Expectations for new educators are setting them up for failure
By Jonathan Lee Lancaster
There exists a terrible reality in many schools: new educators are expected to do it all. In addition to honing teaching techniques, becoming familiar with their curricula, developing classroom management abilities and creating their pedagogical ideology, new educators are also subject to expectations from school leaders to advise extracurricular clubs, volunteer for noninstructional duties and take on roles in committees.
In the aptly named 2004 article, “Why Do New Teachers Cry?”educators and researchers Thomas McCann and Larry Johannessen tracked new teachers and presented their difficulties, most of which included a “demoralizing workload” and reports that their position was “especially fatiguing.” While the article is 20 years old, it doesn’t appear that much has changed.
Other research from educators Mary Elizabeth Lloyd and Alexandra Sullivan in 2012 highlights new teachers’ “sense of under appreciation, lack of support and some colleagues’ unwillingness to help.”
Moreover, as Mary Patterson notes in an Educational Leadership article titled “Hazed,” school leaders often assign new educators the most difficult classes that contain students with the most needs, refuse to assign new educators their own classroom and require them to move rooms throughout the day, and burden new educators with the expectation to come early and leave late. All of these conditions set our new educators up for failure.
Passing it off
New educators are often pressured into fulfilling vacant noninstructional positions. After years of enduring the sometimes undesirable roles of class advisers, club supervisors, chaperones, morning and after-school duty holders, committee members and project leaders, more senior educators are eager to pass these roles to new educators. While more senior staff sometimes hold the sentiment that new educators must undergo the same hardships that they did in order to earn their place in the wider school community, it is often the case that more senior educators pass on these roles out of exhaustion.
Educators with more experience don’t desire to see newer teachers fail, rather they pass these roles off because they now have the leverage and seniority to resist the pressure from school administration and decline school leaders’ requests. In this way, more senior educators act out against the toxic work environment that they had endured as a new educator. However, the result perpetuates the cycle of toxicity for newer educators who become saddled with additional roles and responsibilities.
Preying upon the most vulnerable
The result of passing all undesirable roles to new educators is that these tasks are placed upon those in the worst position to perform them. Because new educators need to balance the numerous responsibilities that come with learning to teach, pressuring them to take on additional work is irresponsible and exploitative. Preying upon those without the seniority or tenure to decline extra responsibilities creates an unsustainable environment in which new educators either quit or endure long enough to obtain seniority so they can also pass on these roles.
This cycle produces terrible working environments and outcomes. New educators will never be able to perform these duties well because of the enormous commitment that being a new educator entails. The staff who are most in a position to succeed with these additional roles are those who have seniority and have already developed experience in their roles. Typically, staff with more seniority have developed their base curriculum and teaching techniques enough that they have much more time to devote to these additional roles than new educators who are still trying to find the printer.
Despite this reality, school leaders fail to develop the culture or relationships with senior staff that is needed to break the cycle. As opposed to working with more senior staff—who can flex their contractual muscles to refuse unwanted or unreasonable demands for additional work—school leaders pawn it off on new folks who cannot refuse as freely.
School leaders need to push for more fair compensation for these noninstructional roles to incentivize teachers to agree to take them on. They should also use their influence as leaders shift the school culture toward an environment more conducive to sharing the burden of these roles. That can begin by developing an ongoing dialogue around these issues with more senior staff.
The big picture
As result of the unrealistic expectations placed on new educators, 50% of them leave the profession before their fifth year according to several studies, including those by Carol Bartell in 2005, Bonni Gourneau in 2014, and Leiflyn Gamborg, Angela Webb, Amber Smith and Jennifer Baumgartner in 2018. And further research has demonstrated why.
For instance, Mei-Lin Chang in 2009 and Mike DiCicco, Robert Jordan and Laura Sabella in 2019, found that new educators report alarming levels of anxiety, emotional distress and a lack of self-care. In “The Plight of the Novice Teacher,” Sarah Clark found that new educators typically feel isolated and unsupported. Lloyd and Sullivan found that new educators state that they regularly feel “disrespected or not valued … beat up, exhausted and a failure.” Additionally, researchers Carl Hancock and Lisa Scherff found that new educators developed “cynical attitudes toward students, parents and the workplace” after their first year. Is it any wonder new teacher leave the profession or develop these attitudes?
At a time where nationwide teacher shortages are at an all-time high, schools need to treat new educators better. According to researchers Elizabeth Steiner and Ashley Woo in a 2021 Rand Corporation study, the top reason that teachers state for quitting is not pay, benefits or resources—it is stress. The role of being a new educator is stressful enough. School leaders need to realize that it serves the profession, their culture and students better to work with more senior staff to shift culture than to take the easy route of expecting new teachers to take on all undesirable roles.
Solutions
School leaders must protect and develop new educators by giving them the time, resources and means to succeed. As Patterson contends in “Hazed,” this means hiring teachers with appropriate lead-time, providing one classroom and a reasonable number of preps, and being clear that the expectations for these new educators are no more than what they have agreed to in the contract.
Those in power—school leaders, policymakers and board members—must work to develop strong relationships with more senior staff to help share the burden, push for higher compensation and seek fairer working conditions. Simply put, the current expectations placed on new educators cannot continue.
Jonathan Lee Lancaster is a social studies teacher at Bergen County Academies. He is the membership chair, webmaster, and legislative action team chair for the Bergen County Vocational-Technical Schools Education Association. He can be reached at Lancaster.Jonathan.L@gmail.com