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GSU Blogger - Dr. Sauers
Friday, January 22, 2016
Teacher Shortage
I recently heard this statement on the local news “We
have a supply and demand issue with teachers.”
The discussion was about there being a shortage of teachers, and how
there is not enough people entering and finishing a degree in teaching. I started thinking to myself why I decided to
teach. Teaching for me was a second
profession. I received degrees in
Computer Information Systems and Business Management. After being in Corporate America many years
and dealing with the stress of being in layoff status, I decided to take a
different career path. I had volunteered
with many organizations dealing with children, so the transition was easy for
me. Now, I admit that teaching is not an
easy thing today. Children are very
different from my era of being in school.
Parental support is few and far beyond, children are rude/disrespectful
and children often times do not have a care or concern about their educational
future. This is very hard for us as teacher at times, but it is up to us to be
a positive role model and build relationships with the students we teach. How do we get college students interested in
the field of education without scaring them away? Everyone’s experience is not the same, but in
most cases, one only hears the horror stories.
It is important to be truthful about our experiences, but the fact still
remains that we need teachers. What
theory or suggestions do you have that we as leaders can do to help this
terrible epidemic of teacher shortages?
http://www.wsbtv.com/videos/news/local-educators-concerned-about-shortage-in/vDhjZF/
http://www.wsbtv.com/videos/news/local-educators-concerned-about-shortage-in/vDhjZF/
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I think college students are scared away by the low salaries and bad children so often conveyed in society. Some successful "teacher recruitment" agencies are successful in offering incentives like paying off student loans and paying for professional development opportunities. I think it is important to talk about job security, making a significant contribution to society and paid vacations!
ReplyDeleteSeriously, we also need to look at how we prepare teachers to enter the profession. There are a lot of great teachers who may not major in education because it limits your career options after graduation but who would be excellent teachers. We have to keep it real and not theoretical when we train teachers so they are prepared for the challenges they will face.
I do think it is easy to become negative about our profession. When I was a teacher, I would often "catch" myself venting about that one tough student to a friend or family member. I would often take a breath and then realize that for every student who was rude and disrespectful, there were many that were kind and caring. Schools are finally doing better at recognizing some of those positive behaviors with programs such as PBIS.
ReplyDeleteIn addition to low salaries and stories and videos of misbehaving kids, I think teaching has a perception problem. Like the idiom “misery loves company,” negativity loves camera time. This can be seen in our own town. For years, 11Alive’s Donna Lowry highlighted incredible teaching in her segment “Class Act”; typically, this was relegated to either the morning or noon newscast, but sometimes the segments would wind up on the six o’clock news. A quick search of the 11Alive site shows that the last time one of these segments was produced was in 2014 (http://www.11alive.com/features/class-act-with-donna-lowry/). In contrast, a station in Chattanooga (and several other stations across the nation) still make presenting the positive goings-on of the classroom a major part of their news programs (http://www.wdef.com/golden-apple-award/ - and this is on primetime once a week). It is this negative perception of education that causes people to say the things that Taylor Mali references in his “What Teachers Make” (http://www.ted.com/talks/taylor_mali_what_teachers_make). We need to spend more time showing the good of what is going on in our schools and classrooms, and, in doing so, we will make teaching attractive, again.
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