Resources for Teachers & Instructional Coaches – September 2019

Regardless of if you are a new or experienced teacher, professional development should never stop. Here are a few recommendations for new teachers and articles about professional development.

Hello, can you hear me? I’m in my classroom dreaming about who I want to be

Teachers don’t need to be an official instructional coach in order to support and encourage the new teachers in their schools. Setting up lines of communication between experienced and new teachers can be a powerful lever for helping new teachers find their footing.

Curtis Chandler, a professor of teacher education at Brigham Young University–Idaho, has a request for veteran teachers: “Each of us can help novice educators (and their students) to be successful by providing support, collegial friendship, collaboration, instructional modeling, and well-crafted feedback.”

Read more on Edutopia: Supporting the New Teachers in the Building

And, our slight apologies to Adele for butchering her song lyrics with that section header.

The not-quite-deadly but common sins of teacher professional development

If you are planning on presenting professional development in your district, make sure to check out writer Peter Greene’s things to avoid. Here’s his take on “mismanaging time.”

Start and end on time. If you have an hour to present, don’t take fifty minutes for the first half of your presentation and then race to squeeze the other half into the last ten minutes. You may think that releasing your audience early makes you “cool,” but it also shows the teachers that you don’t know how to manage your time. Does getting your presentation to fit into a block of time, right down to the minute, seem like a tough task? Every teacher in your audience does exactly that, all day, every day. If you can’t do it, they will suspect they have nothing to learn from you.

Check out all the ideas on Forbes: Six Unforgivable Sins Of Teacher Professional Development

A teacher residency program could ease your hiring challenges and improve retention rates

Teacher residencies are allowing districts to hire more prospects and prepare them to be successful in their first year in the classroom. School officials say hiring has become easier with the help of longer, better-funded and more rigorous student-teaching experiences called teacher residencies.

Residencies can help districts address a host of challenges, advocates say.

Residency programs can focus on hard-to-staff areas such as STEM or special education. Substantial stipends can draw candidates from less affluent and more diverse backgrounds.

And at a time when over 40% of new teachers leave the profession within five years, the rigorous training that residencies promote improves retention, saving recruitment costs that can run as high as $20,000 per new employee.

Read more on District Administration: How to set new teachers up for success