The first year a teacher is in a classroom is monumental. During that year, one of three things happens. A teacher is successful and starts a career growing every year in her teaching abilities. A teacher is unhappy, decides teaching is not a good career choice, and begins to drift toward a career change. Or a teacher does the minimal needed from a first-year teacher, enough to earn a continuing contract, and begins a career repeating novice teaching skills. The first is great but the second and third are not.

How many promising teachers leave the profession too early. Too many teachers. How many years do we allow a teacher to be a first-year teacher? Too many years. These two truths are connected. The first years of teaching are critical for those who stay and for those who leave. We need to improve how we work with rookie educators.

First year once or first year forever.

Every teacher experiences a first year as a classroom teacher. It is a birthing process. Most teachers grow through their accumulated professional experiences and the quality of their teaching matures and improves over time. It is common to hear a veteran teacher speak of her beginnings. “In my first year I tried to do too much and did not do very much very well. It took experience to know what was essential to cause children to learn.”  Or “I stayed up past midnight every night working on lesson plans. I thought, ‘If I have a perfect lesson plan, I will have a perfect day of teaching.’ I learned that good teaching is what I do once the plan is in motion.” Equally we hear from principals about how a teacher matures over time and her teaching gets better and better.

But this is not true of every teacher; some teach like a first-year teacher repeatedly. They do not advance their pedagogy or ability to connect with children beyond what they did as a first-year teacher. They are not reflective in considering how a lesson might be improved, and they file every lesson for teaching again next year. They consider student achievement data a reflection of the children they teach not the teaching the children receive. They talk at children rather than listening and engaging with them. There are many descriptors for how a teacher is an habitual first-year teacher.

Consider teachers as flowers. The beautiful perennials keep getting better and better as they cross-pollinate and bloom more colorfully year after year. The annuals bloom in their season and then wilt. Annuals are the same year after year. When I think of high-quality teaching and its impact on the lives of children, I know the teachers I want my grandchildren and their friends to have. Perennials, please; no annuals. So, what do we do to cultivate perennials and cull annuals? Begin with the concept of “first year.”

And, like flower seeds, some teachers do not grow into flowering plants or do grow but never blossom. They quit the garden all too early.

There are two kinds of “first.”

There are two events that define a first-year teacher. One is “this is my first year as a professional teacher” and the second is “this is my first-year teaching in this school.” Each is a valid “first” with a uniqueness that makes these events important in a teaching career. Each of these firsts is wrapped in facts and emotions of “never doing this/never been here before.” It is inarguable that the first day of a teacher’s first year is a huge “first.” By the same definition of first, a teacher who has moved to a different school several times experiences many of the feelings and treatments of a first-day educator. These two “firsts” are essential in teacher development, because they make or break a teacher’s persistence. Whether the first time in a classroom or the first time in a school, what happens then affects a teacher’s career.

First year ever teachers have two learning curves – classroom and institutional. While their pedagogical skills are getting their first, independent, away-from-college testing, their institutional learning curve is almost vertical. They teach by transferring their sheltered student teaching experience to their “you are on your own now” classroom. What seemed like confident teaching in student teaching becomes less confident as an employed teacher. Being singularly responsible for children and their learning is a huge undertaking and weighs heavily on a novice teacher.

For a first year ever teacher, onboarding of institutional procedures is a blur. Bell schedules, attendance taking, grading, office referrals, contact with parents, and calendars of in-school meetings are a piling on of information. It feels like boot camp. A novice does not want to run afoul of institutional procedures, but every novice does mess up on one or two. They get lost and can feel lost. It is the ability to rebound that carries them forward.

“First year in a new school” teachers face similar problems with institutional procedures. Not only do they need to learn new procedures, but they also need to forget the procedures of their former school. Even classroom teaching needs to be recalibrated to the curriculum and priorities of their new school. For example, elementary math is not always the same elementary math. Elementary math is the curricular series the school has adopted and when a teacher is handed a new curricular series her teaching of elementary math must be adapted to that series.

All “firsts” need our improved attention if we are to cultivate annually improving teachers.

First year survivors and leavers.

First-year teaching is a survival of the fittest contest. National statistics are not changing and 40% of classroom teachers leave teaching in their first five years in the profession. Stop and consider that fact for a moment. A teacher pays $80,000 or more for a baccalaureate degree and teaching license. Their move to a new town and investment in renting or buying a home is a huge emotional as well as financial commitment. Then they walk away from that effort and expense. The reasons must be ginormous.

Drilling into why this happens exposes a list of usual suspect reasons that have not changed much over time.

• Inadequate Preparation -Beginning teachers with little or no preparation are 21⁄2 times more likely to leave the classroom after one year compared to their well-prepared peers.
• Lack Of Support For New Teachers – New teachers who do not receive mentoring and other supports leave at more than two times the rate of those who do.
• Challenging Working Conditions – Teachers often cite working conditions, such as the support of their principals and the opportunity to collaborate with colleagues, as the top reason for leaving.
• Dissatisfaction With Compensation – Beginning teachers earn about 20% less than individuals with college degrees in other fields, a wage gap that can widen to 30% for mid-career educators.
• Better Career Opportunities – More than 1 in 4 teachers who leave say they do so to pursue other career opportunities.
• Personal Reasons – More than 1 in 3 teachers who leave cite personal reasons, including pregnancy and childcare, as extremely or very important in their decision.

https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/sites/default/files/Teacher_Exodus_Infographic.pdf

Concentrate on the first four reasons.

