Erica was the third student of mine to head for the Houston, Texas area in pursuit of employment due to the downturn of the Michigan economy in 2008.  At that time, she was teaching at Spring Woods High School, the same school that Roger Clemens attended.  Upon my arrival at the school, one of the principals led me to the display case where one of Clemens’ professional jerseys was on display.  Erica’s school reminded me of a motel in some ways.  Her classroom was on the second floor and the stairways and “hallway” were open-air and looked down on a large paved commons area.  The students entered that part of school through metal gates.  The campus officers were armed and Erica told me that there was a court justice just for the large school district.  There were “sweeps” for tardy students, students had to wear their IDs and at that time no student cell phones were allowed on campus.

During her time at Grand Valley Erica consistently displayed a confident air and a “take charge” attitude.  She did not shy away from work and her classroom teacher during her student-assisting placement at Grandville High School commented on her hard work and willingness in incorporating technology into his classroom lessons.  I know she received a good letter of recommendation from that teacher.

On the day of my visit in 2008 Erica was teaching about World War II.  She started her lesson with a warm up that involved a website from the United Kingdom (www.schoolhistory.co.uk).  Her lesson plan was well-organized, just like during her student teaching days.  The first part of this lesson had to do with the “Rise of Dictators” and started with Benito Mussolini.  Several times in the first few minutes of the class Erica referred to the students’ prior knowledge in regards to terms like “jingoism” and “red scare”.  Erica mentioned the book, “Number the Stars” and referred to the Houston Holocaust Memorial. Several students had heard of the Holocaust and one student remarked that the Holocaust Memorial “looked like a gas chamber” (Robinson, f.n., 2008, p.2).

The note-taking segment of the class lasted perhaps seven or eight minutes and then Erica shifted to a graphic organizer that students used in conjunction with Erica’s detail-rich PowerPoint on World War II. Within the slide show Erica highlighted key terms and facts for the students. While presenting this material Erica made a historiographical comment which reminded students that different sources might have varied dates and opinions. Erica also made statements of relevance to the students’ lives so that they might connect more easily to the material.  She asked the class if they had viewed the movie “Pearl Harbor” that came out in 2001.  Seven years later in 2008 none of the students admitted to seeing this movie.  Later Erica told me that when she mentioned the movie to her team leader (department chair) the leader cautioned Erica not to use the whole movie. Erica responded that she only intended to use clips. The leader added the comment that the movie was “too Hollywood”.  My further conversation with Erica about using the movie in her class showed that she was only interested in the sections that depicted the real history behind the surprise attack. Erica also used an audio clip of a radio report of the attack, a video clip FDR’s famous “Day of Infamy” speech to Congress and an audio clip of a bond drive.  Overall Erica displayed a great deal of content knowledge that she carefully interwove with relevant connections to her students’ lives.

The next part of the lesson was a writing activity. The students were to write a brief article which processed the information from this part of the class.  Erica offered time for the students to pause and process what they learned and took time to walk around the room to check student progress while also asking questions for understanding.  She also reinforced the importance of writing for the state standardized test.  Later in the class period she told me that Spring Woods had a 94% success rate on the state test (STARS or TAKS).  “Success” was a passing percentage of 60 and Erica did not know the breakdown of those scores. Did the majority of the students barely pass? Was there a Bell curve?  Did most of the students reach 80% competency or a mastery rate?  At the end of this activity Erica asked students to read their articles.  This took place a little over an hour into the class and the students were somewhat listless.  At this point Erica had the students get up and stretch, a good idea after an hour of sitting in their desks.

After the short writing segment Erica returned to the slide show, making connections to World War I and the inter-war period.  She stopped her delivery several times, checking that students were keeping up and offering that she would return to some of this material and the main themes in future classes.

The last twenty minutes of the class Erica allowed time for the students to start their homework.  I did not get a sense of how much time out of class it would take her students to complete the work but I was somewhat shocked when her Second Hour class started Erica found out that only one quarter of her class had completed last night’s homework assignment.  Part of the problem was explained when Erica later told me that she awards classes for good behavior by throwing a pizza party. Her second hour class did not string together since the beginning of the school year the requisite multiple days (10 or 15) of good behavior until just recently.

During her planning period Erica took me to her team planning room.  In this room just down the open-air hallway was a fairly well-stocked set of resources, some a little outdated and some new, including some primary source document readings. She mentioned that the textbook and the support materials were tied directly to the state test and that the district curriculum used tight standards and benchmarks tied to the state. She did have some leeway in the material she chose to use and how she presented it.

