For years, public discussion around the shortage of teachers across the U.S. has centered on filling the pipeline. In response to the immediate pressures of teacher shortage, states like Arizona have approved more pathways to become a certified teacher. Universities offer more alternative pathways. School districts can now be state-sanctioned education-preparation providers. Community colleges are launching four-year bachelor’s degree programs that lead to teacher certification. 

But simply offering more doors into the profession is no guarantee of keeping people in the profession. In Arizona, Governor Katie Hobbs has made educator retention a priority. As part of her administration's First 100 Days Initiative, Governor Hobbs established an Educator Retention Task Force. 

That’s good news. It’s good to focus on retention. We can expect — and support — recommendations to increase compensation for educators, improve working conditions and pull other traditional levers of improving workplace satisfaction. 

There’s a big piece of the puzzle, however, that receives too little attention in most public conversations about teacher retention: teacher preparation. 

If a growing number of people are leaving a profession, one of the first places we should look to improve things is in how we prepare people for that profession. Teacher-preparation programs and schools need to work together closely to provide teacher candidates with a positive experience. 

Are expectations for novice teachers reasonable? Do they have a full picture of the environment they are entering and the roles they will be asked to perform? Do they know how to advocate for themselves, including whom to approach and what to ask for? 

A positive experience would provide teacher candidates with coaching and feedback early and often; opportunities to be fully embraced by teachers and administrators; and roles and assignments in which they have a fair and reasonable chance of experiencing success as educators. Above all, a positive experience would provide teacher candidates a credible sense that they are on the road to becoming valued professionals.  

Ultimately, delivering a positive experience requires teacher-prep programs and educational systems to reconsider what it means to deliver the right experiences. 

Here are three places to start: a much thicker connection between coursework and clinical experience; a commitment to compensating teacher candidates for the work they perform in schools; and on-the-job professional learning through collaborative work that is purpose-built to combat the potential for isolation and alienation that too many teacher candidates and new teachers feel. 

Connecting coursework and professional experiences

Too often, teacher candidates feel underprepared for what they encounter in their professional experiences, including residencies. Also, nearly as often, school administrators report that not enough teacher candidates arrive ready to contribute in the ways that schools need them to contribute. 

We need to get much better at authentically connecting coursework and clinical practice in a way that does justice both to the value of theoretical knowledge and to the contextual specificity of the learning environments in which students work. 

In a traditional university teacher-preparation program, a student takes a math methods course taught by a university faculty member. Maybe that student participates in an internship one day a week in a school, but that internship is unlikely to be tied directly to that math methods course. More likely, the student will be filling whatever need is most pressing on any given day in that classroom or school. Additionally, whoever is supervising that internship may have nothing to do with that math methods course.

This needs to change.

The faculty member — or team of faculty members — teaching math methods should also be coaching the professional experience in which the candidate is learning to apply those methods. Course assignments should be embedded in professional practice. Professional practice should inform course content.  

Strengthening the connection between how teacher candidates acquire a knowledge base and how they apply it will benefit teacher candidates and the schools where they learn to practice their profession. 

This approach would strengthen all teacher-preparation programs, whether university-based, district-based or alternative. 

Making work count (and pay)

We need to recognize two things that are true about teacher candidates: first, they are just as much learners as the P–12 students they are teaching; second, the work they are doing in schools is… work. Because they are learning, we shouldn’t require professional experiences that ask them to do everything we ask experienced teachers to do. Because they are working, we should pay them. 

Many teacher candidates work other jobs to support themselves and, in many cases, their families as they complete coursework and their professional experiences. This is a major cause of the stress and burnout suffered by so many. 

Right now, there are alternative certification pathways that allow teacher candidates to be paid teachers of record while they work toward certification. And some students in traditional bachelor’s and master’s degree programs are paid as they fulfill the professional experience requirements of their programs. 

However, in addressing the problem of paying teacher candidates, policymakers often create another problem by asking teacher candidates to perform the roles of experienced teachers. They are not experienced teachers. It’s not reasonable to expect to retain people that are hired to perform tasks they are not prepared to do. 