1. Hiring teachers is not a game of horseshoes. When there is a shortage of qualified applicants, close to being a qualified applicant is not good enough. However, in too many schools close is good enough. It is wrong to infer that all schools hire unqualified persons as teachers. Yet the reality is that too many schools face too few applicants and our chances to hire a highly qualified teacher every time are becoming scarce.

The choices to not hiring a “good enough” teacher are not teaching the course(s) of that assignment, creating larger class sizes by eliminating a classroom without a teacher, or becoming creative with hybrid instruction that reduces the need for constant face-to-face teaching. Each of these can cause parental and faculty uproar that no principal wants to face. Hence, hiring a “good enough” teacher is too often good enough.

The problem is worsened by some legislation that tries to address teacher shortage by declaring teachers do not need a baccalaureate degree, or unlicensed substitute teachers can be hired as regular teachers, or any military veteran can be hired as a classroom teacher. When these reasonings are apllied, “good enough” really is good enough. Except when we consider child learning. And then unprepared still is unprepared and children suffer when their teacher is not prepared to teach them. Unprepared is never good and far from good enough.

The fix = do not hire “good enough” unprepared teachers. For student learning, unprepared teachers cause more problems than dropped courses and larger class sizes.

Another fix = assign highly qualified teachers to initial and tier 2 instruction only and lesser to unprepared teaches to classroom supervision. Assure that all children get their initial and adjusted instruction from the best teacher available.

• Hiring is too often a one and done task. The problem with hiring a “close to good enough” teacher is that school principalship is a constant addressing of immediate problems. One hired the problem of a teacher placement is yesterday’s problem. Once the “close to good enough” teacher is hired, principals by necessity turn to the next immediate problem and do not give required attention to their problematic new hire(s).

Most school principals are “fire fighters” – every day is a matter of taking care of immediate and urgently hot problems of student discipline, student attendance, student transportation, building security and maintenance, finding sub teachers, supervising student activities, and resolving parent-school issues. Principals keep problems, like fires, from getting out of control. Professional development is not a September through December issue. It is further back on the fire line.  And observing teachers for professional evaluations waits until late winter and spring. Consequently, new teachers and “good enough” teachers do not see their principal unless the teacher is involved in a hot problem and then it seldom is a positive relationship.

As a generalization, first ever and first year in the school teachers get little personal and professional attention from their principal.

Fix = make principal engagement with each “first” teacher a weekly priority. Even checking in activities count when the “firsts” know the principal is personally interested in their daily teaching. Listening to a “first” is a proactive support.

Mentoring was a school priority du jour a decade ago but has slid back in priorities since. If a mentor is contractually or policy-required, mentor and “first’ relationships are typically on paper not in real time.

Fix = pay mentors, don’t make it volunteer or uncompensated duty.

Fix = require weekly, documented contacts.

Fix = “firsts” need procedural mentoring, and they need curricular mentoring. Do not think mentoring is a one size fits all. By the end of the first year, the curricular needs will outweigh the procedural.

• Vestiges of seniority benefits are still in play when considering the assignments “firsts” are given. Veteran teachers most often have smaller class sizes, upper-level courses, recently renovated classrooms, even more windows than “firsts.” “Firsts” also are assigned to more supervisory duties than veterans. In my “first ever” year, I was assigned to boys’ restroom supervision during two passing periods every day. Instead of taking care of my needs or arranging for the next class of students, I was expected to stand in and “supervise” boys in their second-floor restroom. The fact that I remember this is testimony to its onerousness.

Fix = reduce the non-instructional assignments usually given to firsts. Not only do firsts not know the routines of these assignments, but it is just another boot camp feature for a first. Children tend to respond better to veteran teachers. Veterans know how to downplay student behavior that needs to be downplayed. Discontinue assigning every lowly duty to “firsts.”

• Employment is comparative. Even though the average teacher salary in 2024 will be in the mid-$60,000s, “firsts” most often begin much lower. I work in a post-baccalaureate teacher preparation program and see “first year ever” teachers hired in the mid-$30,000s. With households of 2 or more, these “firsts” also qualify for food stamp-assistance in Wisconsin. When they compare their annual salary with other professions requiring a baccalaureate degree, they do not compare well. When they consider their school debts and how long it will take pay off their debt based on teacher pay as compared to other beginning professionals, they do not compare well. Too many novice teachers leave teaching because of inadequate compensation.

Fix = the professional work of a fourth-year teacher qualitatively compares well with a ten-year veteran. By the fourth year, after a “first” satisfies probationary status, pay them the same annual salary as a ten-year veteran. The costs of increasing their annual pay over the 4^th thru 9^th year is less than the costs for finding new “firsts” who are needed to replace young teachers who leave the profession early.

Cultivate the perennial; weed out the annuals.

The final fix for helping “firsts” who are highly-qualified-teachers-in-the-making is for principals to be more proactive in weeding out “first forever” teachers. One of the hardest smackdowns for “firsts” is their observation that mediocrity is rewarded in public education. An unprepared, “just good enough” teacher gets the same treatment and compensation as a well-prepared, sweating out the details “first.” Adding injury to insult, the “first” who cares is treated the same as the annual who does not care. And when that treatment includes a lack of mentoring, a lack of principal acknowledgement and support, and low levels of beginning and annual increases in pay, it is no wonder that promising “firsts” become “I’m out of here” firsts.