文章基本信息

标题：Blue Valley's lessons in retention - 2002 Partnership
作者：Patrick J. Kiger
期刊名称：Workforce
印刷版ISSN：1092-8332
出版年度：2002
卷号：Sept 2002
出版社：Crain Communications, Inc.

Blue Valley's lessons in retention - 2002 Partnership

Patrick J. Kiger

The highly regarded Blue Valley School District saw ominous signs in its teacher turnover rates. In partnership with the Blue Valley National Education Association and the University of Kansas, quality and retention improved.

When Ryan Ellis walked into a high-school classroom in the Blue Valley School District in Overland Park, Kansas, for the first time last fall, he was unnerved. His dream was to get students excited about discussing The Adventures of Hucklebery Finn and other classic works of literature. He hoped to turn that passion into a career.

All the same, the rookie teacher wondered if he was up to the job, in an affluent suburban school district where administrators and parents set high standards. He promised himself that if he ever thought he wasn't making the grade, he would quit.

Blue Valley's HR department also worried about whether Ellis would succeed or fail. With student test scores that consistently rank in the top 10 percent of the nation, the district has a reputation for the academic excellence that comes with highly skilled, veteran faculty members. Blue Valley's teachers average 14 years of experience; an impressive 66 percent have advanced degrees. But since the late 1990s, administrators have been concerned about maintaining the quality of their workforce. "We ourselves never actually reached the point that we were in a crisis, but on a state and national level there were a lot of warning signs," says Sandra Chapman, Blue Valley's director of human resources staff development. Nationwide, the school-age population is surging, and the departure of baby-boom-age faculty--thanks to pension plans that allow them to retire with full benefits in their mid-50s--already is creating a dire situation. Over the next decade, public schools across the country will need 2.4 million new teachers--nearly as many as the 2.8 million presently at work in classrooms.

While college education programs are scrambling to produce graduates to meet the need, these novices have an alarmingly high washout rate. Nationwide, 30 to 50 percent of new teachers leave the profession within five years because of poor performance or because they are disillusioned. At Blue Valley, the failure rate wasn't quite that high, but it was still troubling. In the 1998-99 school year, for example, 13 percent of the new teachers weren't rehired for the following year because of poor performance. That was nearly twice the district's overall teaching-staff turnover rate, and it meant that the district was losing new teachers at a faster rate than its veterans were retiring.

Blue Valley administrators knew that just filling those jobs with more new hires wouldn't work. Research indicates that it takes a teacher several years to develop the skills needed to reach children with different learning styles. For the school district to keep its lofty reputation intact, new hires had to stay long enough to develop into talented veterans. The problem wasn't a lack of quality applicants. Blue Valley's reputation and pay scale--the average Blue Valley teacher earned $45,000, the fourth-best compensation among Kansas school districts-attracted 10 for each opening. Instead, new teachers who should have succeeded weren't making it.

Chapman and others gradually realized that a solution would require major changes in the initiation process for teachers. In the past, rookies had plunged in with little formal help from administrators or experienced colleagues. "The old culture was sort of 'I had to survive it, so you'll have to do it, too,"' Chapman says.

Thus, Blue Valley developed the Alliance for Educational Excellence program, a new-teacher-development initiative providing orientation seminars, workplace mentoring, and continual in-the-classroom evaluation and training to help new teachers improve their performance. The program gives new teachers an opportunity to build on their academic credentials with a master's degree from the University of Kansas through a special program in which they can actually take many of their classes at Blue Valley and conduct research on issues in their own classrooms.

"The unique thing about the program is its comprehensive nature," Chapman says. "Some districts have tried various parts of this solution--peer assistance, or graduate study--but combining the elements in one package is new. Basically, we're trying to focus on the different needs that a new teacher would have, and address them all at once." Another distinctive aspect is the district's extensive use of surveys and feedback to continually monitor and improve the program's performance. Finally, the program is a product of partnership. On one level, it's an alliance that includes school-district administrators and the local teachers' union, who've put aside their sometimes divergent interests to work together, and the University of Kansas. But on another level, it also is a cooperative effort between the district's HR professionals and veteran teachers, who've been persuaded by HR to contribute many hours of work--with only modest compensation--to help their new peers.

