A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

DR. MICHAL LOMASK: Everything that the former presenters talked about -- everything that the former presenters talked about is all true. But, the question is, what are we going to do about it, and how much is it going to cost? So I have a set of overheads, but actually I'm going to start with the last one, because there it says it's going to cost about $8,000 for building a good induction program. Actually, you made a calculation before I came. In Connecticut the program, the complex program that I'm going to describe in a minute, costs about $1,300 per year, per teacher. And maybe it can be better.

My background is actually from science, and my thesis was in biochemistry. It might be more interesting for some of us, actually, to learn about my biochemistry thesis, because it was about biochemistry of the aging process. But when I went into education my professor said, how can a smart person like you move to education? And I think that's part of the problem. But after working in education the last 24 years, I think that education is much more complex than biochemistry. And that's part of the problem, people don't appreciate the complexity of being teachers, and especially being teachers of science.

So to my presentation. I want to talk about the BEST program. [See Slide 1] The BEST is a Beginning Educator Support and Training program. The program is a Connecticut induction program for all beginning teachers in Connecticut. Connecticut has about 40,000 teachers. That's the teaching force of Connecticut. And we have about 2,000 beginning teachers every year. So unlike California, we have only 5 percent of the teachers are new teachers. The induction program is two years, so in the program every year we have between 4,000 to 5,000 teachers.

The induction program started in 1986, before I came even to America. As you can probably hear from my accent, I'm not from America, I'm from Israel. And maybe I can later provide some international perspective about teacher training. But, it started in 1986 by a really visionary leader in education, Dr. Ray Pecheone, and one of the smart things that they did at that time is they tied teacher training and teacher assessment to enhancement of salaries. And my friend and colleague, Larry Brown sitting here, I brought him because he's a real teacher, unlike me who is just talking about teaching, can tell you what he took for the enhancement program. Teachers had to give up their tenure, for example. They have to do something to be recertified every five years; it's not for life. They have to keep learning. That's a condition to be recertified in Connecticut. And that affects the quality of teaching.

In 1986, as I said, the program started, and it started as induction, a generic induction, induction into generic teaching skills. The idea was that the first year of teaching, teachers have to focus on the classroom management, and how to start and develop, and close a lesson. So the unit of focus of the induction and the assessment of beginning teachers was of the lesson. It was very generic, initiation, closure, discipline, engagement of students, what every teacher has to learn.

After five years, after all the teachers, all the institutions of higher education in Connecticut learned the ropes, learned whatever the program and the standard requirements, we moved into subject specific teacher induction and assessment. At that time I was hired as a specialist for science education. Another person was hired as a specialist for math education, English, social studies, et cetera, et cetera. So focusing the leadership of each project, there was a person with a lot of experience in teaching, in subject matter and in measurement. That's the three components of the program.

The program is based on a set of very high level, I believe, standards. Here is, for example, just a standard for science. [See Slide 2] All science teachers have to know and be able to do, they have to know the generics that I mentioned before, but in addition subject specifics. They have to know the major concepts in terms of science, they have to know the tools of inquiry, they have to know science issues of science, technology and society, they have to know how students learn the science, and they have to know what are the special instructional resources that are needed to teach science. Unlike other subject matters, science requires a lot of resources. We have the same. We have special standards for mathematics, but I want to focus only on the science today.

The standards were written by a group of experienced science teachers, with help of university professors, and all the science teachers in the induction program have to master these concepts. How can we ensure that they are doing what we envision that they are doing? We develop an assessment system that is based on a portfolio. All the beginning teachers in Connecticut have to develop a teaching portfolio during the first two years. [See Slide 3] And here is a teaching portfolio. What they have to do is to document an inquiry-based learning unit, two weeks inquiry unit, and in the documentation they have to include the daily labs for the unit, the specific activities of the students, the learning activities.

