Dr. Lisa Delgado Brown, Dr. Laura Wilhelm, and Dr. Elizabeth (Liz) Harden Willner ______________________________________________________________________________
Windows and Mirrors: Community Building through Literacy Instruction Nationwide our schools are facing a crisis: our teacher education programs are graduating new educators at lower rates, yet K-12 enrollment continues to grow (US ED Title II report, 2015). Stagnant pay and attrition aside, recent articles discuss poll results indicating that teachers are disenchanted with the field and report feeling more stress than they did in decades past (Brown, 2015). A U.S. Department of Education longitudinal study of 1,990 first-year public school teachers from 2007-2012 found that of those new educators, about 17% left the profession within the first 5 years (Gray & Taie, 2015). In Oklahoma, the State Department of Education reported that a higher than average percentage of teachers have left the profession since the 2012-2013 school year (just over 10% in Oklahoma, compared to the national attrition rate of 7.7%) (Dekker, 2019). Further, the report shows that beginning teachers also leave the profession at higher than national rates- 81.8 % still taught after 3 years, but only 53.9% remained in the profession after year 5 (Lazarte-Alcala, 2018). Of those beginning teachers who stayed in the profession, having a collaborative mentor was the most valuable factor for retention, according to a large-scale study through the National Center for Educational Statistics (Gray & Taie, 2015). Similarly, Ingersoll & Strong (2011) found that participation in a program that offered support for beginning teachers resulted in not only higher rates of retention, but also more effective classroom instructional practices (including classroom management, organization, and lesson planning) and higher levels of student achievement (described as higher scores or gains). Thus, the need for mentors who work collaboratively with new classroom teachers was found to be both valuable and effective. The authors are professors at a university located in a major urban community in Oklahoma. The first author has expertise in special education and literacy education; the second author has expertise in early childhood and urban education, and the third author has expertise in elementary and literacy education. Collectively, we wrote and received a grant through the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education titled Windows and Mirrors: Community Building through Literacy Instruction. There were two main goals of the grant: 1) to mentor elementary teachers in their first three years in the profession and to provide time and tools for them to develop their own professional learning goals and 2) to build the capacity for beginning elementary teachers to use literacy instruction to support classroom community building. In addition, we hoped to not only provide mentorship to beginning teachers, but also encourage them to build a community of supportive peers. Participants included seven administrators (five building principals and two assistant principals), and nine beginning teachers (grades represented included Pre-K (2), first (1), second (2), third (2), and sixth (2) grades). Seven teacher
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