Once upon a time there was a teacher who wanted to change the world.
Sound familiar? Many of us who entered the teaching profession truly felt like we could change the world.
And some of us do! Every day in a thousand tiny ways, each of us working with the young people in our schools changes the world. We give a smile where few had been given. We reassure at just the right moments. We help guide and grow our students, hopefully empowering them to be better, smarter, stronger, more capable than they were when they first walked through our doors.
But this doesn’t always happen, does it?
Little things get in the way of teaching. Sometimes big things get in the way of teaching. Sometimes these “things” create such obstacles to good teaching that good people are driven out of the profession. I think all of us who have been teaching for any period of time know of someone who has left teaching because the reality of the job wasn’t what they’d been expecting.
Remember your first days in the classroom? The nervousness, the anxiety, the outright fear that enveloped many of us thinking about those first moments facing a classroom full of young people for the first time. My heart starts racing just thinking of those days.
Luckily those days are far behind me now. I was able to somehow make it through those difficult early years of teaching and slide somewhat gracefully into the status of a veteran teacher. Before I knew it, principals were sending me new teachers to mentor, drawing on my years of experience in order to help grow the next generation of teachers.
Just recently my school has been hit with a couple of scandals. Two recently hired teachers ended up being entirely unworthy to serve in our fine profession. Luckily their less than appropriate nature was uncovered before any damage had been done to our students. But it got me thinking. Why are these individuals getting hired? And then I realized. Both of these people were last minute hires- hired either a day before the school year started or hired well-into the school year. These people were something of a last minute vacancy filling hire.
For the first time in my career, I understand the grave effects of our teacher shortage. As fewer and fewer of our young people enter the teaching profession, schools are forced to accept less than ideal candidates. This isn’t to say that every new hire is less valuable than those who were hired before. But it does say something about the talent pool out there hoping to get into teaching.
It is clear to me that more needs to be done to nurture and retain those teachers who are already in this great profession. Each of us needs to step up and share what we know will help other teachers, struggling teachers, in order to ease their burdens and elevate our profession.
Working together we can all help those teachers who are strong candidates but who might be missing one element of effective teaching, might be missing that one tool in their toolbox that would enable them to be a great teacher rather than a struggling teacher.
Can you envision a school of empowered and powerful teachers, working to their ability and helping all our students grow?
I know I can. And I’m going to do my part to help.
Won’t you?
DarrenB
