It has been awhile since I posted to this blog.  With the craziness of the Spring semester and then summer break, I have not had a lot of updates to post.  But we are now well into a new school year, and research and inquiry are again taking place! My assistant principal and I have begun meeting with new teachers on our campus and are sharing a variety of topics and information with them as they embark on this difficult yet rewarding career.  I will share some of these current experiences in the coming weeks, but today I want to post a draft of my dissemination paper on the topic of New Teacher Academies.  This project is in no way done, but this information will give interested parties a little insight into my thoughts and processes as I continue on this path. 

The Effect of New Teacher Academies on Teacher and Student Performance

Needs Assessment

As the campus coordinator and leader of the Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports team, I spend a great deal of time analyzing discipline data.  Over time, it became apparent that the same teachers were writing the majority of the discipline referrals on our campus and that the same students were receiving discipline referrals on a regular basis.  Upon closer analysis, I discovered that our five new teachers fell at either end of the referral spectrum: three of them wrote excessive pink slips for everything from not having supplies to fighting and two of them wrote almost no pink slips for the entire year.  These discoveries led me to look more closely at the training new teachers receive and how to use this training to effect change in new teachers’ classrooms.

Objectives and Vision of the Action Research Project

After analyzing the data and observing new teachers’ classrooms, I began to ask the following questions:

• What effect do regular, weekly meetings with the new teachers on my campus have on increasing student time on-task and decreasing office referrals from these classes?  
• What effect do these meetings have on new teacher morale and retention rates?

These questions led me to discuss the extension of New Teacher Academy from a beginning-of-year event to a weekly training and discussion time.  I knew that the new teachers received many great tools, ideas, processes, and procedures in their training, but I also knew they were so overwhelmed that many of those things probably fell to the wayside very quickly.  With that in mind, my assistant principal and I wrote goals for ourselves and the new teachers with whom we wanted to effect change:

• In the 2011-12 school year, the number of discipline referrals will be reduced by 25%.
• In the 2011-12 school year, teacher time on task will be increased by 15%, as measured by administrative walk-throughs and evaluations.
• In the 2011-12 school year, student time on task will be increased by 25%, as measured by teacher observation and evaluation and administrative evaluation.

We then began writing lessons and activities geared toward the areas of concern we identified as we conducted informal walk-throughs of these classrooms.

Review of the Literature and Action Research Strategy

Articulation of the Vision

In the spring of 2011, after identifying the struggles our new teachers were facing, we determined that New Teacher Academy must begin immediately.  The main group to whom we needed to communicate our vision were the new teachers.  Because we were so far into the school year, this was not an easy subject to address without making the new teachers feel that we did not feel they could do their jobs adequately and alienating them.  In articulating our reason for creating the New Teacher Academy and our vision for the group, we stressed that we knew they were working hard and doing their best to meet the needs of their students.  We also acknowledged that we had not given them adequate support throughout the first half of the school year to increase their successes and reduces their struggles.  We then shared our goals for the second semester and how we intended to use New Teacher Academy to attain those goals.  By the end, the new teachers felt supported, appreciated, and ready to work together to improve the coming semester. 

Management of the Organization

This project has been organized and managed primarily by my assistant principal and me.  She was already meeting with the new teachers sporadically to discuss certain topics as she saw a need arise.  After analyzing the discipline data, I proposed a more consistent and structured meeting and topics to aid new teachers in developing their skills and proficiency as teachers.  She and I then worked together to observe the classrooms of our new teachers and develop a list of topics to cover each week in New Teacher Academy.  Because both of our schedules were already so busy, we divided the topics on the list between us based on our individual strengths and areas of interest and alternated the topics each week so that each of us was responsible for planning every two weeks.  We also looked to teacher leaders on our campus to lead some of the meetings to ease our load, but more importantly, to begin developing those leadership skills and promote peer teaching and learning.

Management of the Operations

Because the majority of the planning and work required for this project rested with the assistant principal and me, there were very few issues regarding consensus, communication, and conflict.  We get along very well, and I look to her constantly for advice and guidance in instructional matters, so this was a great opportunity for me to continue to learn a great deal from her.  The biggest conflict we faced throughout the project was the negative attitudes of a couple of the new teachers with whom we were working.  Even though we were very careful in our presentation of weekly New Teacher Academy meetings, there were still those that felt we considered them bad teachers that needed remediation in order to do their jobs appropriately and brought that attitude with them to our meetings.  The assistant principal led the first two meetings in order to model for me how to deal with the negativity appropriately and did a wonderful job of involving those people in the discussion and helping them to see on their own that they were good teachers but had areas that needed attention in order to make their classes run more smoothly.

Response to Community Interest and Needs

Because our campus has a much higher percentage of Special Education students than others in our district, this is always an area of concern and discussion when we implement new projects, strategies, and programs.  In this case, we looked at the discipline data for Special Education students in our new teachers’ classes.  Because these numbers were higher than we felt they probably should be, this became a primary focus of our classroom observations.  Our observations led us to determine that new teachers probably did not receive adequate training in working with Special Education students or how to properly read the paperwork related to these students in order to properly serve them.  This also led us to develop topics related to differentiating instruction and working with a variety of students and instructional levels within a single class.  We involved our diagnostician and Special Education teachers in part of the planning and discussion for these topics in order to maintain continuity and consistency throughout the building regarding how these elements have been previously implemented.