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Chapter 1

RESEARCH AND THEORY

Retaining effective teachers poses a unique problem for the education community. In 2007, the U.S. teacher turnover rate was 16.8 percent and in certain urban schools reached more than 20 percent (National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future [NCTAF], 2007). In some schools and districts, teachers drop out at an even higher rate than students (NCTAF, 2007). Compared to other professions such as law, architecture, and nursing, teacher turnover is relatively high (Ingersoll, 2003; Ingersoll & Perda, 2010)—almost 4 percent higher than in all other fields (NCTAF, 2003). Every year, schools in the United States hire more than two hundred thousand new teachers for the first day of school; however, by the end of the academic year, at least twenty-two thousand have already quit teaching (Graziano, 2005). Michael B. Allen (2005) reported that roughly half of new teachers leave within five years, although Annette L. Breaux and Harry K. Wong (2003) found that between 40 and 50 percent leave during the first seven years. Impending teacher retirements add another dimension to the problem of teacher turnover. Thirty-seven percent of current teachers are over age fifty (Allen, 2005). Therefore, by 2035, it is likely that the education community will also lose many of its experienced teachers.

Statistics like these give weight to the suggestions of scholars like Sharon Feiman-Nemser (2010), who called for researchers to “redefine teacher shortages as a problem of retention and not as a matter of insufficient supply” (p. 23). Richard M. Ingersoll (2003) stated:

Contemporary educational thought holds that one of the pivotal causes of inadequate school performance is the inability of schools to adequately staff classrooms with qualified teachers. It is widely believed that schools are plagued by shortages of teachers, primarily due to recent increases in teacher retirement and student enrollments…. These data indicate that school staffing problems are not primarily due to teacher shortages, in the sense of an insufficient supply of qualified teachers. Rather, the data indicate that school staffing problems are primarily due to a “revolving door”—where large numbers of qualified teachers depart their jobs for reasons other than retirement. (p. 3)

As seen here, the problem has less to do with finding enough teachers and more to do with keeping effective teachers in schools. Richard M. Ingersoll and Michael Strong (2011) pointed out that the number of new teachers in the United States has increased since the mid-1980s:

This upsurge in hiring has resulted in an equally dramatic growth in the number of newly hired, first-year teachers the past two decades—from 50,000 in 1987–88 to 200,000 in 2007–08. In the late 1980s the modal teacher had 15 years of teaching experience; by 2008, the modal teacher was a beginner in his or her first year of teaching. (p. 204)

Thus, the average teacher is now in the first few years of teaching and has yet to gain the necessary experience to develop expertise within the classroom. This trend has serious implications for the field of education.

The Implications of Teacher Attrition

The phrase teacher attrition refers to the practice of classroom teachers choosing to quit teaching. Since 1992, teacher attrition in the United States has grown by 50 percent (NCTAF, 2007). This rate of teacher attrition has educational implications in at least three areas: (1) student achievement, (2) education finance, and (3) the widening achievement gap.

Implications for Student Achievement

The negative implications of teacher attrition on student achievement result from two important demographic details. First, the most effective teachers tend to quit teaching in the highest numbers. In a study from the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory (NCREL), a majority of superintendents classified between 75 and 100 percent of quitting teachers as either effective or very effective (Hare & Heap, 2001). In 2012, the New Teacher Project studied a group of high-achieving, highly engaging teachers they called irreplaceables. The authors described these teachers as so effective that they were “nearly impossible to replace” but added that they “too often vanish from schools as the result of neglect and inattention” (p. 2). Across the districts studied, only about 20 percent of teachers fell into this high-quality category. Consequently, whenever an irreplaceable left a low-performing school, that school had to hire an average of eleven different teachers before finding one of comparable quality. This study reinforced the idea that “the real teacher retention crisis is not simply the failure to retain enough teachers; it is the failure to retain the right teachers” (p. 4).

Second, most working teachers have less experience than they did in previous years. Figure 1.1 compares the number of teachers with various levels of experience in 1987–1988 to teachers in the 2007–2008 and 2011–2012 school years.

