In practice | leadership

Paul Bambrick-santoyo

Rookie teachers: The rst 90 days

The rst few months for new teachers provide opportunities to teach them complex skills
that will help improve student learning.
Last month, I introduced the
power of a dress rehearsal for
rookie teachers. The next step
comes when students show up
and new teachers have to figure
out what to do when challenges
arise. What happens when students
dont follow a classroom routine?
What about when they dont
understand directions? What if
a student simply gets an answer
wrong?
Lets pick up with the journey of another rookie teacher,
Allison Kelly. Now, its January,
and Kelly has been teaching at
Clinton Hill Middle School in
Newark, N.J., for about three
months. Kelly is meeting with
principal Jesse Rector to discuss
her recent lesson on subject-verb
agreement.
This particular lesson has left
Kelly with a sense that students
might not have learned what she
wanted to teach them. She frowns
at the video of the lesson that she
and Rector are reviewing. So
right here, she murmurs, pausing the video, I called on Anajah.
And I think she was the right one
to call on. Rector nods, but Kelly
still looks troubled. Even after
that, I still dont think she really
understood the answer.
So what gives you that doubt?
Rector asks.
Kelly reflects a moment. She
said Justins answer had been
incorrect because it didnt have
subject-verb agreement, she answers. Thats all she said.
PAUL BAMBRICK-SANTOYO is
managing director of Uncommon
Schools, Newark, N.J., and author of
Great habits, great readers: A practical
guide to K-4 reading in light of the
Common Core (Jossey-Bass, 2013).
72

Kappan

November 2013

Right! says Rector. So she

identified the major issue, but she
just kind of said what youd said
three steps back. The problem
with that, Rector and Kelly agree,
is that Anajah never actually demonstrated that she had learned the
skill of correcting the subject-verb
agreement in a sentence.

The rst 90 days

Studies show that teachers improve significantly in their first
two years but rarely improve
much more after the first five (Atteberry, Loeb, &Wyckoff, 2013).
That means the earliest days in a
teachers career present a critical
opportunity to help them get better faster.
In his work with rookie teachers, Rector has to guard against
an all too common and counterproductive pitfall: pushing them
to master every element of great
teaching at once. To succeed at
getting rookies up to speed, Rector has to narrow his priorities to
what rookie teachers most need to
know in the first 90 days to drive
learning in their classrooms.
So, to hold his rookies (and
himself) accountable for focusing on the right skills, Rector
has worked from a scope and
sequence of those skills from
establishing classroom routines
to shifting higher-order thinking to students. Sticking to the
scope and sequence wont make a
teacher like Kelly an expert in 90
days, but it will make her proficient enough that her students are
learning what they need to know
just as they would in a more
experienced teachers classroom.
Rectors scope and sequence
for rookie teachers is too long to
cover in one article. The chart at

right shows a small sample of it.

By the time we meet Kelly in
her meeting with Rector, she already knows how to write datadriven lesson plans, assess student
comprehension, and preplan responses to student error. The next
step then is responding to student
error in the moment. Returning
to Rector and Kellys meeting, we
see how that skill building looks
in action.

Getting better faster

Role playing as Anajah, Rector
prompts Kelly to ask the same
question Kelly had asked Anajah
in her classroom. Anajah, she
begins, why is werent the error
in this sentence?
Because the subject and the
verb have to agree, Rector replies.
Whats the subject in the
sentence? Kelly asks, knowing
she needs to hear more. As Rector continues to give incomplete
answers, she breaks down her
question further: Is the subject
singular or plural? So what does
the verb need to be? Give me the
actual word, not just singular.
Excellent, Rector affirms, once
Kelly has gotten Anajah to explain
properly why werent is the error. You just asked me a series of
very clear questions that got me to
that articulation. So lets reflect on
why that worked so well.
I broke down the skill into
questions, steps she should be taking to get to the right answer, says
Kelly. And then I asked her to put
it all together in one sentence.
Right! Rector agrees. So
now, in about an hour, youre
going to be teaching again, and
something like this is going to
come up. What are you going to
do? Kelly writes down her new

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Responding to student error: A novice teachers journey to proficiency

A sAMPLInG OF skILLs TO MAsTeR
DATe

MAnAGeMenT

RIGOR

By 1st day of school

(covered in August PD)

Routines & Procedures 101

Writing Lesson Plans

Write out critical routines and procedure

down to the smallest detail of what is
said and done.

Include data-based objectives.

The earliest
days in a
teachers
career present
a critical
opportunity to
help them get
better faster.

Include preplanned questions to

ask students.

Plan how and when to roll out the

routine/procedure in your classroom.
By Sept. 30

Strong Voice 101

Checking for Understanding

When giving instructions, stop moving

and strike a formal pose (square up,
stand still).

Monitor student work

conscientiously, noting student
errors.

When giving instructions, use formal

register, including tone and word choice.

Assign and review a brief endof-class mini-assessment to see

whether (and which) students
mastered the material.

Give crisp instructions with as few words

as possible.
By Oct. 30

Individual Student Corrections

Data-Driven Instruction 101

Redirect students using the least to most

invasive intervention:
Proximity;
Eye contact;
Body language;
Say students name quickly; and
Small consequence.

Analyze why students answered

incorrectly.

Anticipate student off-task behavior and

rehearse the next two things you will do
when that behavior occurs.

Plan dates and times to reteach

standards students struggled with.
Script desired student responses.
Annotate in lesson plan which
questions to ask which students
based on analysis; call on those
students when asking the questions.

Repeat expectations while looking at the

student(s) who are not complying.
By Feb. 15

Pacing 201

Data-Driven Instruction 201

Create the illusion of speed so that

students feel constantly engaged.

Script out what you will do or ask

when students answer incorrectly.

Use brief 15- to 30-second turn & talks.

Repeat wrong answers, giving

yourself and the student time to
reflect.

No more than two to three seconds

between when a student responds and a
teacher picks up instruction.

Reference

Ask scaffolded questions that break

the problem into smaller chunks.
After correcting an error, go back
to the student who made the error
and have him or her summarize the
correct answer.

action step: Break down skills into

a series of questions, ending with
a question that requires the student to put it all together.
The process Rector has just followed guiding Kelly to identify
the skill she most urgently needed
to master, practicing it with her,

and translating it into a single action for her to implement in her

classroom is an incredible boon
to rookie teachers. It empowers
them to get to the bottom of nagging worries about how effectively
students are really learning, to
master those practices that will

lock in student success, and to do

it all while honing their own instincts about what will make their
teaching great. Ninety days into
her career, Kelly is swiftly moving from rookie to experienced
teacher and her students reK
sults will show it.
V95 N3

Atteberry, A., Loeb,

S., & Wyckoff, J.
(2013). Do first
impressions matter?
Improvement in
early career teacher
effectiveness.
Washington, DC:
National Center
for Analysis of
Longitudinal Data
in Education
Research, 2013.
http://auth.calder.
commonspotcloud.
com/publications/
upload/wp90.pdf

kappanmagazine.org

73

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