The results of the Alliance initiative have been startling. Since implementing the program three years ago, Blue Valley hasn't had to fire any new teachers for poor performance. Given the previous 13 percent failure rate, that's a net gain of 27 veteran teachers who might not otherwise be in the classroom. Additionally, Blue Valley has created a model for how to bring together various players and coordinate their efforts, in order to assist new employees from a variety of angles and give them the best possible chance to succeed. For that reason, Blue Valley is the winner of this year's Optimas award for Partnership.

Using veterans to assist new hires

New teachers begin with six days of orientation seminars before the start of the school year. The program includes advice on teaching fundamentals such as curriculum, instruction, and classroom management. One important aspect is a frank discussion between the new hires and veteran teachers about Blue Valley's workplace culture and community expectations for teacher performance. "Blue Valley has a lot of parents who are educated, well-to-do, and have very high expectations for their kids. There's a lot of pressure on teachers from the get-go, and a young teacher has to be mentally prepared to deal with it' Chapman says.

One of the orientation program's innovative features is the "demonstration classroom" segment. A group of new teachers is invited to spend a half day in the classroom of a veteran teacher who is preparing for the coming year. "We pair them with someone who teaches the same subject or age group that they'll be teaching," says Walter Carter, Blue Valley's district coordinating teacher for staff development. "There are important differences between teaching, say, kindergartners and fifth-graders, and you can't address that effectively in an auditorium full of all different sorts of teachers. The demonstration classroom gives them a very specific model to follow, and a chance to talk about very specific issues-how to manage a certain class in the first week, how to deal with parents of children of a certain grade-level. Our feedback from surveys is that new teachers find it very useful, because it helps them to prepare specifically for what they'll be doing."

Ryan Ellis says the program also gives new teachers the message that it is okay for them to ask their peers for help, and that in fact they're expected to do so. "You see right off that it's not a sink-or-swim environment, where they wait until you make a mistake and then criticize you. It's okay that you don't know everything. You're allowed to ask questions, and you know there are people around who want to help you figure it all out."

That message was reinforced by a mentorship program that paired new and more experienced teachers who were in the same grade or subject. The mentors are volunteers and receive a nominal $400 stipend for their efforts. To qualify, mentors receive 10 hours of specialized training on coaching techniques. In particular, mentors prepare to offer "just in time" support, in which they're available on short notice to help a new teacher work through an immediate challenge.

Veteran English teacher Rita Norton, for example, helped Ellis get through some rough spots in the American Literature course that he taught to high-school juniors. "One of the books I had to teach was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," Ellis says. "There are a lot of tricky things about teaching that book--for example, how to deal with the racial issues. She showed me what she'd done in her classes in the past, how to encourage the kids to talk about it and to form strong opinions, rather than just to sit there." When Ellis expressed a desire to include some works by Native American writers, Norton provided him with some hard-to-find texts that she'd collected over the years and used in her own classes.

Continual critiques to improve--and validate--performance

In addition to quick, timely bits of advice from mentors, new teachers like Ellis also receive more extensive critiques and coaching from another experienced colleague. The Peer Assistance program actually began as a standalone pilot initiative in 1997, but its value quickly became so apparent that Blue Valley expanded it and incorporated it into the larger Alliance program. It features four veteran teachers, who take three years off from the classroom to work with new hires and help them develop their skills. Each peer assistant has a caseload of 25 to 30 new teachers. The veteran meets with his or her charges at least eight times in the course of the year, and spends much of that time actually observing the novice teacher in the classroom.

Those observation sessions are different from the sort of evaluation that a new teacher might get from a supervisor. "On some of the observations, we're watching specific things that the new teacher has asked us to look at, and gathering data," says Deb Satariano, a veteran peer assistant. "For example, the person might ask me to track how many kids are off-task when she's teaching, or how much time she wastes after answering a question before moving on. Those numbers can help a person to make subtle adjustments to her teaching technique, and become much more effective."