As shown in figure 1.1, the number of teachers with one to fifteen years of experience increased dramatically between 1988 and 2012. In the 2007–2008 school year, teachers with only one year of experience made up the single largest group of educators. Although this drift has slowed somewhat—the average teacher in 2014 had about five years of experience—the teaching force has expanded to accommodate many more inexperienced teachers than in previous decades:

Despite the slowing of this trend, the teaching force remains very green. There are, of course, still large numbers of veteran teachers; in 2011–12 about a quarter of all school teachers had 20 years or more of teaching experience. But these percentages do not take into account the ballooning of the teaching force. Because the teaching force has dramatically grown, numerically there are far more beginners than before. (Ingersoll, Merrill, & Stuckey, 2014, pp. 11–12)

Source: Ingersoll et al., 2014, p. 12. Used with permission.

Figure 1.1: Teaching experience of school teachers, 1987–1988, 2007–2008, and 2011–2012.

While it would be a mistake to undervalue the effect that new teachers can have in the classroom, it is important to remember that a teacher does not reach his or her full professional potential within the first year. By contrast, teachers who remain in the profession for several years develop expertise and are likely to see higher rates of achievement among their students. As Robert J. Marzano and his colleagues (2011) pointed out, students with highly skilled teachers achieve at higher rates than students with less-skilled teachers. Table 1.1 (page 6) displays the variations in student achievement associated with different degrees of teacher competence (for students beginning at the 50th percentile).

As shown in table 1.1, “A student at the 50th percentile will not be expected to gain at all in percentile rank in the classroom of a teacher of the 50th percentile in terms of his or her pedagogical skill” (Marzano et al., 2011, p. 2). As the teacher’s skill increases, however, student achievement also increases. If a teacher’s pedagogical skill lies within the 70th percentile, for instance, a student can be expected to grow from the 50th percentile to the 58th percentile. A student at the 50th percentile whose teacher is between the 90th and 98th percentiles in regard to skill could be expected to gain 18 to 27 percentile points as a result of being in that teacher’s class. Although not all teachers will necessarily reach the 90th or 98th percentile, all teachers can make incremental gains in expertise from year to year. As Marzano and colleagues (2011) asserted, “Even a modest increase [in teacher expertise] would yield impressive results” (p. 2).

Table 1.1: Teacher Expertise and Student Achievements

Teacher Skill Percentile Rank	Predicted Percentile Gain for Student at the 50th Percentile	Predicted Percentile Rank for Student
50th	0	50th
70th	8	58th
90th	18	68th
98th	27	77th

Note: For a discussion of how these figures were computed, see Marzano & Waters, 2009.

Source: Marzano et al., 2011, p. 2.

As these data show, a teacher’s level of pedagogical skill has a clear influence on student achievement. In other words, the more skilled the teacher, the better chance his or her students have to grow academically. Because half of all teachers leave the field before reaching their peak effectiveness, however, students in schools with high teacher turnover may face a continual parade of inexperienced teachers (NCTAF, 2007). Mariana Haynes (2014) observed:

Since the mid-1980s the significant expansion of the teaching workforce has been accompanied by increased turnover among beginning teachers. The annual attrition rate for first-year teachers has increased by more than 40 percent over the past two decades. The influx of new teachers has neither stabilized the teaching workforce nor improved teaching quality. (p. 3)

High turnover rates among beginning teachers in the workforce have produced a continuous cycle of inexperienced educators. This trend has serious implications for student achievement, particularly when considering the impact that teacher expertise has on student outcomes.

Implications for Education Finance

Rising attrition rates also have important implications for school and district budgets. Each teacher who leaves the profession generally costs a district about $11,000 to replace, although replacement costs vary depending on the size of the district (Graziano, 2005). In large districts, such as Chicago Public Schools, a teacher’s exit costs the district almost $18,000 (Education Innovation Institute, 2011). Additionally, when a teacher leaves a district, the district also loses the money invested in that teacher’s professional development, curriculum orientation, and school-specific knowledge (Graziano, 2005). These costs add up quickly, particularly given the increasing numbers of teachers who quit. In 2007, the NCTAF estimated that teacher turnover in public schools costs the United States over $7.3 billion per year.

Teacher incentives (either for staying in the profession or for staying in low-performing schools) have also proven costly for schools and districts. For example, one Washington State program awards $5,000 annual bonuses to board-certified teachers, an incentive that doubles in amount if the board-certified teacher chooses to work in a low-income school (Education Innovation Institute, 2011). Though well-intended, this effort has become increasingly expensive:

The Center on Reinventing Public Education found that the cost of the bonuses has skyrocketed as more teachers have earned board certification, rising from less than $10 million in 2007–08, to an estimated $35 million in 2010–11 and a projected $55 million in 2012–13. Increases of that magnitude invite scrutiny of the program’s effectiveness, especially when states face budget shortfalls. Due to these rising costs, the report found little net gain: only about 1 percent of board certified teachers had moved to challenging schools each year … while almost as many eligible teachers had moved out of low-income schools in favor of ones with more affluent students. (Education Innovation Institute, 2011, p. 3)

As shown here, the expenses of replacing teachers or trying to retain them through often ineffective monetary incentives strain the financial resources of schools and districts.

