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APPENDIX A

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR THE

WORK OF THE

METROPOLITAN ATLANTA BEGINNING TEACHER SUPPORT AND INDUCTION CONSORTIUM

 

Communities Develop Teachers

The underlying theme for the Consortium is that induction communities are more powerful than relying on a single mentor for beginning teachers. The community includes all school personnel, teacher education, parents, students and others involved in the school.

Goals

The goal of the Consortium is to increase student achievement by supporting, developing, and retaining committed and effective beginning teachers for our schools. The support component will be designed to: (1) provide facilitating environments for beginning teachers in the most meaningful place, the schools in which they work; (2) identify and provide resources needed for beginning teachers and all others involved in the induction process; (3) allow for adequate, quality time for teachers to make the transition from beginner to effective veteran in a positive manner; and (4) prepare several types of trained personnel to deliver services needed by beginning teachers. The development component will be designed to: (1) provide a longitudinal plan which recognizes that growth into an effective veteran is not a quick or linear process; that is, progress will come over time, and likely include some periods of slow- or no-growth in professional development; (2) focus on teacher reflection and critical thinking, in the classroom and on broader issues; (3) feature an interactive process to promote full participation among novice teachers, trained mentors, and all others who will provide support and induction services; and (4) to assess student learning outcomes and the processes used in the model itself. Eventually it will be imperative to know how well the model works in facilitating the induction of beginning teachers and how well the beginning teachers facilitate their own students’ learning. If the support and development functions of the model are effective, it will then lead to increased teacher retention by: (1) establishing a school-wide mentoring environment for the induction period; (2) providing initial attention on teachers’ needs and induction support rather than assessment; (3) giving a broader resource base for teachers and mentors; (4) contributing to increased teacher efficacy; and (5) ultimately leading to increased effectiveness and professional satisfaction.

Assumptions of the Consortium

1. To be effective, an induction model must focus on the needs of beginning teachers. Some of those needs can be generally identified from the knowledge base on beginning teachers, while other needs must be personally expressed by individual teachers, based on their training, context, efficacy, skills, and professional readiness.

2. Beginning teachers have many and complex needs, emanating from multiple sources. Therefore, an effective induction model must provide services from various people (a mentor, other teachers, teacher educators, building administrators), agencies (district, university, department of education), and sources (documents, electronic communication, and verbal interactions). The Consortium Model is strongly based on an assumption that the needs of beginning teachers cannot be met by a single designated veteran teacher, placed in charge of his/her development.

3. Effective induction requires adequate resources, including but not limited to: trained personnel, release time and/or compensation for beginning teachers and mentors, communication technology, and opportunities to interact with other beginning teachers.

4. The Consortium assumes that beginning teachers have completed a teacher education program and are certified in their teaching field during the induction years. This allows consortium personnel to better anticipate the levels of knowledge, skills, experience and needs of the novice teachers they will serve, leading to a more effective mentoring plan.

5. Teacher induction begins during preservice and continues until a teacher can independently and effectively assume the full scope of professional responsibilities, including the promotion of achievement for all students. Therefore, any induction model must monitor a teacher’s progress until the induction process is complete, irrespective of time in-service. For some teachers that development will come faster; others will need more time. The induction and support process must be interactive, not directive. Effective induction is something accomplished with beginning teachers, not to them or simply for them. Beginning teachers must learn how to be active participants in their own development through reflection and critical thinking facilitated by every person and agency in the induction plan. There should also be reciprocal benefits that accrue for those in mentoring roles, so they can experience professional growth as well.

6. Teacher induction, which includes mentoring, is the shared responsibility of several agencies: the school faculty and administration, the school district administration, the teacher education institution (in particular the Professional Education Faculty and each program’s faculty), and the State Department of Education.

Principles that Undergird the Work of the Consortium

All of the work in the Consortium will be pursued under some common understandings and principles that can promote well articulated efforts across all parts of the project and the evaluation of the project.

1. Needs assessment and support must precede evaluation. Beginning teachers cannot give their undivided attention to the complex process of development while at the same time being under evaluative scrutiny, particularly high stakes evaluation that may determine job continuation. In its first stages, the Consortium calls for the provision of services to: (1) determine beginning teachers’ needs; (2) establish a supportive, interactive environment for teacher induction; (3) give regular feedback and assessment of professional development. Only eventually does the model call for a shift to the determination of a teacher’s effectiveness through critical observation and/or student achievement.

