COVID-19 disrupted their training. How will Fort Worth schools support new teachers?
For students studying to become teachers, student teaching marks the culmination of their college experience and the first time they’re responsible for what goes on in a classroom.
But last year, as the COVID-19 pandemic caused major disruptions in schools nationwide, many student teachers spent little time in classrooms.
Now, Fort Worth school leaders are looking for ways to support first-year teachers who didn’t get the benefit of a normal student teaching experience. At a time when pandemic-related stress is driving teachers from the classroom, leaders of North Texas teacher preparation programs say that support for incoming educators will be critical.
“We cannot afford to let this new cohort of teachers in Texas leave the profession,” said Frank Hernandez, dean of Texas Christian University’s College of Education.
TCU student teaching marred by stops and starts
Hernandez said a series of stops and starts hampered the student teaching process for TCU students last year. At the beginning of the school year, university officials had to figure out whether it was safe to send student teachers out into the community with the pandemic raging, he said. Meanwhile, officials in the Fort Worth school district were trying to decide whether to allow people outside the district, including student teachers, into school buildings. At the same time, the Texas Education Agency was developing policies and procedures for virtual student teaching.
TCU officials eventually decided to start their student teachers virtually, Hernandez said. Later in the spring, as Tarrant County’s COVID-19 numbers dropped, the university began sending its student teachers to in-person classes. But by that time, there was no way students could get the full benefit of a normal student teaching experience, he said.
“They got very little time with their students,” Hernandez said.
During a normal year, student teaching marks the culminating experience of an education major’s academic career, Hernandez said. It’s the time when they put all the methods and practices they’ve learned in their classes into action. Education majors at TCU spend many hours in classrooms before they do their student teaching, Hernandez said, but that experience marks the first time students are responsible for the teaching, assessment and management of a class.
Although it wasn’t an ideal situation, last year’s student teaching experience still had value, Hernandez said. The circumstances forced student teachers to be creative, flexible and innovative, he said. They had to use technology in a way most had never imagined, both in the classroom and to stay connected with colleagues and classmates.
Those are all important skills because of the lasting changes the pandemic has already left on the American education system, Hernandez said. This year’s cohort of new teachers will need to be more flexible, creative and brave than any cohort that came before it, he said.
Hernandez said he and other teacher preparation leaders are trying to impress upon school districts the importance of supporting their first-year teachers, especially now. Many of the students those teachers will work with haven’t had in-person instruction in more than a year, he said, and many more have been through traumatic experiences during the pandemic.
Schools can’t put their new teachers in a classroom and expect them to figure everything out on their own, he said. They need to place first-year teachers in teams of strong educators who work together to meet the challenges they’ll face in the next year, he said. That way, new teachers won’t feel as though it falls solely on their shoulders to make sense of those challenges. Ultimately, he said, that support could be the factor that decides whether those teachers stay in the classroom after this school year.
Fort Worth schools boost professional development
Marcey Sorensen, the Fort Worth school district’s assistant superintendent of teaching and learning, said the district is paying this year’s first-year teachers for five more professional development days than they’d get in a typical year. Fort Worth teachers are required to do 30 hours of professional development per year. In a typical year, the district’s new teacher training takes up most of its first-year teachers’ professional development hours for the year, Sorensen said. By giving first-year teachers more paid professional development time, district leaders hope to help first-year teachers make up ground they may have missed during student teaching last year, she said.
New teachers will get training in classroom management, social-emotional learning and course content during the district’s new teacher academy, Sorensen said. The district also has 128 instructional coaches on its campuses each day, she said. Those coaches will work closely with new teachers in the coming school year to help them navigate their first years in the classroom, she said.
District leaders have been working with principals for months on creating campus cultures that are supportive not only for students and families, but also for teachers, Sorensen said. Students have been through traumatic experiences during the pandemic, she said, but so have adults. The upcoming school year will be a high-stakes year, she said, with all students back on campus for the first time in more than a year and teachers and administrators focusing on helping those who lost ground during the pandemic recover. It will be crucial that campus administrators pay attention to how their teachers, especially their first-year teachers, are doing throughout the year and offer support where it’s needed, she said.
