Addressing
the State’s Teacher Shortage: Mentoring Pre-Service and Novice Teachers to Be
Reflective Practitioners Via an Electronic Mailing List
Anne
Jordan-Baker, Assistant Librarian, Elmhurst College
Judy
Fiene, Visiting Assistant Professor of Education, Elmhurst College
April
9, 2002
“The Illinois State Board of Education,” according the Chicago
Tribune, “estimates that about 20 percent of the state’s 124,000 public
school teachers are eligible for retirement within the next three years.
Together with increased enrollment and movement among schools, roughly half the
state’s classrooms could find themselves with new teachers” (Ahmed-Ullah,
2001, para 15). Retirements are aggravating teacher shortages across the
country, resulting in many more fresh-out-of-college teachers entering the
classroom for the first time. Unfortunately for the nation’s schools,
approximately 30 percent of new teachers leave the profession within five years
(Ahmed-Ullah, 2001, para 19). School officials are thus eager to create programs
and develop services to support and mentor new teachers so that they will remain
in the profession.
In an effort to stimulate dialog and reflective thinking among her
students, Judy Fiene, Visiting Assistant Professor of Education at Elmhurst
College, began using an electronic mailing list (ListServ) in one of her classes
of pre-service teachers in the spring semester, 2001. Other faculty from the
department of education also joined the list, called Edunews, and eventually, as
the students began teaching, graduating, and then starting full-time teaching
jobs, the list evolved into an online community of more than one hundred
subscribers. With this mix of education students, novice teachers, and their
more experienced colleagues, the mailing list became a rich and interesting
“place” of conversation, mentoring, encouragement, debate, and thinking out
loud. The list also eventually served as the meeting place for the Cyber Book
Club, a group of subscribers who read Learning to Read: Lessons from
Exemplary First-Grade Classrooms by Michael Pressley and discussed it on the
mailing list.
Since it began as part of a class, the bulk of the discussion that took
place on Edunews was at first almost entirely instigated by Judy, who served as
the list moderator and as the model for how professionals discuss issues with
their colleagues. The initial
success of Edunews depended on Judy’s moderation and facilitation skills. One
of Judy’s early posts to the list was this friendly welcome and invitation:
Hello to all members of this new and WONDERFUL listserv. I
know you are out there and are all extremely interested in
what’s hot and what’s
not in the field of literacy. However, at
times, I feel like I’m talking to myself
:o). It would be wonderful
if we all communicated with one another—have a question…
just ask. Enjoy a site…tell us about it. I would
like to invite
mentor teachers and cooperating teachers or just
plain
teachers to join our group as well. Please
feel free to send this
site to any teacher that you feel would add to the community of
learners we have just started. Once again, welcome to the
wonderful world of teaching.
Judy Fiene
Without
this kind of prompting, Edunews would never have become the intellectually
interesting place it came to be. On a practical note, both of us strongly
believe that one of the keys to a successful and interesting mailing list is
good facilitation. Because Judy’s facilitation worked so well, students began
to participate and even to adopt some of Judy’s “ways of being” on the
list so that students and new teachers came to ask
questions and even mentor and support each other in the ways they had
witnessed Judy perform those skills on the list.
Edunews began as an attempt to help education students become
“reflective practitioners,” professional educators who are knowledgeable
about their discipline, adept at communicating their professional expertise with
non-educators, committed to lifelong learning, and analytical about their own
teaching and its effectiveness. The mailing list has served its purpose well
from the beginning and continues to do so. Subscribers have discussed such
topics as the appropriateness of certain novels for particular age groups, the
stress as well as the excitement of learning how to teach children to “learn
how to learn,” as well as strategies to assist students in learning how to
read and improving their reading skills and reading enjoyment. The events of
September 11 proved to be of serious importance to members of the list. One
subscriber wrote,
As logical adults it is difficult even for us to understand what has
happened. How do we help the students understand when
we
ourselves are still shocked and confused?
…In a time such as
this we need to promote a sense of community and
compassion. Children need to see
the adults around them
pulling together and doing what can be done to
resolve the
issues…. Some teachers allowed students to listen to
reports on the radio and watch live television. My question to all
of you is how did/would you handle the
situation? Was is a good thing or a bad
thing to have allowed the students to listen and watch as yesterday’s
events unfolded?
Many subscribers responded to Judy’s request for information on how different
schools handled the events of September 11, and one student responded to the
previous post as follows:
I liked your comments and I agree with you. It has been my experience
that
when a tragedy occurs, whether it be not making the team, the loss of a
pet…, the loss of a family member, etc., up the continuum to the attack
on America, we all must have our grieving feelings heard by someone, but
then we must find something positive to do in response. There is a always
a positive response that can be taken in every negative situation, and it
is
up to us as adults to suggest and model that for our children.