2. Teacher development must be pursued independently from student learning initially. The literature on teacher induction is clear is its recognition that teacher effectiveness takes time to develop. Beginning teachers must first have the necessary knowledge, skills, support, and time in practice and reflection opportunities that contribute to effectiveness before student achievement should be used as an evaluative criterion. Therefore, the Consortium Model calls for teachers to be provided with the needed support, time, reflection, and on-going assessments in the first year of teaching before student achievement measures will be used for evaluative purposes. To hold beginning teachers accountable for student achievement too early risks taking short cuts in their development, and making unfair determinations of their teaching talents.

3. All activities and goals for teachers’ development in the Consortium model should be consistent with currently accepted standards, such as Interstate National Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC) standards for beginning teachers. These standards were developed nationally and are compatible with the Consortium’s priorities for what beginning teachers should know, value, and be able to do. Further, the INTASC standards are used as the foundation for all initial teacher education programs at Georgia State University, providing strong link between preservice training and the Consortium Model’s induction activities. It is expected that the Consortium will regularly benchmark its activities against the INTASC standards. The Consortium will also use appropriate teaching standards developed by the Board of Regents, Georgia Department of Education, and professional organizations (e.g., The National Council for Teachers of Mathematics).

4. The Consortium will devise strategies and procedures for assessing its effectiveness in facilitating the support, development, and retention of beginning teachers in the program using a variety of data sources and types. Those assessments will provide the basis for making decisions to maintain or revise specific project activities in the future.

5. In most induction plans, the assigned mentor plays the central, and often solo, role in the provision of services to the beginning teacher. The fundamental role of the mentor teacher is changed in the Consortium, to that of facilitator (of the overall process) and coordinator (of services needed by the beginning teacher). That is, the mentor teacher carries the primary responsibility of identifying a beginning teacher’s needs, but will not necessarily deliver all the services to meet those needs him/herself.

6. The Consortium will re-examine of the expertise needed by mentor teachers, other professionals, and other agencies participating in the mentoring plan. The model will also lead to new ways in which training is provided. For instance, the Consortium may call for a review of the focus, content and the delivery of TSS certification in Georgia.

7. The primary delivery point for the Consortium is the school in which a beginning teacher works. It is the key reference community within the model. The specific school context can provide the basis for much of the need; therefore services should be based in that setting in order to be most effective. While some out-of-school services are to be anticipated, they should be held to a minimum.

8. The Consortium will develop new communication and mentoring strategies, with a strong reliance on a variety of appropriate technologies for those purposes. Since many parties will participate, and cohorts of beginning teachers in one school district must be linked together, an information infrastructure must be developed to facilitate those activities.

Operating Framework for the Consortium

The Consortium is a large and complex project, with many activities and participants likely spread across several schools and districts. In order to be more effective, it will be necessary for the project to proceed from a coherent framework. The working framework for the Consortium will be the Quality Mentoring Framework (QMF) outlined by Odell and Huling (2000) which includes 20 components within six dimensions. Those six dimensions are:
    1. Determining program purposes (3 components)
    2. Understanding school, district, and university cultures and responsibilities (3 components)
    3. Mentor selection and mentor/novice matching (4 components)
    4. Mentor preparation and development (4 components)
    5. Delineating mentor roles and practices (3 components)
    6. Conducting program administration, implementation and evaluation (3 components)

The QMF can guide the process of any mentoring plan, including the Consortium, but is not so prescriptive as to inhibit the unique characteristics and processes in this model. Each of the 20 components essentially acts a "check point" for discussion, planning, implementation, and assessment in the Consortium project. Therefore, the QMF can provide the framework for planning this model and the basis for summative and formative assessments of the model’s implementation and effectiveness.

Shared Responsibilities in the Consortium Model

The key assumption behind the Consortium model is that the needs of beginning teachers are too varied and too complex for a single person to address, as is now done in all other induction models and programs. That assumption led us to a principle that the induction process must include several key persons and agencies, all working to support, develop and retain effective beginning teachers. We have identified the following list of key participants: beginning teacher; trained mentors; other teachers and resource personnel in the school; school staff and administrative personnel, district administrators, particularly content area supervisors; district staff development leaders; parents and parent-school organizations; university teacher educators; technology experts; content area experts; TSS designers and trainers; others, as determined by the needs of a beginning teacher.

The notion is that each of these participants will provide one or more types of support services for beginning teachers. The assigned mentor will be trained to know how to target specific needs of each beginning teacher and how to enlist specific participants in addressing those needs. The mentor might be viewed as the "head contractor," while all other participants are "sub-contractors," trained and "on call" to the mentor as needs are identified. Each participant group should receive training in the Consortium model and general mentoring processes, with focused training in the area/s that group will most likely be called upon for assistance.