Teacher turnover, especially among urban teachers in their first few years, was a huge problem when I started teaching in '93, and it's still a huge problem today. With this in mind and with hopes of helping this year's newbies navigate the months ahead, I'm reprinting this summer two previous posts about the first-year teaching experience. Here's the first one, originally published August 20, 2011:
At an orientation before my first year of teaching, one of the speakers referred to an article titled,Phases of First-Year Teaching, in which Ellen Moir identifies several phases first-year teachers typically go through. And, according to Moir, they go through them in the same order at roughly the same times, as depicted in the following graph:
What jumped out to me when I first saw this--as it has to pre-service teachers I've shared this with--is how early and abruptly new teachers feel disillusioned. Just six weeks or so after entering their classrooms with high hopes, they're questioning whether they've chosen the right profession. No way would this happen to me, I thought, as I listened to the speaker at orientation.
