NEVADA VIEWS: Tackling teacher retention

A recent Sunday editorial in the Review-Journal highlighted one intractable problem facing educational leaders in Nevada: how to address teacher retention and the large percentage of new teachers who quit after one year. I offer one solution to address the problem of new teachers who quickly leave after discovering that teaching was not what they expected it to be.

I propose that teacher education programs move the student teaching credit course to the second semester of the first year. This will address two major problems in education: teacher retention and the disconnect between classroom experience and pedagogic instruction.

Nearly 50 percent of teachers leave the profession within the first five years. Beginning teachers with little or no preparation are 2½ times more likely to leave the classroom after one year compared to their well-prepared peers. Many who leave report that they did not understand what teaching conditions were like until they had finished a long and costly teacher training program, often a four-year program. Others report that the education courses had little relevance to them until they had been in the classroom teaching.

Adopting this change allows students to see early on in their training — firsthand for an entire 16 weeks — what day-in-and-day-out teaching is like and what actually has to be done for classroom preparation, presentation and management.

As it stands under the current system, students do not get this kind of experience until the end of their teacher training, when they have already committed time and energy. Such students are faced with having to either continue on in a career that they are not excited about (and in which they have made an investment of money and time) or face the difficulty of changing majors and extending their college studies for several more years.

An intensive early experience in student teaching over a longer time than the traditional one week observing and working with a teacher will make the pedagogic materials in other education classes more meaningful and understandable. And if, after this semester is over and the student decided teaching is not for him or her, there is still time to focus on other education goals and majors.

To make this work, education departments will need to restructure the time in the program when students do a semester of student teaching. The Clark County School District and other education systems will need to provide more student teaching classes and teachers, with possible commensurate pay for the teachers, who will mentor. This will not require a major outlay of funds, it will simply change when potential teachers are exposed to the reality of classroom teaching.

After the semester is over, students will be able to link the pedagogic concepts, ideas and techniques presented in other classes with the classroom experiences they already have had. The district does something similar to this right now with its Alternative Path to Licensing, though this proposal would have student teachers working with current teachers.

This proposal does not involve any new manner of teaching, but provides student teachers with an early experience that can work to improve retention and make the teacher training experience more relevant.

Geoffrey Frasz is an emeritus professor of philosophy at the College of Southern Nevada.