How to Make Better Teachers: Let Them Teach with Their Friends?

by JESSE SCACCIA

Is the reason new teachers aren’t better–and that they don’t stick–because they’re lonely? Would our schools actually be better if it the teachers were college buddies as well as professional colleagues?

This is just what was proposed in an op-ed in the New York Times on Sunday by the director of the teaching program at Williams College, Susan Engel.

If teachers felt this way about each other, would they teach better?

In the piece, called “Teach Your Teachers Well,” Engel wrote:

Give as many public schools as possible the financial incentives to hire these newly prepared teachers in groups of seven or more. This way, talented eager young teachers won’t languish or leave teaching because they felt bored, inept, isolated or marginalized. Instead, they will feel part of a robust community of promising professionals. They will struggle and learn together. Good teachers need good colleagues.

Engel shared a number of other suggestions for fixing teacher education, including universities taking teacher education more seriously, higher teacher ed program admission standards, and that student teachers should be reviewing their own teaching on tape. But none of her suggestions struck me the way this bring-your-buddies-along concept.

It sure would have helped me, I can tell you that much. My first “real” teaching job was in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. My department was, on average, quite a bit older than me. (Trust, mid-40s feels hella old to a 23-year-old.) They were a bit tired, a bit jaded, and wore their teaching careers on their faces, if you know what I mean. For many of them, teaching had devolved from a cause to a career.

I felt like my enthusiasm, my hope, my desire to see the best intentions of my students was so often met with knowing nods and some version of, “Just wait kid. You’ll see.”

But what was even worse than the colleague side of things was that these people weren’t people I would normally be friends with. There wasn’t a feeling of animosity or anything like that. It’s just… I didn’t want to hang out with them. I mean this much less condescending than it sounds, but the best I can say is that I tolerated my first group of professional colleagues.

I did feel isolated, marginalized, and lonely. And it was impossible to not take these feelings into the classroom with me.

Whether we like it or not, us teachers are humans first.

But man, I can’t imagine the difference if I had been able to take a few of my friends from my teacher education program with me. They were my age, of course, but more than that we were raised in the same zeitgeist. We understood each other’s cultural references, jokes, fears, and hopes. Since we were also raised in the same teaching program, we understood each other’s teacher-minds. We were like a little family.

The more I think about this, the more I believe Engel is on to something real here. New teachers have a way of feeling lost in so many ways. To have the teacher room or the department room be a safe place with familiar faces to come back to could cause a sea-change shift in how the teacher views him or herself. I think back on some of those first just awful days in the classroom, when my self-esteem was as low as it could go, when I was questioning if teaching was the right career for me, when I felt so bad at teaching I could barely keep my head up high as I walked through the halls… If the next faces I saw could have been my college teaching buddies… if I could have seen Cara or Meg, and they would have recognized my dejection (because they knew me, because they cared about me) and they could have talked me through it… or hugged me through it…

It would have made all the difference in the world.

When journalists and the experts talk about how to fix the schools, there’s so much emphasis on things like pay and testing and class size. Maybe the answer is much more simple. Maybe they should just let us teach with our friends.