For
this writer, the mailing list served as a place for her to both discuss current
issues but also so share her own feelings with other teachers who were also
struggling personally and professionally with this complex issue.
What is astounding is that this student managed to relate her response to
the tragedy to pedagogy:
I hope nowadays that teachers are teaching history and novels from
the concept/theme stance rather than a memorize-names-and-dates-and
-spit-them-back-on-a-multiple-choice-test stance. Kids need to learn
and internalize all that they possibly can about how others lived/
survived so that they can make positive, meaningful choices about
how they can use their talents and their life to help themselves and
others overcome any obstacles and adversity along their journey.
The mailing list has served as a medium for numerous such high-quality
discussions in issues of importance to pre-service and novice teachers. So while
the goal of creating “reflective practitioners” continues to be met—as
evidenced by the quantity and quality of postings to the list—the question
remains to be answered whether such electronic mailing lists can improve
schools’ retention of new teachers. Evidence from the mailing list does
suggest that such online support and mentoring could very well achieve positive
results in teacher retention. An early message to the list reads:
Hello to all! I just thought as a first year teacher I would share
with you some of my experiences so far. First and foremost, I am
so glad that I have entered into such an inspiring profession. I finally
found
a “job” that I don’t consider work. I look forward to each and
everyday.
I actually don’t even watch the clock to see when I can go home….
However, I am experiencing some growing pains and was wondering
if this was normal. First of all, I feel that I have no guidance and
everyone
is too busy to help. We don’t have a curriculum guide in my school, so
I
am on my own…. I feel like each day is a terrific challenge, and I hope
to meet all of the expectations the district has for me. The only problem
is that I don’t know what they all are. I am taking each day, day by
day, but
sometimes I feel so overwhelmed because I’m not sure if I’m doing all
the
administrative stuff that’s required. It’s the administrative stuff
that really
makes me nervous. There’s so much.
This
teacher’s email clearly indicates her need for support and guidance as well as
the fact that she is not receiving these from her school or colleagues. Her
expression of enthusiasm for the teaching profession and her statement that she
“hope[s] to meet all of the expectations the district has” for her shows
that she is probably a teacher the school would hate to lose. An electronic
mailing list that gives her the encouragement and mentoring she needs could keep
her in the school system despite her feelings of being “overwhelmed.”
On a more pragmatic note, the State of Illinois’ Core Technology
Standards for All Teachers, which was revised on October, 2001, sets high
standards for teachers’ skills in using technology in the classroom as well as
for their own professional development. All Illinois teachers are expected to
possess a variety of technological skills including, as stated in Standard Two,
the use of technology “for enhancing personal professional growth and
productivity” as well as for “communicating, collaborating, conducting
research, and solving problems” (Illinois State Board of Education [ISBE],
2001, p. 13). Standard Six requires teachers to “use telecommunications and
information-access resources to support instruction” (ISBE, p. 15). Mentoring
teachers through an electronic mailing list provides subscribers with a way to
use technology for their own professional growth as well as providing them with
a model of how to use the technology in their teaching.
We cannot stress strongly enough, however, that it is not the technology
itself—the electronic mailing list—that brings about the positive results
for students and novice teachers. It is the facilitation and the participation
of at least one experienced teacher, the mentor, that makes success possible.
The mentoring process itself—the interaction between an experienced
practitioner and a neophyte—remains the same regardless of the means by which
the parties communicate. The electronic mailing list, however, does provide some
important advantages not available in the traditional one-on-one mentoring
relationship. First, a list provides an efficient means for one or more mentors
to work with multiple novices without any of the participants having to be in
the same place at the same time. Mailing lists also allow for the modeling of
mentoring behavior so that the novices themselves may begin to mentor others.
Finally, a mailing list creates a sense of community among the participants,
creating a situation in which the mentor is not the only source of support or
assistance: the community becomes a trusted resource that members can turn to
for advice and support as well as an audience for members’ developing thoughts
on issues of concern to them.
Ahmed-Ullah,
N.S. (2001, August 22). Bell ushers in novice teachers. Chicago Tribune.
Retrieved January 8, 2002, from the NewsBank database.
Illinois
State Board of Education (2001). Core technology standards for all teachers.
Retrieved January 22, 2002, from the Illinois State Board of Education
web site:
http://www.isbe.state.il.us/profdevelopment/PDFs/techstandards.pdf