New teachers need extra help to prepare for urban schools

One approach that’s gaining notice is a teacher mentor model developed by the New Teacher Center at the University of California-Santa Cruz. Studies show that such first-year support can boost teacher retention rates significantly.

“The New York City program is more than just a buddy system,” says Ellen Moir, executive director of the New Teacher Center. “It represents a complete shift in how school systems support and retain new teachers.”

Such efforts are strengthened when they’re integrated with the preparation of new teachers at nearby colleges.

Such a partnership has been established by the Memphis, Tenn., school system and the University of Memphis. Education students at the university interested in teaching in urban schools spend as much time as possible in city classrooms, says Vivian Gunn Morris, director of the university’s New Teacher Center. Teacher training emphasizes the real-world experiences and challenges of an urban setting.

That means plenty of lessons in classroom management and in understanding the diverse cultural and value systems that new teachers will confront, she says. These are incredibly important lessons, particularly for white, middle-class teachers who find themselves dealing with poor minority students.

“Cultural differences are a big part of the problem [for new teachers],” Morris says. “The ways of communications may be different; the ways of reacting to the same situations may be different. Sometimes the intended message is not always the one that’s received.”

For example, she says, a black student might tell his friends that a new teacher is “a real dog,” a colloquialism that the teacher might find offensive but is seen among students as a compliment.

Many urban students grow up in households where they’ve never learned to sit still and be quiet as new teachers expect, Morris says. Urban students can be vocal and energetic in the classroom, and a new teacher needs to “learn how to use that energy to accomplish the goals they have.”

Yet all the preparation in the world won’t prepare new teachers for the realities of the classroom, and that’s where mentoring pays off, Morris says. In Memphis, mentors meet once a week in a forum to discuss the problems facing new teachers, and they spend two hours a week working with each of the new teachers they mentor. Monthly seminars also provide additional help for teachers.

This results in retention rates that are about 10 percentile points higher. “I think having a full-time mentoring program, a high-quality program, is a tremendous help,” Morris says.

In Nashville, Tenn., Superintendent Pedro E. Garcia says his school system also is raising teacher retention rates through a strong support system for new teachers.

Before school begins, new teachers receive four days of training in classroom management and learn about the social and cultural diversity among impoverished families, he says. Staff development continues throughout the year, and principals and a cadre of full-time mentors “have to do a lot of holding hands.”

“The first month can be very brutal,” Garcia says. “Just because teachers have taken the classes, doesn’t mean they know how to teach. You’ve got to provide teachers with these opportunities so that, when they get into the classroom, they’re not scared to death.”

The New Haven, Conn., school system has joined forces with Yale University to provide full tuition and stipends for students seeking a master’s degree in urban education and who agree to teach in the city schools for three years after graduation.

This program features extensive in-school training in the urban district and mentoring during the teachers’ first year, says Jonathon Gillette, director of Yale University’s Teacher Preparation Program.

One quality that the program hopes to strengthen in new teachers is resiliency, he says. New teachers often struggle to find successful ways of reaching out to students, and many find their early efforts fall short. It can be very discouraging.

“Resiliency is not something we can measure,” Gillette says. “But one of the key predictors of how well untrained teachers will do is how resilient they are. In the face of failure for the first 30 to 60 days -- even the first year -- they have to go back and [keep trying]. That’s a huge element in urban teaching.”

Elsewhere, school systems see hope in improving the diversity of their teaching staff. In Philadelphia, school officials, working with a local member of Congress and Temple University, have launched an urban teaching institute to train 20 to 30 student teachers to work specifically in the city schools. Half of the institute’s students are expected to be minorities.

“Urban teaching is a specialty,” Sandra Dungee Glenn of the Philadelphia School Reform Commission said at the institute’s launch in April. “There are situations unique to managing the urban classroom. You have issues such as diverse learning styles. You have a high degree of student mobility and turnover. There may be dozens of languages spoken in the homes of students in a single school. And there are myths about the urban classroom that we want to explode.”

Yet all these efforts will not stem the turnover in teachers completely, Gillette predicts. The world is changing, and, in the future, school officials need to recognize that the life-long teacher of the past might be replaced by professionals who switch careers every five to nine years.