Teachers are some of the hardest working people today. Of course, the issue of working long hours for little pay is constant. However, we, as teacher education instructors/professors, encourage our pre-service teachers to realize that it is the heart (our students and their future) of the profession that drive us. If we forget this, we can become weary and grow weak. This weakness then leads to defeat and defeat leads us to eventually leaving the profession as a whole. We lose sight of the purpose behind our long hours of grading work, preparing lessons, analyzing data, and meeting needs of our students. The purpose: to take part in our students' success and to witness them thrive and grow up to be productive citizens of our society. How, then, can we prevent our talented teachers from following this horrible spiraling down? I was discouraged today. Our faculty and our program work hard to create the best experiences for our students, work hard to develop our instruction that is hands-on and experiential, and work hard to apply for needs so that our students thrive so that they confidently enter their 4-year university program and then eventually help meet the teacher shortages. We work hard--period. My colleague and I wrote a proposal for rooms that we wanted for our program. The rooms were perfect for our needs. There was a storage area for our equipment, glass windows for parents to watch their kids while our students taught them in training. We were going to name it our Classroom Learning Laboratory. We found out today that we were not granted our request. I started to feel incredibly discouraged. It seems that we work hard, but apparently we don't work hard enough. Is this right? I then began to remember why some teachers leave the profession. We leave because of the defeat we feel when we are not heard, when our voices are silenced. We work diligently, but the system sometimes prevents us from receiving what we believe our students need. We don't have a champion for our causes. Working conditions, therefore, are not conducive to our very own teachers to thrive. According to the Learning Policy Institute (Sutcher, 2016), "Beyond resources, teachers’ plans to stay in teaching and their reasons for actually having left are strongly associated with how they feel about administrative support, collegial opportunities, and teacher input into decision-making. When these elements are present, retaining teachers is much easier." This is true, and it is evident in our case as well. If only we would have been there in the decision room to make our case. To show them the growing needs of this profession in our state today--in our nation today. The compelling data below shows that teachers are desperately needed. Not only teachers meeting these needs, but qualified teachers, providing our students early clinical experiences so that they are confident when they enter their university programs. Again from the Learning Policy Institute, we see a dramatic demand for teachers and the unfortunate slim supply that we have of qualified teachers. Districts and schools are forced to fill positions with teachers who are on emergency certificates, teach in other subjects or are simply not qualified. The attrition rate for teachers in our country is 8%. If we reduced this by just half, we dramatically decrease the demand for teachers in our country. How do we do this? One way to keep our teachers in the field is to provide a conducive learning and teaching environment for them as well. We may feel defeated because we feel that we were not heard. However, I have to remind myself that ultimately our goals and our plans, although thwarted today, are still to help our students grow and build competency in this field so that our students will have a brighter future--no matter the circumstances. References Sutcher, L., Darling-Hammond, L., & Carver-Thomas, D. (2016, September 15). A Coming Crisis in Teaching? Teacher Supply, Demand, and Shortages in the U.S. Retrieved November 1, 2016, from https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/coming-crisis-teaching-brief
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AuthorProfessor of Education at Lone Star College-CyFair Archives
April 2017
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