Implications for the Widening Achievement Gap

Clearly, the consequences of teacher attrition affect all schools. However, the ramifications are particularly relevant to low-performing, high-poverty schools—a category that includes one in five public schools in the United States (Aud et al., 2013). Ingersoll (2003) reported that teacher attrition rates in high-poverty schools are about 50 percent higher than attrition rates in more affluent schools. This cycle of attrition contributes to student achievement gaps, the statistically significant differences in average scores between students from different demographic groups. In the United States, achievement gaps are most typically found between white students and students of color. On average, white students outperformed black students in all areas of the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP; Vanneman, Hamilton, Anderson, & Rahman, 2009) and Hispanic or Latino students in all areas of the 2009 NAEP (Hemphill & Vanneman, 2011). With so many teachers leaving, it becomes increasingly difficult for high-poverty schools to close these gaps in student opportunity and achievement.

Additionally, when most of the teachers at a high-poverty school are inexperienced, beginning teachers are sometimes forced to determine—on their own—how to meet the diverse needs of their students. Such isolation can have disastrous consequences for new teachers who already feel overwhelmed by the high expectations of the profession. Sometimes these teachers leave to find another school, but too often, they change professions altogether, abandoning their potential to impact student achievement at all.

Since 1990, a number of organizations have endeavored to address teacher attrition and achievement gaps in U.S. public education. One such organization, called Teach for America (TFA), aims to close the gap “by recruiting high-achieving college graduates to teach for two years in low-income urban and rural schools” (Donaldson & Johnson, 2011, p. 47). TFA’s approach has garnered both support and criticism. Supporters believe that TFA recruits talented young people who may otherwise not have considered teaching as a career choice. However, detractors argue that TFA’s monthlong teacher training period and short, two-year commitment to teaching contribute to the general lack of experience and teaching consistency in classrooms (Donaldson & Johnson, 2011). In response to these criticisms, TFA launched two new pilot programs: one that admits and trains college juniors and one that extends support to TFA alumni throughout their third, fourth, and fifth years of teaching (Sawchuk, 2014).

Despite the best efforts of TFA and other teacher recruitment and training programs, teacher attrition still contributes to low student achievement, education finance shortfalls, and student achievement gaps. The NCTAF (2003) summarized the situation thusly:

The number of teachers entering the schools increased steadily during the 1990s…. The problem is that teacher attrition was increasing even faster. It is as if we were pouring teachers into a bucket with a fist-sized hole in the bottom. (p. 8)

Educators must focus their efforts on sealing the hole. To combat the problem of teacher attrition, we must consider why so many beginning teachers quit before they develop adequate levels of expertise. Some factors—such as standardized testing mandates, class sizes, and low salaries—exist largely outside a school’s or teacher’s control (Ingersoll, 2003; Kopkowski, 2008). However, other factors are within the control of schools and districts. Specifically, beginning teachers have unique needs, and those needs too often go unmet. We assert that schools and districts can identify and meet the needs of beginning teachers to address the problem of teacher attrition.

The Unique Needs of Beginning Teachers

In order to successfully address the issue of teacher retention in their schools, school leaders must develop an understanding of the unique perspectives and needs of beginning teachers. Ellen Moir (1999) identified a series of specific mental and emotional challenges that usually occur during the first year of teaching. She organized these challenges into five phases: (1) anticipation, (2) survival, (3) disillusionment, (4) rejuvenation, and (5) reflection, with beginning teachers returning to the anticipation stage at the end of the first year. Figure 1.2 depicts the typical progression of these phases during a teacher’s first year on the job. Of course, not every beginning teacher progresses through these phases exactly as shown in figure 1.2. Still, understanding the phases can help those who support beginning teachers understand the challenges they face. Here, we briefly describe each phase.

During the first anticipation phase, beginning teachers feel excited to enter their own classrooms and make a difference in the lives of their students. Their concerns during this phase may include setting up their classrooms, locating curriculum materials, and establishing relationships with colleagues, school leaders, students, and parents. Not surprisingly, this phase often coincides with the beginning of the school year.