“We want to make sure that they’re supported fully throughout the year,” Sorensen said.
Uplift charter offers mentoring, expands new teacher training
Uplift Education, a charter network that operates campuses across North Texas, plans to expand first-year teacher training at all its campuses and offer mentoring for first-year teachers at its Fort Worth schools, said Anne Erickson, the network’s chief people and innovation officer.
Uplift’s new teacher pipeline draws student teachers from two partners: the Relay Graduate School of Education, a New York-based teacher preparatory college with campuses across the country; and Urban Teachers, a preparatory program that places students in teaching residencies in schools across the country. All of Uplift’s first-year teachers went through a residency on one of its campuses last year, Erickson said.
When Uplift officials began to understand the extent to which the pandemic would affect the way schools operate, they made it a priority to get the network’s student teachers as much exposure to in-person instruction as possible, Erickson said, so all of the network’s first-year students have spent at least some time in a classroom.
But last year’s student teachers had a different experience than they would have had during a normal year, Erickson said. Student teachers typically learn a great deal from the more experienced teachers they work alongside, she said. But those veteran teachers told administrators they felt self-conscious about trying to act as mentors during a year when many of them were struggling to figure out how to do their jobs.
This year, new teachers at Uplift’s Fort Worth campuses will be paired with veteran educators who will act as mentors during their first years on the job, Erickson said.
The network, which operates public charter schools across North Texas, launched the mentoring program last year after noticing that many teachers left its Fort Worth campuses after one year, Erickson said. Teachers who left Uplift said they did so because they felt overwhelmed by the workload, they struggled with classroom management or they needed more support from school leadership, she said. Although the mentoring program wasn’t a response to COVID-19, Erickson said school leaders hope to use it to support first-year teachers who didn’t get the full benefit of student teaching last year.
The network is also broadening the number of teachers who are required to attend its new teacher training to include those who began their teaching careers last year. Although those teachers have already spent a year in the classroom, they’ll need to be able to adjust as life continues to return to normal, she said.
North Texas mentor teachers faced challenges
Holly Hungerford-Kresser, a professor of curriculum and instruction in the University of Texas at Arlington’s College of Education, said the UTA education majors who went through student teaching last year didn’t get a traditional experience. But the pandemic changed the educational landscape drastically, she said, and it’s hard to know how many of those changes will outlast the pandemic. So a traditional student teaching experience might not have prepared this year’s first-year teachers for what’s ahead of them anyway, she said.
UTA places student teachers in several districts in North Texas. Depending on which district and which school they were in, some student teachers switched back and forth between in-person, hybrid and all-online classes at various points during the year, Hungerford-Kresser said.
“If their class was quarantining, they were quarantining. If their class was virtual, they were virtual,” she said. “Whatever happened with their teacher, they were mirroring that.”
In some ways, that switching disrupted their student teaching, she said, but it also gave them experience with delivering instruction in a variety of ways, she said. And it helped them learn to be flexible when the situation changed, she said.
Student teaching is a critical piece of the teacher preparation process, Hungerford-Kresser said. It’s a 13- to 15-week period during which student teachers get to apply everything they’ve learned up to that point to a real-world classroom setting, she said. And they do so under the guidance of a university professor and a classroom teacher who acts as a mentor. But classroom teachers faced an almost endless list of challenges last year, she said, so some student teachers may not have gotten the full benefit of their mentorship. Once they start work in the fall, those new teachers may need extra support and guidance, she said.
Even in a normal year, student teaching is an arduous process, Hungerford-Kresser said. Student teachers work as full-time faculty members in the schools where they’re placed. But they’re still students, which means they have coursework to complete for their professors, as well, she said.
With the stresses of teaching during the pandemic added in, last year’s student teachers had an experience that was more taxing than most, not only in terms of time and energy, but also from a mental heath standpoint, she said. During seminars last year, she and other faculty members reminded the university’s student teachers that every year they spend in the classroom after this one would almost certainly be easier.
“They’ve already had their hardest year,” she said.
