Graduate teachers need coaching, mentoring

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Opinion

Re: Teacher training issues, August 25 letter.

Lara Meyer

I have spent the past month mentoring seven fantastic beginning teachers at one of our local high schools. Whoever has trained them has done a great job. I’m sure the natural talent and intelligence of these graduates also plays a part.

These seven graduates have developed strong positive relationships with their students.

Student engagement data gathered through observations of their teaching shows students are engaged with learning 91 percent of the time. That’s fantastic. The students are reporting they are doing plenty of thinking and learning in class with these graduate teachers. The graduates are keen to become expert teachers as fast as they can. The students being taught by them are very lucky.

I think we need to make sure our graduate teachers, indeed all teachers both in primary and secondary schools, understand how to teach reading. So much relies on our children knowing how to read properly and yet it is not really taught well at training institutions. If you’re a lucky teacher you work at a school that systematically teaches you how to teach reading.

I’ve been showing these graduates how to plan lessons starting with the end in mind, how to differentiate learning based on information about the students’ start point and how to implement research-informed best practice into their lessons.

Teaching is such a complex thing to learn that no training programme can possibly deliver a fully cooked expert teacher into a school. That is why we have a certification process that should provide graduates with a further two years of systematic on-the-job training through coaching and mentoring.

It has been my experience that many graduate teachers start their first teaching job and the mentoring they receive is not well prepared; sometimes the only professional learning they get is when they attend workshops organised away from their school environment. The best learning is about your own class, your students and your practice.

I also see a lot of graduates being deskilled by the teachers around them. I’m sure this is not intentional deskilling but rather because teachers who have been in the job for longer have learned to cut corners and graduates pick up bad habits.

Sometimes teachers have not been able to keep up with the latest research and practices about how to be an expert teacher.

I had to devote about 15 hours a week to professional reading and learning on top of my teaching job to make sure I remained relevant and up to date for my students. I wanted to do that because my students demanded it of me. They would give me instant negative feedback if I wasn’t doing a good job by them!

Ideally school leaders need to find ways to help all teachers find time to keep learning and improving in genuinely useful ways.

If a school’s professional learning plan for teachers — staff meetings, etc — only focuses on things like digital literacy or the latest fad in education, teachers are not learning the things that are most relevant to making them an expert teacher, based on the evidence of their own observable teaching practices.

There is a big difference between being an expert teacher and an experienced teacher. And time in the job doesn’t automatically equate to expertise.