroom, just far enough away that you can’t really hear what they are saying, can be a recipe for happy collusion: I will let you go off to the corners of the room and we will both pretend the optimal case is occurring.

    So I was very happy to read a brilliant blog post by my friend, colleague and TLAC Fellow (see below) Doug Doblar of Bay Creek Middle School in Gwinnett County, Georgia, that uses the TLAC technique Cold Call to solve some of group work’s endemic problems. 

    Here’s how Doug describes the endemic problems of group work:

    One of the challenges that requires constant vigilance … is assuring that every member of a group thinks and learns during the day’s thinking task.  There are quite a few ways this can go wrong, I’ve found:

      • One or two students in the group form a quick understanding of the new topic and race forward, leaving the other member or members of the group in the dust
      • One or two students in the group do not form a very quick understanding of the topic, but are afraid to say so, so they feign an understanding, allowing the other member or members of the group to similarly leave them in the dust
      • One or two students in a group “aren’t feeling it today,” so they don’t participate, feign an understanding, and get left in the dust

     

    Or some other iteration of this situation where part of the group is off to the races while another part of the group is stuck at the starting line, willingly or not.

     

    Perfectly put. I love an advocate for an idea who is keenly aware of the potential downside!

    Doug advises addressing these challenges through a variety of tools, which is supremely practical and realistic. A complex challenge in the classroom is rarely solved by one tool alone.

    First Doug advises building strong routines and setting clear expectations that address the pitfalls.

    But Doug also advises using Cold Call and I think this application of the technique is brilliant.

    As you walk from group to group, he advises you should Cold Call students who are at risk of non-engagement.

    Here’s how he describes it:

    Cold calling is my go-to technique during thinking tasks when I’m worried that a member of a group might be getting left behind, willingly or unwillingly.

    As I actively observe during thinking task time, it usually isn’t too hard to spot these students.  They stand a little farther from the group, maybe don’t face the whiteboard, rarely have the marker, and might be ones I already know are “not feeling it” today and who feel that their bad mood should excuse them from learning and participating.  They’re also ones with personalities who make them regular disengage-ers who I’m always aware of.

     

    As Doug circulates he finds these students and Cold Calls them in one of three ways, which I will let him describe:

      1. Directly asking a student to do the next “thin slice”: During thin-sliced thinking tasks– which I use more days than not –I’ll often just show up to a group and ask a student who I’m afraid might be disengaged to lead the next example or to explain a prior example to me.  “Bryce, will you lead the next one?”  or “Maddie, will you explain this last one to me?”
      2. “What’s he/she talking about?: When I come to a group whose leader is doing great of explaining thinking and trying to make sure the group is following along, but I’m worried that a member of that group is either disengaged or feigning an understanding to keep things moving, I’ll often just slide up to that student and ask “what’s he/she talking about?”  It’s a quick and easy cold call that holds the student accountable for explaining the leader’s example.
      3. “​What’s he/she doing?”: This version of cold calling works just like the “what’s he/she talking about” one, except I use it when the group’s leader isn’t doing as good of a job.  Sometimes I’ll catch the student with the marker silently and independently working a slice on his or her own with just the other members of the group watching.  Usually this is ok, but I’ll frequently slide in and ask another group member “what’s he/she doing?” while it’s happening to make sure that the rest of the group actually understands what’s going on.
    2.  

     

    As if that’s not helpful enough, Doug has posted videos of himself doing this and I’ve made a short montage of them here:

     

     

    Doug wraps by talking about how important it is to keep the Cold Calls positive and how that helps  build what we sometimes call ‘loving accountability.’

    They know I might move over at any moment and cold call one of them, and not a single one looks anxious about it…the students understood and they were proud to be able to explain that to me…. Accountability is hard to build into any instructional setting, but once it is assumed, kids really take ownership of their learning most of the time. 

    It’s great stuff and there’s plenty more insight in Doug’s full post, which you can read here.

    Want to know more?

    Check out:

    Doug’s Blog: Doug writes beautifully about implementing Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics and how TLAC techniques support that framework. He provides practical advice and video. To read more, visit his blog here: http://www.dougdoblar.com/

     

    TLAC Fellows: Doug is one of twelve of our talented TLAC Fellows – Cohort 3. We’re opening the application for Cohort 4 on February 18th! All application materials and more information about the program can be found here: https://teachlikeachampion.org/teach-like-champion-fellows/

     

    Upcoming Engaging Academics Workshop: Interested in exploring Cold Call with us? We’re in LA on February 27-28 for an Engaging Academics workshop where we’ll study high engagement strategies like Everybody Writes, Cold Call, Means of Participation, and Lesson Preparation. Join us here: https://teachlikeachampion.org/engagingacademicsfeb2025



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