Teaching in Changing Times

Teaching in Changing Times: Diverse Classrooms Challenge New Teachers' Skills
38 Pages

The third and final installment of our "Lessons Learned" reports on new teachers finds two specific areas in which teacher training may be lacking: preparedness for the diversity of the contemporary American classroom and teaching students with special needs.

Most new teachers (76 percent) said teaching an ethnically diverse student body was covered in their training, but only 39 percent said that training helps them "a lot" in the classroom. In terms of effectiveness, that puts this near the bottom of the list of subjects the new teachers had studied. The survey covered 12 areas of teacher training ranging from direct instruction to their study of history, philosophy and policy debates in public education. No other factor examined in the Public Agenda research showed nearly as great a gap between how many received training in a given area and new teachers' assessments of its effectiveness.

Many new teachers also reported inadequacies in training they received for teaching children with special needs.Most new teachers (82 percent) say their training had indeed covered this, but far fewer (47 percent) say their training helped them "a lot."

This is a particularly important area, the report notes, because nearly every new teacher reported having at least some children with special needs in their classroom. Only 5 percent reported having no students with special needs.

To download the report, visit:
http://www.publicagenda.org/lessonslearned3/

(reprinted from Public Agenda Alert. May 21, 2008)