In the survival phase, new teachers begin to realize the realities of day-to-day work. Teachers in this phase have little time for planning or reflection—they simply struggle to stay afloat. Even in the face of challenges and difficulties, most beginning teachers attempt to maintain their energy and dedication to students, though they may find themselves falling short. This phase often occurs around the second to third month of school.

New teachers often “hit the wall” during the disillusionment phase. At this time, they may begin to question their commitment, capability, and self-worth, and they sometimes even become ill from stress. The disillusionment phase often presents the greatest challenge for the first-year teacher to overcome and typically falls between November and January.

Source: Republished with permission of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, from “The Stages of a Teacher’s First Year,” Moir, 1999, p. 21; permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.

Figure 1.2: The phases of a first-year teacher’s attitude toward teaching.

The next phase—rejuvenation—often arrives shortly after winter break, once new teachers have had the opportunity to rest and spend time with family and friends. Time away from the stresses and pressures of the classroom can give beginning teachers a new outlook on their profession and a new sense of their own accomplishments. Teachers in this phase feel more hopeful and begin to focus on their students’ academic performance and their own teaching competence. Rejuvenation can last into the spring.

As the school year comes to a close, new teachers enter the reflection phase. In this phase, they look back on all they have learned throughout the year, including which strategies were effective, which strategies were ineffective, which strategies went untried, and what they could do differently next year. At the end of the year, many teachers also feel powerful emotions related to saying good-bye to their first group of students.

As they close out the school year, beginning teachers typically re-enter the anticipation phase. During this time, they begin to think ahead to the following year. Having had the opportunity to reflect, beginning teachers usually feel ready to enter the next school year with new ideas, streamlined procedures, and different strategies to try out in the classroom.

As the first few stressful phases in Moir’s (1999) model illustrate, beginning educators face a steep learning curve. School leaders, parents, and students normally expect significant growth from new teachers within a very short period of time. As Breaux and Wong (2003) pointed out, new teachers are expected to develop an understanding of the school culture, form relationships with their students and colleagues, and find balance between work and personal life within a few short months. Further, beginning teachers are expected to be completely prepared to begin teaching on the first day of school and to improve their performance each and every year thereafter. Ellen Moir, Dara Barlin, Janet Gless, and Jan Miles (2009) noted that “regardless of the quality or duration of the teacher preparation program, new teachers assume the full range of teacher responsibilities only on the first day on the job” (p. 58). Because the first day of school brings unexpected challenges, “everything before that might be considered a simulation” (p. 58).

For many of the tasks that teachers perform daily in the classroom, expertise develops over time as practitioners gain exposure to a wide variety of classroom occurrences. David C. Berliner (1988) identified the following six dimensions in which expert teachers perform more adeptly than novices.

1. Interpreting classroom phenomena

2. Discerning important events

3. Using routines

4. Making predictions

5. Distinguishing between typical and atypical events

6. Evaluating performance

According to Berliner (2000), anecdotal reports from teachers indicate that developing skills in these dimensions requires three to five years of experience. Berliner (1994) also asserted that beginning teachers require five years to move from the novice stage of teacher development to the competent stage.

Despite these differences between beginning and experienced teachers, school leaders often expect new teachers to immediately perform the same—or similar—tasks and duties as teachers with years of experience but with relatively little support. This expectation does a tremendous disservice to new teachers. Skills that appear simple and automatic for experienced teachers are often the result of years of careful practice, work, and reflection.

Deliberate Practice to Develop Expertise

While most professionals maintain average levels of performance once they reach them, some continue to improve their craft and eventually reach “the highest levels of professional mastery,” or expertise (Ericsson, 2006, p. 683). While extensive experience is necessary for achieving expertise, experience alone does not “invariably lead to expert levels of achievement” (p. 683). Rather, reaching the highest levels of performance requires deliberate practice, or a concentrated effort to improve one’s abilities (Colvin, 2008; Ericsson, 2006).

When people think about practicing a skill, they typically think of repeating an action over and over again until it becomes automatic. For instance, a teenager preparing for a driving test might drive so frequently that the various elements of operating a vehicle become second nature. Similarly, a basketball player might shoot fifty layups every day until he or she develops muscle memory to make the skill automatic. People who engage in deliberate practice, on the other hand, try to avoid automaticity because they want to correct errors at finer and finer levels of detail. During each practice session, they identify problems with their technique and work to correct them, always seeking to attain a higher level of mastery.