Several minutes into the warm up for her second hour class, Erica stopped and asked a few questions for understanding, directly related to the warm up activity. The class answered in unison correctly so it seemed like they were working on the task at hand.  After another minute Erica moved into the lecture part of the class. She repeated her pattern from the first hour with the difference that happens with a different set of students; some of her prior knowledge questions were met with silence and some questions were answered easily. Even though this class took a long time for their “pizza reward” Erica displayed the same sense of humor and engagement that she did in her previous class.  The students were diligent in their notetaking and answered Erica’s questions to the best of their ability.

When the class moved to the short writing segment of the class there was almost immediate disengagement.  I was not sure if they were not used to writing assignments or this particular class was not good at handling less disciplined structure in the lesson.  Erica went back to the slide show and I was not sure whether she cut off the activity because the students were not using their time effectively or that she needed to finish the material for the day.  This class ended with the same twenty-minute time period for the students to start their homework.

Next on Erica’s schedule was a department meeting which I attended. The meeting was entirely focused on the state tests.  One of the problems that was discussed was that the test was benchmarked by grade level and yet there were students who were taking classes “off grade level” for whatever reason and there was uncertainty how to schedule these students for their tests when they might have other “grade level” tests they also had to take.  It was also discussed that there were no tutorials for social studies material, but there were tutorials for math and science classes.  This district spent two weeks preparing the students for the test.  At this time in 2008 Grand Rapids Public Schools were taking six weeks to prepare some of their students for state-wide testing.

Beyond the state test discussion there was also a discussion on student grades and how they were calculated.  The Spring Woods District set the calculations at 40% of the test scores, 40% class work, including quizzes and 20% outside class work (homework).  All this work had to correlate to the state standards and the state-wide test.  The state test in 2008 was based on the philosophy of “understanding by design”^[1]. Other items discussed in the meeting were task management as it related to class time and class structure, equitable work levels for students of varying abilities, timed writing that equated with an SAT-like, teacher-corrected, state writing assessment scheduled for April and the writing prompts that would be associated with that writing assessment. The prompts for this particular assessment were words such as “immigration”, “Vietnam” and “civil rights” with the idea that students would create a thesis statement and then develop the thesis.

Third Period. At this point in the day, Erica mentioned to me that it was “tough” teaching the same content all day long. There were four teachers assigned to teach U.S. History in her high school at that time. She did not mention if that was all those four teachers taught or whether they had any other content assignments.  I had never less than two content assignments during my teaching career and I preferred three.  It was more work in terms of preparation, but the three different preps kept me more mentally awake than what teachers must face that have the same  content lesson three, four or five times a day.  How do you know if you carefully emphasized the same key, critical points of understanding for each class?  Did you allow the same time for processing?  Would the students raise the same types of questions that might further their classmates understanding of the material?  Lesson plans provide the structure, but even with the scripted lessons which some districts have chosen to follow, there is no guarantee that the interpersonal dynamics and thought processes for every group of students will be the same or render similar results.

Similar to her second period class, not all of her third period students had completed their homework, but the percentage of completion was better.  During the approximately fifteen minutes of the warm up activity in this class there was an undercurrent of conversation in Spanish.  As I glanced around the room it appeared that only about a third of the students were actively engaged in the warm up worksheet. Erica mentioned to me at this time that two of her more engaged students were moved out of this class period and their absence had totally changed the classroom dynamic. She did say that one of the students had requested a return to her class.  As the warm up activity continued more students plugged into the task at hand.  In the process of reviewing the worksheet many of the students answered in unison.  One of her questions was based on the lack of intervention by France and England as Germany began its expansion in the 1930s.  She used a relevant example with her students’ lives that helped engage their interest in the discussion.  It was obvious in the few months in which Erica had spent at her school that she was already aware of what was relevant to her students’ lives and culture in the metropolitan Houston area.

As Erica moved into the lecture portion of the class she consistently used questions to prompt the students’ engagement in the material and in the process kept the discussion as relevant as possible to the students’ lives.  Fascist dictators, such as Mussolini, claimed that they were doing what was best for Italy.  At what point should a person question the actions of their leaders?  What actions should her students take if they thought the President was acting like a dictator?  The students responded with, “write letters” and “vote”.  They knew that people had a voice in their government and Erica made positive remarks in reinforcing their potential actions as citizens. Throughout the lesson Erica checked on her students’ basic understanding for the words used in her lecture notes, as well as the events that formed the historical context formed the lesson for the day.

