David Kauffman, Susan Moore Johnson, Susan M. Kardos, Edward Liu and Heather G. Peske, Teachers College Record
2002
In an intriguing article in the December 2001 issue of Phi Delta Kappan, Harvard ed school professor Susan Moore Johnson and four colleagues explored the so-called "generation gap" between new teachers and those who have spent their professional lives in classrooms. Analyzing the results of interviews with 50 first- and second-year teachers in Massachusetts, the researchers found that newer teachers hold dramatically different views of their profession and expectations for their own careers than do classroom veterans. (See http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=79#1220.) Now Johnson and team have culled another set of observations from those interviews. New teachers, they find, feel "lost at sea" when it comes to their experiences with curricula, state standards and high-stakes testing. Even in states with well developed systems of standards and accountability, fledgling teachers-whose hands are full with such tasks as learning to maintain discipline and navigate school bureaucracy-report that they were not given detailed curricula to help them determine what to teach, how, and when. Rather, testing objectives serve as "proxies" for substantive curricula in many schools and districts. The result is that many new teachers scramble to cobble together lesson plans from one day to the next without coherence or clear understanding of which topics are intellectually most important. Moore and colleagues say their research has several implications. At the state level, policymakers must insist that schools and districts fully align their curricula with state standards. At the school level, principals should maximize novices' effectiveness by encouraging collaboration between them and veterans in creating curricula. And, of course, more R&D is needed to develop and identify the most effective curricula. You can read an executive summary of this report at http://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentID=10822 (requires free registration). For more information on the work of the Project on the Next Generation of Teachers, visit http://www.gse.harvard.edu/~ngt/ or email [email protected].