For their sake — and for the sake of the P–12 students they serve — teacher candidates should be given clearly defined responsibilities that allow them to learn in stages, gain competencies and experience a range of educational roles. 

At one level, this is just basic good practice in professional learning: put candidates in positions where they have a reasonably strong chance of success. At another level, it reveals the deep, systemic problem at the heart of the retention crisis that afflicts both teacher candidates and experienced teachers. Too often, we ask too much of individuals as isolated individuals and not enough of them as members of teams. 

The right experience is a collaborative experience

Teacher preparation has invested a lot in the notion of mentorship. Traditionally, this takes the form of a one-to-one mentorship model. 

This model requires a large teacher-preparation program like the one at Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College to find 800 or more effective mentors a year. It’s difficult, to say the least, to ensure quality mentorship for teacher candidates across hundreds of schools and dozens of districts. We know that the experiences of our students in this model vary widely. 

Additionally, even if we could guarantee a quality mentorship experience for all our candidates, there is another, more fundamental problem with the one-to-one mentorship model: it exposes teacher candidates primarily only to one mentor and to a limited array of instructional methods, classroom management strategies and other things that educators do. 

Our college’s Next Education Workforce initiative begins with the insight that it makes no sense to ask teachers to be all things to all people at all times. The corollary of this is that it makes no sense to ask all teachers to do the same job. 

If it makes no sense for experienced teachers, it certainly makes no sense for teacher candidates. Instead of asking teacher candidates to learn from too few examples of how to do too many things at once, what should we do? 

Teacher-preparation programs and schools need to look at all the things learners need from adult educators and create professional experiences for teacher candidates that address those needs. We should build ladders and tracks of professional experience rather than place teacher candidates into a daunting workplace and expect them to be replicas of in-service teachers who are, themselves, asked to do too much all at once, all the time. 

Interestingly, we can start doing this with people already working in schools. Paraeducators are doing jobs that their schools and their learners need done. At Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, we are building pathways for paraeducators to become certified teachers, and similar efforts are underway elsewhere. Many paraeducator roles could be filled by teacher candidates early in their college years. Imagine a teacher candidate who has taken reading courses and can now work as a literacy accelerator with small groups of students. Think of a secondary education candidate who can work as a project-based mentor with students on interdisciplinary projects. 

Sure, it’s a lift for teacher-preparation programs to work with specific schools to determine what roles learners in those schools need and to find matches for those roles among a college’s teacher candidates. But it would be worth it. It would be a much more learner-centered way of designing professional experiences — centered on the learning of both teacher candidates and P–12 students. And it would be a better use of both university and school time than annually recruiting people for — and trying to manage — a one-to-one mentor model. 

Teacher candidates certainly require extensive coaching and support. But asking one mentor — a teacher who is already likely being asked to be all things to all people — to carry that entire burden makes no sense. Teacher candidates should learn from faculty embedded in their professional experiences, from colleagues on teams, and from coaches who can use technologies like GoReact to analyze “game film” of professional tasks. 

Does this imply moving away from the position that full-time residency or student teaching is always the best professional experience? Indeed it does. The right experience for teacher candidates means committing to a model in which teacher candidates have the opportunity to work with other professionals in team-based teaching configurations. This goes beyond meeting to plan curricula, build schedules or assess personal learning plans.  

While it is true that teacher retention begins with teacher-preparation, it most certainly does not end there. Teacher-preparation programs can play a distinctly catalytic role by deepening the way they work with school partners to strengthen the synapses between curriculum and professional experiences, value professional learning through paid compensation and deep coaching, and place teacher candidates in collaborative teams of distributed expertise.  

Ultimately, the way to retain teacher candidates and teachers is to create a working environment that attracts people. The right experience means the opportunity to work in team-based teaching configurations that offer the intellectual and social rewards of professional work, advancement pathways and a better-than-even chance of successfully meeting the needs of learners.