As in the previous classes when the lesson turned to more independent learning where the students were requested to write about the content their participation flagged. Erica gave them a few minutes to engage and then proceeded to walk around the classroom, checking for engagement and helping with the assignment.  At the end of this activity the students did not want to volunteer to summarize what they had written, but Erica was able to coax one student into sharing about United States’ intervention into World War II.

Erica’s daily schedule was three 90-minute periods with a half hour for lunch.  Within those 90 minutes was a 15-minute warm up activity, a varying amount of time, anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour of notes and discussion, followed by a writing assignment and then some reporting on what the students created.  Homework for the class was deciphering a political cartoon and the students were given 20 minutes within the class time to begin this assignment.  Erica went over the directions for the homework in detail and then prompted some discussion of what the students saw in the cartoon.

Interview

Defining Success, 2008

Erica’s first comment was that she did not realize how well she was prepared for teaching until she put her education into action, e.g. lesson planning and classroom management. At this point at the beginning of her second semester as a teacher she did not think that her coursework in reading strategies and some other teaching strategies contributed much to her teaching.  Her main complaint about the reading strategies course was that it was not content-specific and that the general application to reading without specific references to the works that her content embraced was not helpful.  Her opinion was in contradiction to many of the people involved in this study who said that while they were taking courses, such as the reading strategies course, they did not see the potential application to their careers, but after just a semester in their classrooms the coursework made sense and was extremely useful.

Erica’s next comment echoed some of my misgivings when I first started my career.  She lamented that her time in college did not prepare her for the day-to-day minutiae of teaching.  She thought that GVSU did not help her with finding a job.  She said that her college work did not expose her to the inner day-to-day workings of a school district or individual building.

At this point in the conversation we turned to a discussion on “cultural diversity”.  West Michigan has some cultural diversity, but it is definitely not the Houston, Texas area.  Erica’s project for her Cultural Diversity class at GVSU involved attending church services at an all African-American church, but she said that her two different student teaching placements were not all that diverse as compared to her school outside of Houston and she felt that a school culture that was at least 50% different than the culture in which you grew up was the minimal percentage to have in order to understand differences in culture.

Erica next commented on the timing of student teaching.  Although there has always been a requirement for at least 20 hours of an educational experience before applying to the College of Education, she thought that some experience, observational at least, should happen much earlier than the end of your junior year in a five-year program. Overall, she thought she was fairly well prepared but she thought some changes should be made in a few areas.

Special education preparation was another area that Erica thought needed some fine-tuning.  In her time at GVSU she had very little experience with Individualized Education Plans or I.E.P.s and the jargon associated with those plans.  When I taught the Social Studies Methods class I always tried to mention the importance of attending an IEP meeting once the students were out in the field but I never tracked them to see if they followed through with that suggestion.  Erica was unfamiliar with the process of keeping daily logs, as requested by her district and she thought there were probably differences between districts in how the minutiae of record-keeping was laid down. In Erica’s words, “Until someone says, three weeks into school, ‘Hey, where’s your log on this?’ you’re not going to know that you should be keeping one, because most mentors forget to tell you things that they just do” (Erica, v.t., 2008, p.3).  She realized that some of the day to day details of the job would not be taught by a university and that the school districts would have to pick up those details, especially when the details varied, and it was unnerving for a new teacher to be caught without some daily record-keeping that the veterans knew all along.

Content, 2008

When I started this study, I was keenly interested in learning if our college students received the content necessary for them to teach to the standards, no matter in what state they found employment.  Part of that interest was focused on finding out if the “Syllabus of Record” recorded with the University coincided with the actual course syllabus employed by every professor teaching a similar course.  Of course, Academic Freedom is involved and a person’s own research area creates separate course content foundations, but if those variances create problems for future teachers then there is a problem.  What I discovered was that many former students knew they learned what they taught in some course or another, but in very few instances could they name the course or the professor who taught that course. That fact made it difficult for me or the History Department for tracking where content was being taught and who was or was not following the “Syllabus of Record”. Another challenge in terms of content application is the time between learning the content and its actual application. With the advent of Advanced Placement courses resulting in college credit, some students might have learned some of their U.S. or World History in high school with no re-visitation to some of the content until they taught it years down the road.  So, the old adage that, ‘teachers stay one chapter ahead of their students in the textbook’ might apply.  Added to that is the depth that some college coursework has on particular time periods or events when teachers are given a week or sometimes days for teaching the main ideas and concepts that a college professor might present in a few weeks or a semester.  Then the winnowing down process has to occur, hopefully with help from a state’s standards and a cohesive Social Studies department.  I had an excellent group of mentors in my first school in Upstate New York, with many years of teaching experience and they all but gave me my curriculum, but the day-to-day application of that curriculum was still up to me in many cases. There were days where Don and Ethel would ask me what I was doing and respond with, “well, that’s interesting” and I knew immediately that “interesting” meant, “What the heck are you doing??”