Because deliberate practice requires the practitioner to identify specific areas in which he or she needs improvement, the process of cultivating expertise is nearly impossible to undertake independently. Geoff Colvin (2008) explained:

Without a clear, unbiased view of the subject’s performance, choosing the best practice activity will be impossible…. Very few of us can make a clear, honest assessment of our own performance. Even if we could, we could not design the best practice activity for that moment in our development—the type of practice that would put us on the road to achieving at the highest levels—unless we had extensive knowledge of the latest and best methods for developing people in our chosen field. Most of us don’t have that knowledge. (pp. 67–68)

In order to achieve success in the classroom, new teachers must develop expertise. However, they cannot do this alone. Beginning teachers can only reasonably be expected to succeed if they receive intentional, comprehensive support catered to meet their unique needs. We suggest that mentors can effectively provide this support.

The Importance of Support and Mentoring

The use of mentoring to help new employees develop expertise is not specific to the teaching profession. In fact, the most employee-friendly corporations in the United States emphasize mentoring and training. Every year, Fortune magazine partners with the Great Place to Work Institute to conduct an extensive survey of employees at different American companies (such as Google, Goldman Sachs, and Whole Foods). The survey includes questions about employees’ attitudes toward management credibility, job satisfaction, camaraderie, pay and benefit programs, hiring, communication, and diversity. Fortune then uses the results to publish an annual list of the “100 Best Companies to Work For.” In 2014, salaried employees of the companies on this list received an average of seventy-five hours of training per year, with some companies on the list offering hundreds of hours of training annually (Fortune, 2014).

Unlike these companies, school systems often fail to support their new teachers beyond a basic orientation to the school. Only twenty-eight states have laws that require or encourage districts to offer induction programs at all (Breaux & Wong, 2003). In 2004 and 2005, the MetLife Foundation surveyed eight hundred K–12 public school teachers with five or fewer years of teaching experience. Of these teachers, 18 percent reported that they were fairly or very likely to leave the profession (MetLife, 2005). The authors identified the following feelings as characteristic of new teachers who were likely to quit.

• Frustration that the school leadership undersupported or undervalued them

• Stress related to workload, expectations, or number of responsibilities

• Anxiety regarding lack of expertise

In a study of new teachers’ explanations for their career choices, Susan M. Johnson and Sarah E. Birkeland (2003) reported:

Of central importance in all of the teachers’ explanations of their decisions to stay in their schools, to move, or to leave teaching was whether they believed that they were achieving success with their students…. Our respondents reported that achieving success in their teaching depended largely on a set of school-site factors—the role and contributions of the principal and colleagues, the teachers’ assignments and workload, and the availability of curriculums and resources. In deciding whether to stay or leave, teachers weighed these factors and judged to what extent shortcomings in one or more compromised their chances of teaching effectively. (pp. 593–594)

How a school team supports, empowers, and connects with first-year teachers is critical to developing and retaining them. Without this support, new teachers can feel isolated and ineffective and oftentimes leave the profession before they have a chance to achieve their full potential.

The benefits of mentoring for new teachers have been well researched. Richard M. Ingersoll and Thomas M. Smith (2004) reported that new teachers who received support (such as a helpful mentor in the same subject area, common planning and collaboration time with teachers in the same subject area, and supportive communication with school leaders) were less likely to leave at the end of the first year than those who did not receive support. Alan J. Reiman, Kristen A. Corbell, Erin T. Horne, and Dina Walker-DeVose (2010) conducted a meta-analytic literature review—a synthesis of findings from a large number of individual studies—and found that new teachers generally associated the following factors with their own perceptions of success in the field of teaching.

• Mentor, colleague, parental, and administrative support

• Effective classroom management

• Reduced assignment load and workload

• Instructional resources

• Student success

The authors’ review of the research supports the idea that schools and school districts can positively affect retention by increasing new teachers’ perceptions of their own success through more comprehensive support programs.

Translating Research and Theory Into Practice

In subsequent chapters, we draw from the research and theory in this chapter and from sources such as The Art and Science of Teaching (Marzano, 2007) and Effective Supervision (Marzano et al., 2011) to discuss how to effectively support beginning teachers. Each chapter provides a number of strategies that we suggest mentors can implement to help support a beginning teacher both in the classroom and outside it. As mentioned in the introduction, as you progress through the remaining chapters, you will encounter comprehension questions to help you process the content presented. After completing each set of questions, you can check your answers with those in appendix A (page 71).