Send This Article to a Friend

Newly hatched

By Robert J. Garmston

Journal of Staff Development, Fall 2001, (Vol. 22, No. 4)

Copyright, National Staff Development Council, 2001. All rights reserved.

How we support new teachers either accelerates or stymies the development of high-performing schools. As programs to support beginning teachers proliferate, it’s critical for staff developers to know what new teachers — and the profession — need.

Each new teacher needs to know and grow into what we define as a professional. Each school needs to recognize the practices of a professional community.

What It Means to Be a Professional

Professionals make meaning from complex situations, creatively use specialized knowledge, generate new knowledge, and expand their own teaching repertoire. Professionals’ conceptual knowledge, palette of practical experiences (craft knowledge), and effectiveness are far greater than teachers trained as skilled laborers. Developing craft knowledge without reflecting leads to the practice of teaching as skilled labor. It is shortsighted and ultimately limits the teacher and the profession. While craft knowledge takes a long time to acquire, early staff development practices can accelerate teacher movement toward professionalism.

What a teacher witnesses during this crucial period is emulated. A young chick bonds with its mother, the first thing the baby sees. Biologist Conrad Lorenz once arranged for the chick’s first sight to be a football. Instead of its natural mother, the chick followed the football as it wobbled crazily about, lurching toward uncertain destinations. Humans, too, learn by emulating significant others. Administrators and support providers model professional behavior to new teachers when they show uncertainty, reveal their thinking as they plan, and think aloud with novice teachers as they problem solve.

Staff development that involves coaching new teachers should rely on a collegial approach that helps teachers acquire the skills for self-directed learning.

Art Costa and I have studied effective practices of new teacher programs (Costa & Garmston, in press) and found three interrelated services help new teachers:

Promoting professionalism

Developing teachers as professionals requires that we begin by helping teachers acquire the skills for self-directed learning: self-management, self-monitoring, and self-modification.

Self-management. Engage the teacher in goal-setting. This should be an early and consistent experience. Have the teacher — not the mentor — describe goals, ideas to reach them, and what to look for as evidence of success. When the teacher is seeking rules and recipes, it’s especially important to model that these are useful only in relation to goals, and it is the teacher’s vision, values, and goals that drive instruction. Of course, it’s also appropriate to consult — collegially. Collegial consulting involves regarding the new teacher as a colleague, not an empty vessel, co-planning, thinking aloud together, and providing ideas. Collegial consulting serves two purposes. It accelerates the teacher’s acquisition of craft knowledge and also models (remember that football) what professionals do — they collaborate (Lipton & Wellman, 2001).

Self-monitoring requires consciousness of one’s intentions, feelings, decisions, behaviors, and their effects on instruction. Coaching conversations before teaching raise an in-the-moment awareness during teaching. Ask: "What will you see and hear when students are learning?" "What do you want to be most aware of as you start this lesson?" "What are several ways you might react if that problem comes up?"

Self-modifying involves consciousness, a disposition to self-monitor, and the emotional strength to see one’s self as a contributor to events, not a victim. Coaching questions that invite the teacher to express feelings about the lesson, recall what occurred, analyze it for cause-effect, construct personal learning, and describe ways to apply new insights promote not only the skills of self-modification, but an ability to mold oneself based on reflecting on one’s experiences. Ask the questions: "What are some hunches you have about what led to that?" "What are some inferences you are making?" "Given this experience, what are some new goals you might be setting for yourself?"

Professional Cultures

Rigorous, values-driven, and adaptive collective effort is what turns good schools into exceptional schools, stuck schools into moving schools, and makes the best schools even better (Garmston & Wellman, 1999). When new teacher programs contribute to a "teachers’ professional community" (Louis, 1996), the efforts of both individual teachers and the group are enhanced. A collective sense of responsibility for students develops, and schoolwide student learning increases. Five elements contribute: 1) shared norms and values; 2) a collective focus on student learning; 3) collaboration; 4) less isolated practice; and 5) reflective dialogue.

Schools in which beginning teachers experience both cognitive coaching and collaborative consulting discover that several years later when a new crop of teacher leaders appears. Just as chicks follow a wobbly football, they bring to their emerging leadership functions reflection, collegiality, and a focus on student learning similar to that described in the research on teachers’ professional communities.

References

Costa, A. & Garmston, R. (in press). Cognitive coaching: A foundation for renaissance schools (2nd ed.). Norwood, MA: Christopher Gordon.

Garmston, R. & Wellman, B. (1999). The adaptive school. A sourcebook for developing collaborative groups. Norwood, MA: Christopher Gordon.

Lipton, L. & Wellman, B. with Carlette Humbard. (2001). Mentoring matters: A practical guide to learning-focused relationships. Sherman, CT: MiraVia LLC.

Louis, K.S. et al. (1996). Teachers’ professional community in restructuring schools. American Research Journal, 33(4), 757-798.

3 services that help new teachers

Cognitive Coaching: A colleague-colleague relationship

PURPOSE

• To mediate or to develop self-directed learning

• To maximize effectiveness of actions toward goals

• To build capacity for professional effectiveness

Collaborative Consulting: A mentor-colleague relationship

PURPOSE

• To provide information or technical assistance

• To teach, guide and share expertise

• To improve teaching effectiveness

Evaluating: An authority figure-employee relationship

PURPOSE

• To assess performance based on external criteria

• To generate data for personnel decisions

• To have teachers internalize teaching standards

About the author

Robert J. Garmston is co-founder of the Institute for Intelligent Behavior and a professor emeritus at California State University, Sacramento’s School of Education. You can contact him at 337 Guadalupe Dr., El Dorado Hills, CA 95762-3560, (916) 933-2727, fax (916) 933-2756, e-mail: FABob@aol.com.


Click for NSDC Home Page