Beyond the content preparation, Erica did say that writing papers for her content classes did help her in assigning and editing student writing (Erica, v.t., 2008, p.3).  In the process of our annual reviews and promotion stages the tenure-track professors have to provide examples of student work which display the amount of feedback provided by professors.  This practice reinforces the importance of writing, with proper feedback for Grand Valley students and also presents a good role model for our teacher candidates.

Pearls of Wisdom, 2008

Erica’s one “pearl of wisdom” during this interview in 2008 was the importance of searching for teaching jobs outside of the state of Michigan.  She mentioned earlier in the interview that GVSU was not helpful when it came to her job search.  At that time, she also thought the Michigan schools were less supportive of new teachers, but she was very happy with the support she received at her high school near Houston (Erica, v.t., 2008, p.5).

2015

By the fall of 2015 Erica had a new role in Katy ISD, a few miles west of Spring Branch.  I met her at Cinco Ranch High School, which had an enrollment of approximately 3300 students. Katy ISD had around 100,000 students and nine high schools at that time. This school was designated a “high performing school”.  This school was in stark contrast to Spring Branch. That school had a 90 % ‘free and reduced lunch’ student population.  Cinco Ranch percentage was 3% (Erica, f.n., 2015, p.2).  99% of the students passed the state test, with the caveat that a passing score was around 50%.  Erica’s was no longer teaching students. She was teaching teachers in her role as Social Studies Coach.  She worked with 30 teachers, mostly male, in all the Social Studies content areas.

I attended a meeting she organized with a group of teachers.  Erica’s discussion was based on the most commonly incorrectly answered questions on a common assessment.  During my teaching career I did analyze my students’ test results in order to better understand how I might improve my teaching and test writing, but I often lacked the time to carefully analyze all my tests and certainly rarely had the time to meet with fellow teachers to discuss common problems with assessments.  In line with most states’ standardized tests the typical question format for this district was multiple choice questions.  During the discussion the teachers said that grading essays would be too much work (Erica, f.n., 2015, p.1).  There was some writing going in their classes, but not as a part of the school’s common assessments. The commonly missed questions for this particular assessment were the following terms: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Harlem Renaissance, lynching, Sacco and Vanzetti, and understanding the word “inconsistent”, connecting “free enterprise” with business, “dry” with no alcohol, the 18th Amendment, “Red Scare”, Communism, Russia and the correct placement of events in timelines (Erica, f.n., 2015, p.1).

At Erica’s disposal was a software program entitled Eduphoria (http://www.eduphoria.net/ accessed May 13, 2019).  This program allowed the teachers to share data.  While sharing data amongst teachers seemed like a good idea the sharing of “data” amongst the students was not celebrated by the teachers, specifically sharing the test information.  A school policy in 2015 said that the students had a right to keep their tests “for their personal records”.  The teachers were definitely not enthused by this policy.  They argued that it took much time and effort to build a good test and that “only cheaters” would benefit from having the tests released to students. The teachers assumed that the students would immediately share the “data” on social media (Erica, f.n., 2015, p.1).

Interview, 2015

Defining Success, 2015

Erica’s answer to this question this time around was “the ability to stay flexible and change and continue to do what is best for your students…evaluating what your students need and how you can best serve them” (Erica, v.t., 2015, p.1).  She said that it is difficult to prepare anyone for the year to year changes in school population and the period to period changes in the make-up of classes.  What might work in one class in one year might not work with another class, whether in different school years or different hours of the same day.  She did credit GVSU with establishing a successful foundation for writing lesson plans, being creative and staying organized.  She also thought GVSU did a good job getting teaching candidates up in front of other people and presenting versus what she encountered with Texas teacher preparation. She admitted that Texas teacher candidates might have had adequate content preparation, but the new teachers apparently did not have that practice and thus they were nervous and unsure of themselves in their teaching debuts. The program at GVSU provided both the content and pedagogy for success and teacher candidates had a good idea before too late in their college careers as to their potential success in the classroom.  I know from discussions with my former students in Texas that due to rapid population growth there were many teaching openings and that stress resulted in many “alternative certification” teachers in the system with no comprehensive preparation for teaching. (Erica, v.t. 2015, p.2).

