How the Substitute Teacher Shortage Is Impacting Teacher Professional Development
It’s 7 a.m., and I’m on my second trek from my automotive to our centralized district assembly house, lugging snacks, provides and chart paper as I put together to steer a workshop on greatest practices for expertise integration for a gaggle of 15 elementary academics in my district.
It’s September 2021 and as certainly one of the district’s educational expertise content material leaders, I’ve lastly been given the inexperienced mild to host in-person skilled growth (PD) for this group of keen academics after months of assembly on-line. Teachers trickle in as I set out muffins and sweet at every desk. Excited for the alternative to concentrate on their studying, academics discover their seats and begin to chit chat about the lesson plans they’ve left for his or her college students.
This workshop is a part of a tech ambassador program, which builds expertise advocacy throughout the district. As a part of the program, every instructor was supplied with funding to cowl the price of a substitute instructor to cowl their class for a complete of 5 days all through this faculty yr so they may take part in a sequence {of professional} workshops centered on the best way to purposefully combine expertise into elementary school rooms centered on the ISTE Standards for Students (ISTE is the guardian group of EdSurge, although we function with editorial independence.)
Fast ahead to September 2022, and I’m finalizing modules on Canvas, our studying administration system, to proceed to ship the identical high quality skilled studying, however in a completely completely different format. After two years of disruptions to in-person gathering on account of well being considerations, academics are actually dealing with a distinct barrier — the substitute instructor scarcity. One of each 5 requests in the U.S. for substitute academics went unfilled earlier than COVID-19, and that has worsened with the results of the pandemic, with 77 p.c of districts reporting staffing challenges associated to substitute academics, in line with a working paper published by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University. This scarcity has impacted many areas of our colleges’ day-to-day practices, and is now impacting how academics study.
A New Barrier Emerges
Our suburban Missouri faculty district serves round 16,500 college students. Behind the scenes of every classroom in our district, there are various palms at work. Providing deep, tailor-made studying experiences for our college students requires a number of effort, from evaluating curricular sources to aligning research-based educational practices to the evolving state requirements. Our district’s curriculum staff consists of a wide range of members with roles designed to assist academics to work by way of these areas. One of my roles is to fulfill with groups of academics to develop them as teacher-leaders of their buildings, as they study to rework classroom practices with the intentional use of digital instruments.
Prior to the pandemic, our district allowed academics to be launched from their classroom to take part in their very own studying, however our present lack of substitute academics has created challenges. Building directors, typically pulled to fill this position and canopy school rooms themselves, now push again on requests for academics to be lined for PD. Like many districts throughout the nation, our academics can not attend skilled conferences or collaborate with friends to study educational practices as a result of substitute academics should not accessible to cowl school rooms. This actuality is problematic for academics and necessitates a brand new strategy to offering skilled studying.
The New Reality for Teacher PD
In the not-too-distant previous, my days had been crammed making ready for PD conferences with a wide range of instructor teams. I labored with groups that had been studying about expertise integration and supported new academics with the digital instruments that they’d at their disposal. With every group, I might reply questions in the second and supply alternatives for academics to bounce concepts off of each other.
Today, I facilitate skilled studying experiences which can be held on-line after faculty hours. I manage modules to incorporate researched based mostly articles, video messages and dialogue boards centered round academics’ studying goals. Instead of visiting school rooms in neighboring districts to witness efforts and initiatives in particular person, academics who want to develop of their apply view video snippets of constructions in apply. The shift has posed challenges for these of us facilitating the PD in addition to for the academics.
As a facilitator, transferring to asynchronous on-line PD signifies that I can’t alter studying to fulfill academics’ quick wants in real-time. Those invaluable desk conversations don’t occur in asynchronous studying environments. My colleague Dr. Melinda Scheetz, the literacy coordinator for our district who designed our district’s PD for shifting to our new phonics curriculum, agrees. She says she has struggled with managing the content material that each one of our elementary academics must study round our phonics initiative and the best way to tackle their considerations just about. Scheetz not too long ago shared her sentiment with me: “We teach our students in person, but we’re asking our teachers to learn asynchronously in isolation.”
The adjustment has been tough for our academics too. While a lot of them have realized collaboratively in full or half-day coaching periods for his or her whole careers, many battle to carve out time for on-line studying throughout the faculty day as a result of they’ve a heavy load of standard classroom obligations. “It’s so much more time consuming to read everyone’s comments on discussion boards,” wrote one instructor after finishing a survey Scheetz administered following an asynchronous PD session. Other survey respondents indicated that they’d hassle staying on activity to finish on-line studying, and missed the alternative to ask questions in the second.
Hopeful Future for Teacher PD
The shift to on-line instructor PD that happened on account of COVID and has continued to pull on on account of the scarcity of substitute academics making it tough to seek out protection for in-person skilled studying experiences has offered challenges, however there have additionally been some advantages. Teachers report that they like the comfort of having the ability to full their studying at a time and place that’s handy for them. Many additionally respect the proven fact that these studying sources, together with movies modeling educational practices, can be found to return to, permitting academics to rewatch, pause and rewind when wanted.
As for me, whereas I favor working with a gaggle of academics who can synchronously share concepts and collaborate in-person, I’ve encountered some sudden successes. As a results of this pivot, I discover myself working one-on-one with academics extra recurrently. My strategic asynchronous course design consists of purposeful questions that permit every particular person instructor to examine in about their private targets and distinctive challenges, which permits me to get to know them at a deeper stage than earlier than.
At a time when a lot of the analysis signifies that self-directed studying ends in constructive outcomes for our college students, creating self-directed studying environments for our academics is sensible. This state of affairs, for instance, has allowed me to mannequin the use of our newly adopted studying administration system that academics are anticipated to make use of — and it has given them a chance to expertise these digital studying methods as a learner.
As I put together for a fast after-school check-in with a gaggle of academics who’re studying efficient methods for instructing versatile blended lessons in our district’s three excessive colleges, I gained’t be bringing chart paper or setting chocolate out on tables. Instead, I’ll be checking that my course content material is nicely organized on Canvas and that my Zoom assembly is ready up accurately.
Whether facilitating PD in particular person or on-line, I need to honor that these academics are drained, however nonetheless able to study. I need to present them that I acknowledge that, identical to the college students they educate, these academics convey with them learner preferences and distinctive experiences that make absorbing this data simple or difficult. But, most of all, I need these academics to depart this studying expertise with their buckets crammed, feeling empowered to show their college students.