In Ellis's case, his peer assistant, Kathi Flexman, scrutinized how he moved in the classroom. "Movement is a really important attention-getting technique when you're teaching," Ellis says. "So she came in one day with a graph of the room and the location of the students' desks. Then she sat through the class with a stopwatch, and every 15 seconds plotted where I was in the room. Afterward, she showed me the pattern. It was really a surprise, not at all what I remembered in my head. We also talked about why I spent so much time over by these students, as opposed to other ones-your goal, generally, is to spread yourself around evenly-and how to use techniques such as walking behind students, so that they have to turn their heads and concentrate more on you. Or how to kneel down next to a student who's whispering to somebody else, so that you can regain the student's attention without turning it into a power struggle. This is the kind of stuff that they barely touched on in college, if at all. But it really can make a big difference in your success as a teacher."

Turning job improvement into an academic credential

Another component of the Alliance program is an optional master's degree in education. The non-thesis program, set up with the cooperation of the University of Kansas, gives new teachers a chance to take nine credit hours of classes taught in the evenings at school-district buildings by university professors and school-district staff members. They use textbooks supplied by the district. It took considerable negotiation to work out a partnership with the university, Chapman says. "They're a research university--for them, the purpose of a master's degree is to prepare for a doctorate. For us, the focus is acquiring and improving skills that can be used in the classroom. But we managed to work out those differences."

So far, about 100 teachers have enrolled in the program. The course work includes "action research" assignments, in which teachers work on an issue from their own classrooms--for example, how to use a computer more effectively as a teaching tool. They develop a potential strategy to address the situation, and then document its effectiveness. "The goal is to apply theory that you normally would learn in a master's program," Chapman says. "Basically, they're getting credit for helping to solve a problem with their kids. That gets at another issue that we've discovered with new teachers: they have a lot of knowledge and background already, but they tend to fall apart when it comes to applying it. This program is designed to help them put it all together."

A cooperative effort, on multiple levels

One of the keys to the Alliance program's effectiveness is that it has the strong support of both district administrators and the Blue Valley National Education Association, the teachers' union--two groups that in many districts are bitter adversaries on personnel issues. One reason: HR worked from the start with the union and gave it an important role in shaping the program's content. "When I got the job [in 1998], the NEA officials actually came to me first and wanted to start a mentoring program," Chapman says. "I said, 'That's great, because I want to talk with you about some ideas for staff development that I want to work on.'"

HR and union officials began having informal discussions, out of which came ideas such as the expanded induction process and the in-house master's degree program. HR took those joint ideas and ran with them--doing support research, writing proposals, seeking outside grants, and winning political support within the school administration.

The union supported HR's efforts to launch the program with its own lobbying. "When we did our collective bargaining that year," union president Sherrelyn R. Smith says, "one of the things we actually negotiated for was funding for the program. We felt very strongly that this was something from which our teachers would get a lot of benefit."

Blue Valley's HR team and the teachers' union have continued to work together to ensure that the program runs smoothly. Mentoring and peer-assistance programs sometimes venture into tricky areas of management-labor relations. The veteran teacher-coaches inevitably must discuss new teachers' development with the principals who supervise them, if only to ensure that their advice doesn't conflict with the supervisors'. But they have to be careful not to share so much that the new teachers feel unable to candidly discuss their weaknesses with the coaches. HR and the union have achieved a comfortable balance, in part by giving new teachers some control over what information about them is passed along. A report from one of the peer assistant's observation sessions becomes part of the new teacher's end-of-the-year evaluation, But the new teacher gets to pick the session that is to be included.

Teacher-coaches are able to win new teachers' confidence because they often act as advocates for the new teachers with their supervisors. "If I know a teacher is having trouble, I'll ask, 'Is it okay if I talk with your principal about this issue?'" peer assistant Satariano says. "I always tell the principal exactly what we're doing to improve the person's performance--and also all the things that the new teacher is doing well, to help the principal have a balanced view."

HR and the union say their partnership has paid off. Not only has the Alliance program improved the district's new-teacher retention rate, but it's also become a recruiting tool. "These days, when potential candidates interview, they want to know what sort of programs a district offers to support their teaching," Smith says. "We have a lot to offer them. It's a way to ensure that we continue to attract the top people, and that we keep them."

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