Teacher Retention

From LiteracyTentWiki

Subject: [ProfessionalDevelopment 587] Re: Teacher Retention
From: Downey, Stacey sdowney at udc.edu
Date: Thu Oct 5 16:23:24 EDT 2006

Michelle Johnson's post, and her beautiful and apt assessments of three of the Teacher-Researchers and their strengths, makes me wonder about another possible benefit of practitioner inquiry. The field, including adult learners, and colleagues, benefit greatly from these enriched educators. How does that get rewarded? By whom?

In a field where we know that teachers are part-time and underpaid, and lack benefits and paid prep time, do projects like these increase teacher retention?

Is there a measurable PD outcome here? Do teachers stay in the field longer when their local community is one that values practitioner inquiry and best practices, and trusts in their expertise to identify promising practices? Is there any way to reward teachers, even modestly, who engage in this kind of work to acknowledge that teachers who take the time to do this work increase their value as teachers.

To return to Eduardo Honold's thoughtful questions, is there a way to do this kind of work that better fits into the time and purview constraints of adult educators? Did the idea that you mentioned, Eduardo, of having many teachers working on one question, make the process easier for teachers and staff to manage? Was it more "efficient" to deliver PD this way?

Stacey Downey

State Education Agency, Adult Ed. & Family Literacy
Washington, DC
sdowney at udc.edu

Subject: [ProfessionalDevelopment 588] Re: Teacher Retention
From: Janet Isserlis Janet_Isserlis at brown.edu
Date: Thu Oct 5 16:54:16 EDT 2006

All

An anecdotal / impressionistic response to Stacey¹s question. Given the participation of RI adult educators in inquiry work, I¹d say it is an important factor in teacher retention. Reports written by teachers undertaking a range of projects over the course of several years (multiple program-year projects, but a number of teachers undertook different questions/projects over the course of one, two or more years) are online at http://www.brown.edu/lrri/inquiry.html.

Many of those teachers (whose reports are online) are still working in adult ed.

How/is this measurable? I¹d suggest in multiple ways.

Janet Isserlis

Subject: [ProfessionalDevelopment 589] Re: Teacher Retention
From: David Rosen djrosen at comcast.net
Date: Thu Oct 5 17:02:21 EDT 2006

Hello Stacey,

In Massachusetts, when we did practitioner research at the Adult Literacy Resource Institute (ALRI), two things helped teachers to participate:

1. Every full-time teacher in a program funded by the state department of education is paid for participation in 50 professional development hours per year. This is pro-rated for part-time teachers.
2. The ALRI paid the teachers stipends for participating _and_ for writing an article, which we published in our journal, _Connections_. (This also solved a problem for_ us_ , how to get local practitioners to write good articles for our journal!)

Sample journal issues:

http://tech.worlded.org/docs/connections/tableofcontents.htm
http://tech.worlded.org/docs/connections/

Teachers doing practitioner research always commented that this allowed them to carve out a space in their extremely busy teaching lives -- the only space where they could be reflective in a focused way, and that the reflection was an important ingredient in enabling them to change their practice.

David

David J. Rosen
djrosen at comcast.net

Subject: [ProfessionalDevelopment 592] Re: Teacher Retention
From: Corley, Mary Ann MCorley at air.org
Date: Thu Oct 5 17:40:47 EDT 2006

Hi, list members:

Over the past year in California, we hosted a Field-based Research Initiative on the topic of learner persistence. Teachers applied to participate in training sessions and to conduct inquiry on whether a specific intervention would have an effect on learner persistence. CALPRO invited Dr. Alisa Belzer from Rutgers to provide the training on practitioner inquiry. We accepted eight teachers to participate in the training and included their immediate supervisors in the first round of training because we wanted to ensure that teachers had administrative support while they were engaged in this project.

We held five days of training--two initial days in December to provide an overview and to help participants frame their questions, a conference call in early March, a one-day follow-up meeting at the end of march at which teacher researchers discussed their projects and any challenges they faced, and a final two-day meeting in May at which each teacher researcher presented a draft paper and all participants responded/asked questions to clarify, etc. Alisa Belzer was available by phone throughout the project's duration to provide guidance to the teacher researchers. Topics ranged from using distance learning methods, to trying out a new intake and orientation process, to helping learners with clear and meaningful goal-setting. Participating teachers all rated the experience as highly valuable to them. CALPRO is in the process of editing and preparing the papers for publication. Copies of the publication will be available at the Meeting of the Minds II Symposium in Sacramento, November 30-December 2, 2006. In addition, Dr. Belzer and some of the participating teacher researchers will conduct a session at the Symposium on this experience.

I believe that practitioner inquiry is a highly effective form of professional development for participating teachers. There are inherent challenges in the process, e.g., (1) it is expensive [CALPRO provided honoraria of $1,500 to each participating teacher for time spent on this project and also covered travel expenses to the three training events, and CALPRO hired a consultant to prepare and deliver the training and follow-up support]; (2) it requires agency administrative commitment and support, which is not always available; (3) it is not easy to get teachers to narrow their focus and ask manageable questions; and (4) it reaches only a small segment of available teachers. However, in the long run, practitioner inquiry contributes richly to the professional development of teachers who, by the very process of self-reflection, have learned and have improved their practice.

This was just our first year in hosting a field-based research initiative. Thanks for all your psotings to this list--they have been helpful to us as we think through next steps for California.

Best wishes,
-Mary Ann Corley
CALPRO Director/Principal Research Analyst
American Institutes for Research

Subject: [ProfessionalDevelopment 594] Re: Teacher Retention
From: Eduardo Honold ehonol at sisd.net
Date: Thu Oct 5 18:42:08 EDT 2006

Hello, Stacey:

In Texas, some PD centers have provided small stipends to teachers to participate in long-term PD with a research to practice component, but probably not as generous as MA. We try to make it easier for teachers by offering a limited menu of classroom research projects they can try out, evaluate and share with peers. This makes it less daunting (more efficient?) for most teachers than starting AR from scratch. Maybe the ideal model is for teachers to get their feet wet on guided or directed classroom research and graduate to more independent efforts such as those found in the Connections journal.
Eduardo Honold
Coordinator, Far West Project GREAT
ehonol at sisd.net

Subject: [ProfessionalDevelopment 599] Re: Teacher Retention
From: Harriet Smith hsmith at coe.tamu.edu
Date: Fri Oct 6 14:14:51 EDT 2006

A year ago, Texas' Literacy Links newsletter featured an article titled "Teacher Retention in Adult Literacy Programs: Uncharted Territory - or Something We Already Know How to Achieve?" http://www-tcall.tamu.edu/newsletr/oct05/oct05a.htm

In that article, we tried to get a grip on the extent of the problem, as well as considering the following questions:

What are the unique challenges for teacher retention in adult literacy? What program practices seem to improve teacher retention?

Many in the field here in Texas see new teacher induction and mentoring as especially critical. The kind of long-term PD with with a research to practice component mentioned by Eduardo Honold seems to have been successful to the extent that it has been done in our state. A goodly proportion of our state's current leadership in the field, particularly those involved in professional development, were teacher participants in Texas' Project IDEA Teacher Action Research model in the late 1990s and early 2000s.


Harriet Vardiman Smith
Clearinghouse Project Director
Texas Center for the Advancement of Literacy & Learning
www-tcall.tamu.edu

Retrieved from "http://wiki.literacytent.org/index.php/Teacher_Retention"