Four Things I Want to Say to Novice Teachers
During the brouhaha over Nancie Atwell's remarks on CNN, my friend and 40-year teaching veteran Claudia Swisher remarked that when she'd first read Atwell's books, she questioned whether the techniques Atwell developed would work in traditional public schools. After fully absorbing Atwell's ideas, however, she began incorporating them--and found them not only useful, but transformative.
I hope this is what happens with all the novice teachers who are up in arms at being told that public schools no longer welcome the creativity and vitality of new classroom practitioners. If Atwell's honest comments left you angry, go deeper into the rich instructional ideas in her books. Turn your irritation into a learning experience.
If I were leading an organization of pre-service teachers, here's what I would tell them:
Welcome to a Changed Profession. Nobody is "discouraging" you from becoming a teacher.In fact, we want you to become career teachers--not tried-it-and-ran temps--so we're honoring you, by telling you the truth. Which is: this is not your mother's profession. Things have changed, even in the years since you graduated high school.
We warmly welcome your new ideas, energy and enthusiasm. But sticking with teaching these days will require more than grit and a tool bag of instructional strategies. In order to re-shape teaching and learning, to become the innovative, dedicated, future-focused professional teacher in your personal vision, you need to see the big picture: What is the conventional wisdom around the future of public education in America? Is that conventional wisdom the truth? Plan on changing your mind a dozen times in your first year of independent practice.
Beware of Media Oversell. Media campaigns are just that: what the public has been fed, by people whose job it is to promote certain programs and initiatives. I #loveteaching, too--but I've been paying careful attention to the evolution of public school teaching for more than forty years. We can't paper over the recent influx of top-down mandates--endless standardized everything, loss of teacher control over curriculum and instruction, evaluation by test data--with clever hashtags or faux outrage (like that directed at Nancie Atwell). I genuinely love teaching too much to hand it over, lock, stock and whiteboard, to hired guns who are shaping MY work according to the dictates of funders.
Scrutinize the glossy websites of non-profit educational organizations. Analyze books and articles written by hot young (non-teacher) authors. Ask yourself: What ideas are they selling? Who will benefit? Another way of expressing this necessity of evaluating media soundbites around K-12 education (first popularized by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, in their seminal,