Erica reinforced the importance of Grand Valley State’s ‘two placement’ policy.  Her half-day teacher assisting placement was at Grandville High School, a suburban school, mostly middle to upper middle class.  Her full day student teaching experience was at Fennville Middle School, a more rural setting.  The student population included many children from migrant farm-working families and even though Erica related that her home was not too far from Fennville she had her eyes opened based on the differences in backgrounds from her life experience and that of her students.  The children were at the mercy of their parents’ cyclical working conditions and Erica had some of those students in her classes for only eight weeks before they had to move for their parents’ work.  These students were disconnected from the community and the school.  Erica related that it was an important part of her teacher preparation in that she had to find ways to connect with these disconnected students (Erica, v.t., p.2, 2015).

Challenges, 2015

Erica’s biggest challenge at first was adapting to a new state with a new set of circumstances.  She did not know anyone.  She was near a large city, Houston, and she was young and on her own for the first time in her life.  She did adapt and flourish, which is good news to any student facing the challenge of moving to find new employment.  Her second challenge is one common to many teachers; how to adapt to the almost yearly changing educational initiatives.  “So, you get a new administrative team, you get a new leader, someone who goes and reads a book this summer and now everything is going to be geared around that book.  I think education really changes a lot.  Too often, too much and really for unwarranted reasons so I feel like a lot of times we are reinventing the wheel and I think that is really in any district” (Erica, v.t., p.2-3, 2015).  Along with the changes in policy come changes in the paper work and minute details necessary when those initiatives are put in place and that work bogs teachers down.  Erica believed this ‘bog’ resulted in less teacher creativity and more of teachers just ‘following their administrator leader’.  She quickly added that this ‘bog’ did not exist with her current position in 2015 as social studies coach in the Katy ISD.  Erica would much rather see a concentration on a few goals or initiatives every year and not 10. Then if you mix in the difficulty of teaching in a low performing district and those day to day challenges it makes the job of dealing with constant change much more difficult.  In Erica’s words, “If the teachers can’t tell you what the initiatives are off the top of their heads then they are not going to be practicing them” (Erica, v.t., p.3, 2015).  At this point I related to Erica another teacher’s experience back in Michigan where the school went through three daily schedule changes in three years with almost no justification in that teacher’s eyes.  Change for the sake of change is not a good plan for improving education.

At this point Erica related a bad experience at her former Houston area school. For some reason the administration decided it was a good idea to change teachers’ classrooms every year for three years in a row and change how those teachers and their departments were arranged. In part she thought that some administrators become out of touch with the reality of teaching, especially if they are years removed from the classroom (Erica, v.t., p.4, 2015).

How did she deal with these challenges?  Erica reached out to other teachers who shared the same type of experiences since they would understand best the stresses in her life. Now, as a part of the administrative team she was reaching out to the administrators, but not cutting off contact with the teachers who had to live with administrative decisions.  She said it was important to draw upon different perspectives and experiences in making decisions on how to handle situations.  Erica thought that teachers who isolate themselves from others have the biggest problems dealing with stressful situations. “I definitely wouldn’t take the ‘lonesome warrior’ approach because you want to survive the school year and have some good material to build off of for next year and the best way to do that is to get it from as many people as possible” (Erica, v.t., p.5, 2015).