They have to include two types of inquiries, and that's very important. One inquiry is a traditional lab-based inquiry. Another is STS type of inquiry. One is a more quantitative inquiry, one is more qualitative inquiry. And we have a lot of debate about this issue. But STS may be seen as social studies, not as science. But the way we see it in Connecticut is the reason we teach science is not to produce the next generation of scientists. Some of the students will be scientists; some will be engineers, but all students have to understand the basics of science and know how to use scientific knowledge in their own life as adults. That's why we focus part of the science teaching on STS.

They have to submit student's work, specific student's work to see actually what students are doing and learning in class. And they have to write a reflection about the unit, how did it go, what did the students learn, how do they know that students learned what they think they learned, and what are plans, how to improve the teaching in the future.

I can tell you more details, but I don't have time. In the first year that we implemented the program that was the result. [See Slide 4] The portfolios are submitted to the state. The state train assessors to assess the quality of the teaching, the portfolio teaching. And that's what we found in the first year of implementation. What you see is one, two, three, four levels of performance of beginning teachers. The minus is a big or major deficiency in the skills. The mark is basic knowledge, they're okay, and the plus is a competent teacher. And I would say the minus one, or one and two, I really don't want my kids in this class. Two to three, it's okay, I'm not going to make a big deal, four, I'll fight for my kid to be in this class.

And you see all these levels of performances of beginning teachers. But pay attention to the distribution. Fifteen percent of beginning teachers are level one, which means they didn't master the basic central concepts and theories, they have problems with the content itself. Okay. That's one of the problems. Instructional design is not good enough, they do not know how to build inquiry science learning unit. The monitoring of student's understanding is very minimal, they don't even begin to understand what it takes to create meaningful learning events enough to evaluate them, et cetera, et cetera.

On level two they have basic skills, and we certify them. Right now we certify them in their basic skills. By the way, we don't have yet a shortage of science teachers, and maybe it will be easier to take a science teacher from Connecticut than from Canada. There are schools where we have 40 applicants for each opening. So we have a lot of teachers right now, I don't know in the future. Forty percent, 40 to 50, of the teachers are not well prepared to teach science even in Connecticut, where it's highly qualified, very low, I believe 5 percent of the teachers leave the profession every year. And the reason is, as Dennis states so beautifully, to learn in a university how to teach, being a good student doesn't mean you can be a good teacher. It takes a transformation for a beginning teacher to -- from good student to beginning teacher takes time, and that's what the induction program is all about.

So what do we do to help them really accelerate the gap? We do first, first year, all beginning teachers in Connecticut have mentorship programs by law, by statute, regulation of the state. They have 30 contact hours with the mentor, or mentor team, or contact colleague. Their 30 hours that the state pays for, the state gives funds to school to release teachers from their instructional duty so they can observe other teachers and to pay for mentors so they can meet with teachers after school.

I'm kind of out of time, just interesting statistics. We tried to find out what affects student's learning. The bottom line, why you want better teachers is to increase student achievement in math and science. So I took the data from student assessment in Connecticut with state assessment in science in the 10th grade, and we have mathematics assessment in 4th, 6th, and 8th grade, and here is some of the data. [See Slide 5] Unfortunately, the socioeconomic status of students still are the best predictors of student achievement. There is no question about it. But after you take out the factor of the socioeconomic status or the level of poverty, what affects students performance are two main factors. One is the percentage of teachers with masters degree, which they have a better understanding of the content. And the second predictor is the percentage of teachers that were in the BEST program. I think the data speaks for itself to the importance of doing an induction program.

Another thing that is very important, and I don't have an overhead for it, is the effect the ripple effect on the field. Altogether, I believe that every year with 4,000 students in the system, in the induction program, we have about 4,000 teachers working with these beginning teachers. We have about 200 teachers that assess the performance of these teachers. We have experienced teachers working at all capacities in this program. So there is a ripple effect, and over the last 10 years probably 40 and 50 percent of the teaching force in Connecticut were trained in the new standards, in new methods. And I think how in national testing, in the NAEP, Connecticut is doing very well, it's above average, both in math and science, and I think much of it is because of careful design, and attention to teacher's needs, and the support that we give them all along until they become experienced teachers, three years kind of experience.

Thank you very much.

This page last modified April 26, 2000 (gkp)