In "Learning to Teach," a public television documentary that follows three teachers through their first year in the Baltimore County public schools, producer John Merrow hits the nail on the head. Most people know about teaching from the students' vantage point; Merrow conveys the realities of life from the other side of the desk. Indeed, watching his teachers get ready for opening day brought back the feeling I had in my stomach before my first class--and reminded me of what a colleague told me during the early weeks of school: "The first year is always hell."
Merrow's beginning teachers know their subjects, and they are enthusiastic about their new profession. Paul, a 27-year-old engineer who used to train Navy personnel on nuclear submarines, has taken a $20,000 pay cut to become a high school math teacher because he wants to help young people learn. Leo, a church choir director and former clothing store manager, would like to be remembered for something more than selling coats and believes that teaching music in elementary school will offer that. Chris, a young gym teacher from a small town in upper New York State, talks about how eager she is to meet her students and begin work.
But their first year of teaching puts their enthusiasm to some severe tests, from the terrible day when they face their first classes to the formal evaluation when they teach a prepared lesson in front of a group of supervisors, hoping desperately that they won't mess up. (Chris does.) Easy-going Leo finds out that second graders can make him angrier than he ever imagined, and Chris, who has to struggle to keep order in her middle school gym classes, discovers that parents will believe their kids even when the youngsters are lying. Paul is repelled by the cynicism of some of his colleagues and dismayed to find that there are kids in his classes who seem to have no interest in learning. At the end of the year, Leo and Chris are upbeat. Paul, the most idealistic and--in some ways--the most gifted of the three, considers abandoning teaching although we find, at the end of the program, that he returned the following year.
"Learning to Teach" shows that little has changed since I was a first-year teacher, and it reveals an enormous and costly failure in our system for inducting new members of the teaching profession. Merrow's teachers were expected to figure out things for themselves; they were tossed in to sink or swim. The formal evaluation? That was nothing more than a charade. The evaluators showed up in class at a prearranged time to see a lesson prepared for their benefit and then gave a formal statement about how well the new teachers were doing. This kind of evaluation would probably have alerted the evaluators to a teacher who was a total incompetent or a maniac, but it was not designed to offer the concrete and ongoing help that new teachers need. Only Chris speaks about the support her department chairman gave her when she was in trouble. The other two are isolated in their classrooms. Instead of being able to benefit from the experience of others, they have to sort out their questions and problems as best they can.
A teacher's education is only beginning when he or she takes a first job, and we need to get all teachers--and especially the new ones--out of self-contained classrooms so they can interact with their colleagues. I'm not talking about bull sessions in the teachers' room--though they can be helpful in letting off steam. I mean giving teachers time to share ideas and questions about their teaching, all the way from "How should I approach this poem by Robert Frost with my ninth graders?" to "What should I expect of kids in this class?" Without a chance to reflect on their practice and discuss it with more experienced colleagues, new teachers will have a hard time finding their footing. And they are likely to fall back on techniques they saw their own teachers use, whether or not these techniques worked. This can get them off to a bad start from which they may never recover.
Almost every other profession has a better system of induction for new members than teaching. Most offer some kind of internship that provides lots of help from experienced colleagues and allows beginners to ease into accepting full responsibilities. If teaching is ever to be a profession in the sense that medicine and law are, beginning teachers need a chance to learn what constitutes good practice with the help of accomplished colleagues instead of being forced to figure everything out for themselves.