Motivation, 2015

In her position as coach to other teachers in 2015 Erica stayed motivated by knowing she was helping other teachers deal with day-to-day stress by providing instructional support through the correlation of data on test results, finding new teaching resources and providing positive feedback for their teaching.  If she positively impacted one teacher that positivity might be reflected through that teacher’s 150 students. Erica put it this way,

“I never had an instructional coach so I guess I pride myself off of, maybe, just imagining what would I want someone to do for me if I had that person when I was teaching?  I would want that person to be reliable and trustworthy and consistent, but also be knowledgeable.  So those are the things that help me stay motivated and if I could create the perfect person for that role what would it look like?  I did ask the teachers at the beginning of the year how would they describe the best instructional coach and then I read through their comments so I could see what their expectations were and then I could set my own goals and hopefully fulfill what they wanted me to do because there was someone in my role last year so I knew coming in that I would quote, “Have big shoes to fill” as they were telling me so I wanted to come in and not make a lot of changes. But just do what had been done before and then slowly ease in and really develop relationships with them because I think the first step with being an instructional coach is developing a relationship with the teachers. (Erica, v.t., p.5-6, 2015)

Erica admits that her role expanded beyond just being a coach.  Establishing personal relationships with her teachers also meant that at times she provided teachers a person who listened to their venting, whether it was subject or school related or not.  She wanted the teachers to know she was “there” for them, in whatever capacity they needed her, as long as those relationships did not detract from the job at hand.

Strategies and Methods, 2015

Erica thought the sage on the stage era of education was over.  The focus was now on the students and how they learned versus how the teacher wanted to teach.  Her approach with the teachers was to offer a new idea or strategy once a week and whether or not the teachers adopted her ideas was up to them, but if she provided one teacher with a new way of approaching their teaching then it was worth her time and effort.  She knew that some teachers are ‘first adopters’ and would constantly try out new ideas or approaches but other teachers might be more resistant to change.  She wanted to create a “ladder” for success for those teachers, where the rungs might be an easy upward movement.  Her district’s approach in promoting change in teaching strategies was focused on the students’ future success broadly and not with too specific goals in mind for each teacher or the district.  At this time Erica’s district, in terms of Social Studies instruction was focused on helping students’ analytical skills and more specifically thinking and writing like a historian (Erica, v.t., p.9, 2015). (https://sheg.stanford.edu/history-lessons?f[0]=topic:8#main-content#main-content, accessed June 10, 2019) (https://www.historians.org/teaching-and-learning/teaching-resources-for-historians/teaching-and-learning-in-the-digital-age/the-history-of-the-americas/the-conquest-of-mexico/for-teachers/setting-up-the-project/historical-thinking-skills, accessed June 10, 2019).

Evaluation, 2015

At Erica’s first school in Texas, she was evaluated by a different administrator every year for 7 or 8 years.  With a different point of view every year there was no commonality or consistency.  One administrator might be focused on one ‘key to success’ while another might have a different view of what makes an effective teacher.  She did say that after her first few years, because she received high marks on her evaluations, that she was only spot-checked with five or 10 or 15 minute ‘drop-ins’ by administrators. She did think that the evaluations were useful and that they did provide some effective feedback, but also recognized that her students scored well on the state-wide tests and that circumstance led to the decreased time and amount of evaluations (Erica, v.t. 2015, p.11).

The good evaluations went by the wayside, however, when Erica began working as an instructional coach for her first district in Texas.  Her evaluator was a former friend and they had a long-term relationship.  Erica received her first “terrible” evaluation. She knew that she was new at this job and predicted that she would receive some constructive criticism but apparently the criticism went beyond “constructive”.  Erica thought that having this friend as an evaluator served as a conflict of interest and the review ended their seven-year friendship. Erica’s refused to sign the evaluation which meant that she did not agree with it.  Normally that refusal to sign would have resulted in a new evaluator being assigned, but Erica took a job with the Katy District as an instructional coach and that effectively ended the review process in her old school.   Erica’s other point about the evaluation process at her old school was that she thought evaluators  should actually have content background for the teachers they were evaluating.  At this point in the interview, I laughed a little bit.  One of the strengths of my education and training at Cortland State and the main reason I took the position at Grand Valley State was that there were, and are, content people involved with the training and evaluation of students in their content areas.  Content and pedagogy should go hand-in-hand.  Just because you know how to teach you do not necessarily know how to connect the information and concepts and vice versa, just because you know the information and concepts does not mean you know how to connect with the students.  Further, in Erica’s previous school, the evaluators were shuffled to a new group of teachers each year, with no opportunity for evaluation over a long period of time by the same person.  Whether or not an evaluation instrument on its own would give a different evaluator a good sense of teaching progress is questionable, especially given the fact that Erica said that different evaluators focused on different points in their evaluations.  Erica hoped that there was a better system of long-term, constructive evaluation than she had witnessed to this point in her career (Erica, v.t., 2015, p.12).  She was also critical of “drop in” evaluations which were announced weeks ahead of time. These evaluations might result in 10 minute “dog and pony” shows that would not allow for careful examination of what was going on in the classroom.  She admitted that some administrators had “bigger fish to fry” or more pressing problems, e.g. student behavior cases, than short “drop in” evaluations. She admitted that a person with an English Language Ar background might make a good Social Studies evaluator due to a strong connection between those two areas.  Most good Social Studies teachers have their students write, know the importance of good communication and share some similar goals in terms of curriculum outcomes (critical thinking skills and clear communication of ideas both orally and in written form).  Erica did not want to be the sole evaluator for a math teacher since her content background in math curriculum was lacking.  She knew the basic bones and organization of an efficiently run classroom, but classroom efficiency is only a part of good teaching.

