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BEGINNING teachers do not enter the classroom as finished products. When I made reference to this statement from the Educational Testing Service (ETS) to a middle school principal, he responded with a grimace.
"It's true," he said. "Of the six new recruits I hired this year, four are gradually improving with coaching and mentoring. But two are so weak that, even with one-on-one help, I don't think they'll be back next year."
He's not alone in the degree of his frustration with new teachers. Many school administrators tell me that new teachers are often exuberant and optimistic but ill-equipped for the classroom. "New teachers take up a lot of my time," one assistant high school principal said. "I handle one disaster after another-discipline, problems with parents, lessons gone bad."
There are some administrators who are openly exasperated with the low quality of teacher applicants who are available. A personnel director, after interviewing candidates for middle school math and science positions, confided that she was "weary of teachers who don't know their subjects well." It's a valid-as well as a costly-concern: "What makes me angry," a city superintendent told me, "is spending $2 million annually training new teachers in what they should have learned in college."
Same Demands
Teachers, like other professionals, need time in which to hone their skills, but they seldom get the time they require. In fact, Charlotte Danielson, of ETS, and Thomas McGreal, of the University of Illinois, argue that teaching makes the same demands on novices as it does on experienced practitioners.
A lesson from medicine can be used for the purpose of illustrating their point. In Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science, Atul Gawande, who is a former surgical resident at Harvard Medical School, describes his learning curve while he was in the process of practicing a basic procedure-inserting a central line into a patient's vena cava, the main blood vessel to the heart.
The learning curve is thought of as "a smooth upward sloping are of proficiency," he writes, but in reality, learning is often found to be messy and uncertain. Gawande says he practiced on patients, under close supervision from attending surgeons, nearly 100 times before mastering the procedure, and he recalls "getting worse before getting...