There’s no shortage of ideas — or controversy — in building a better first-year teacher

Post-it notes help first-year teacher Rebecca Haden.

She has them affixed around the edges of her lectern at Shawnee Mission South High School like cheat sheets.

This is a hard job, after all, and the 25-year-old French teacher can see firsthand why so many forces in the politically charged world of education wrangle over America’s system of preparing new teachers.

One note reminds her what she intends to say when students are misusing their laptops.

Another one reminds her of the progressive steps she deploys to bring distracted students back into focus, including when to throw them “the look.”

“Every teacher has to have their ‘look,’” she said. “Mine’s still in development.”

Those pushing reforms in teacher preparation recognize that too many teachers don’t have Haden’s advantages.

She loves her mentor teacher at Shawnee Mission South. The lunch times she shares with members of the foreign language team have been enlightening because of their eagerness to engage in “Rebecca’s question sessions,” she said.

The methods classes and field experience in her master’s program at Rockhurst University, coupled with substitute teaching gigs, put her at a good starting point to deal with the great unknowns of classroom management that are inevitable once teachers are on their own.

“Class management is different class to class,” Haden said. “It depends on your kids, your personality. … It’s trial and error.”

You can’t overplay the seriousness of the stakes, said Deborah Loewenberg Ball, dean of the School of Education at the University of Michigan and director of the teacher prep reform agency TeachingWorks.

The quality of the classroom teacher remains the most significant in-school factor determining a child’s success.

The profession and its practitioners are under constant attack. Critics are troubled by inconsistent standards applied to education schools, low admission criteria, concerns about rigor, and inequitable mentoring and induction programs.

“There is an overwhelming lack of public respect for the work of teachers,” Ball told a gathering of education journalists recently. The nation’s preparation of new teachers “should be a public issue of vital moral, practical and political urgency.”

Airline pilots would not get a pass to struggle through their first year, she said.

“We worry about safety … (but) if children don’t learn to read in the first grade, that’s malpractice. It is dangerous to children. … Why not worry a little bit more about a child in the hands of adults?”

The National Council on Teacher Quality — a persistent critic of schools of education — released a study this week that describes teacher preparation programs as a field of “easy A’s.”

In an analysis of some 500 institutions, the report said, six out of 10 teacher prep programs were more likely to hand out higher grades than other majors on the same campus.

Teacher prep students were more likely to earn graduation honors than other program graduates — 44 percent to 30 percent.

Most schools of education have adopted a set of standards and have an accrediting agency review, but critics like the national council’s Kate Walsh contend there are too many inconsistencies.

“It’s like the Wild West,” she said.

A quest for accountability

There is no shortage of ideas — or controversy — about what needs to happen next.

Many agencies, including Missouri’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, are trying to shore up confidence.

Missouri has been working since 2009 with education groups to find agreeable ways to ensure that teacher prep schools are accountable.

The state has built a model teacher evaluation system with multiple measures of a teacher’s work and of his or her students’ performance.

The evaluation tools can be pushed down to assess student teachers, increasing the information that districts have in hiring decisions.

Those scores can be further tracked and linked to the schools that produced the teachers.

By 2017, the state hopes to establish an annual performance report on the schools that produce Missouri teaching candidates.

It’s complicated, said Paul Kadnik, Missouri’s assistant education commissioner over the Office of Educator Quality.

The goal, he said, is to be able to measure not only what prospective teachers know, but what they can do when facing the unpredictable nature of a classroom.

The trend forward involves including videos of a candidate’s classroom work in the assessments that various testing agencies are creating for states.

But that is stirring concerns over the privacy of children in the videos handled by the testing agencies.

Moreover, there are concerns of fairness because some teaching candidates will have more difficult classrooms for student teaching, and candidates will receive varying support from their school and their mentor.

Education schools want accountability, said Adam Holden, chairman of Fort Hays State University’s department of teacher education — one of the highest rated in the National Council on Teacher Quality rankings.

“It’s just really challenging,” he said.

Fort Hays is increasing the amount of experience teaching students get in classrooms, including piloting a two-year residency program focused on urban and rural schools.

These are some of the strategies that education schools know work, he said, and schools would benefit from being able to share and compare results.

TeachingWorks, the reform agency, is developing an assessment that aims to create a virtual classroom to test a candidate’s classroom management.

It is collaborating with a tech company on a program that would enable trained actors scripted as students to appear as animated avatars on an interactive large screen. The goal is a common testing ground for new teachers, without privacy issues.

‘Adapt and overcome’

Let’s not lose sight of what really matters, said Donna Gardner, chairwoman of the education department at William Jewell College.

William Jewell was also highly ranked, although she thinks much of the targeting on education schools is misplaced.

Schools have been increasing rigor to meet the higher demands placed on teachers, she said. Schools by and large are accredited, many by the Washington, D.C.-based Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation.

“We understand why teachers leave,” she said, citing a body of research on teacher turnover.

“They don’t feel they get recognition, they’re working in isolation, they’re in poor working conditions, they feel a lack of empowerment,” Gardner said. “But now we’re looking to place the blame somewhere else.”

Student teachers want classroom experience, said Andrea Flinders, president of the Kansas City Federation of Teachers. They want to learn from other teachers and have their support. They’re willing to put up with a lot.

The profession needs to be more attractive for the “young and bright people who don’t make enough money,” Flinders said, “and then get beat up” by the many negative accounts on U.S. teachers.

Increased rigor and harder entrance testing could, some education analysts fear, exacerbate a teaching shortage, especially in urban and rural areas.

Holden is not so sure.

“I feel fairly confident, if teachers felt more self-worth … morale would grow,” he said. “Teachers adapt and overcome.”

If she swapped her business-cool skirt and sweater for a sweatshirt, leggings and sneakers, Haden could pass as one of her high school students.

But there’s no question who’s in charge anymore. Her strategies are coming into their own, piece by piece, with her mentor’s help.

And so are those special additions, like the class cheer her French students give fellow students after classroom presentations.

“Un, deux, trois! Ça c’ètait bon!” One, two, three. That was good.

They cap it with her students’ idea to add the three-fingered salute of Katniss in the “Hunger Games” movies.

Haden hasn’t seen the movies, so she’s had to look up the gritty heroine with the steely stare.

Somewhere in there she just might find her “look.”

This story was originally published November 14, 2014 at 7:26 PM with the headline "There’s no shortage of ideas — or controversy — in building a better first-year teacher."