Mentoring, 2015

When asked about her current district’s approach to mentoring Erica thought it was great. She thought a good mentor should be an experienced teacher with the ability to bond to their mentees.  Her previous district and school had a high teacher turnover rate and thus mentors might have only a few years of experience and were constantly changing.

Erica described the change in mentoring when she arrived at Cinco Ranch:

So that’s not a very good example of how effective it can work, but  on this campus and in this district it has been phenomenal.  Going through an institute and training and always having people reaching out to you, asking you how they can help you and what can they do for you.  And then you meet once a week.  You can talk to them on the phone whenever you want.  You can text them.  Really having the opportunity to learn from them and grow, instead of just having this person that is on this sheet of paper that has your name next to it and just says, “Mentor”.  It actually means something (Erica, v.t., 2015, p.13).

Admittedly Cinco Ranch had more resources and a higher socio-economic status than Spring Branch but for Erica it had more to do with the organization in a district than mere money.  However, a poor district with poor teacher morale with mentors simply assigned was obviously going to have problems mentoring new teachers.  I have witnessed some schools where mentors accepted their positions because it was a bump in pay and without careful oversight of their duties and responsibilities their mentoring was not particularly helpful for inexperienced teachers. In other words, there needs to be mentor mentoring and evaluation.  Erica had not heard of mentors being paid for  what they do. She did think that mentors could be offered professional development credit for mentoring or that volunteering for mentoring might be a way to build up a resume.  Of course, if a teacher did not need professional development or the desire for building a resume, what might  be a way to convince an experienced, successful teacher to take on a mentoring role with a rookie?  In my experience, teachers realize that having an unsuccessful teacher in their hall or vicinity leads to potential problems outside of that rookie’s classroom.

Continuing Education, 2015

Erica received her Master’s in Educational Leadership, a path that many of my GVSU students took, both in Michigan and elsewhere. This path did not necessarily mean they wished to become administrators or instructional coaches, but they saw it as a way to improve their teaching and also move along the salary schedule.  I admit that there were times I took graduate  coursework in order to satisfy accreditation requirements, but for the most part I saw post graduate work as a means of improving my content and pedagogical background and thus become a better teacher.  Erica thought her graduate degree meant she developed a better relationship with the students, and at the same time, receive a better understanding of what administrators faced in doing their jobs effectively.  She also said that her coursework in school law gave her a better understanding of what teaching is today.

An important feature of her work as a teacher coach in Katy was the focus on constantly reading as a team as a way of improving their teaching. She mentioned several books that I had not heard of from a pedagogical point of view. Erica said her group of teachers were invested in the reading and the conversation surrounding the books which helped everyone in their classrooms.  It was obvious that Erica was a life-long learner.

Pearls of Wisdom, 2015

Erica admitted that she had no idea about amount of time and level of time management  required for a new teacher to be successful.  If she had to do it all over again she would be better at asking for help versus going it alone.  She knew now that there are shortcuts teachers take to lighten their teaching load without sacrificing the quality of their teaching; simple things like having students collect papers instead of a teacher walking around the room picking up assignments. Erica cautioned new teachers that they need to find a “work/life balance” and not to get burned out by spending countless hours each day preparing for class and grading papers.  Erica said all teachers need to find ways to be revitalized and refreshed in order that the job does not run them down.  She knew teachers who were still putting in 80 to 100-hour weeks, ten years into their careers and she did not know how they maintain that pace.

Erica has since moved back to Michigan, has married, has a step daughter and has since given birth to another daughter.  She works as a supervising teacher for GVSU in the Detroit area schools. Based on her Facebook page, she continues to learn, continues to have a healthy work/life balance and is thoroughly enjoying married life.