Teacher Recruitment & Retention Initiatives
Featured sites:
CalTeach
In California, a collaborative effort among The California Department
of Education, The California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, and
CalTeach has resulted in the distribution of over 2000 recruitment tool
kits to local school districts, personnel preparation programs, and
county administrative offices, among others, who strive to attract persons
to the special education professions. Using California’s State
Improvement Grant (SIG) funds from the U.S. Department of Education,
Office of Special Education Programs, NCPSE's recruitment brochures,
public service announcements, and recruitment video are now available
for distribution through CalTeach, California's recruitment warehouse
for information on the teaching profession and programs for teacher
preparation. View California's version of all these products:
In the near future, these customized CA brochures will be available
for downloading and printing on the CalTeach website.
Excelsior Teaching
Initiative
The Excelsior Teacher Initiative (ETI), created to bring exceptional
certified educators to teach in New York City public schools, seeks
experienced teachers in shortage subject areas such as math, science,
special education, Spanish, physical education, bilingual education,
ESL
and speech therapy.
Mississippi
Teacher Fellowship Program
The Mississippi Teacher Fellowship Program is designed as an innovative
partnership to address Mississippi's teacher shortage.
Project ReSpecT: Retaining
Special Education Teachers
Project ReSpecT is a three-year, federally funded project conducted
by the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of South
Carolina. The purpose of the project is to increase special education
teacher retention through the development and implementation of a mentoring
model to support early career special education teachers.
Mentoring
Induction Project
Watch for CEC's forthcoming publication Guide to Mentoring
New Special Education Teachers, to be published at the end of 2004!
The goals of the Mentoring Induction Project (MIP) are to develop a
model of support for special education teachers, improve existing teaching
conditions, strengthen the induction experiences of new teachers, and
establish and pilot national mentoring guidelines for first year special
education teachers.
Hawaii
Recruitment and Retention Support Center
The Recruitment and Retention Support Center sponsors programs dealing
with alternative teacher certification, educational assistant training,
and professional development training for special education.
Oregon
Special Education Recruitment and Retention Project
The goals of Oregon's Recruitment and Retention Project are twofold:
increase the number of qualified special education and related services
professionals in Oregon and increase the amount of time special education
personnel stay within the field in Oregon. Findings
from their recruitment and retention surveys are also presented.
The South Carolina
Center for Teacher Recruitment
The South Carolina Center for Teacher Recruitment (SCCTR) is a state-supported
organization, established in 1986, that works to address in a comprehensive
way the issue of the declining teacher workforce in South Carolina.
The SCCTR actively seeks to have middle and high school ProTeam and
Teacher Cadet participants work with students with disabilities in their
schools across South Carolina. Through these opportunities, the Pro-Team
and Teacher Cadet participants learn about the needs of special education
students and about special knowledge and skills that special education
brings not only to the classroom but also to the school as a whole.
As a result, of those teacher cadet graduates who do enter teacher preparation
programs, nearly one-quarter enter special education personnel preparation
programs in South Carolina's colleges and universities.
The New
Teacher Center (NTC) at University of California Santa Cruz
The New Teacher Center is a national resource dedicated to teacher development
and new teacher training and the support of programs and practices that
promote excellence and diversity in America's teaching force. Its work
with new teachers results in strong retention trends.
Featured reading:
To read more about these and other recruitment and retention intitiatives,
see:
Telling Our Story;
The Hard Work of Recruiting to Our Field,
the National Clearinghouse Connections newsletter Spring 2000 issue.
Keeping the Committed;
The Importance of Induction and Support Programs for New Special Educators
(pdf), Lynn Boyer and Phoebe Gillespie, Teaching Exceptional
Children vol.33 no.1, Sept/Oct 2000 p.10-15 (Available from CEC 1-888-232-7733,
Order number EC 625699)
Special Educators new to the classroom face unique challenges that can
only be met through a multi-level system of supports. These supports
include activities coordinated through state, higher education, and
local participants. Some of the most critical supports are mentoring
and induction programs, administrative involvement, and university/local
district training and supervision through out the first year. References
and contact information for exemplars in the field are provided.
Learning
the Ropes: Urban Teacher Induction Programs and Practices in the United
States, a publication of Recruiting New Teachers, Inc.
Consensus is growing that few parts of a teacher's development continuum
are as important as the induction years. Learning the Ropes: Urban Teacher
Induction Programs and Practices in the United States reports the findings
of RNT's national study of how large urban school districts - many dealing
with issues of teacher shortage, inadequate training, and high turnover
- are meeting the needs of teachers during the first three years in
the classroom.
Eliminating
the Barriers to Improving Teaching, (pdf
version) Terry Dozier and Candance Bertotti, U.S. Department of
Education Teacher Quality Initiative
Eliminating the barriers to quality teaching will require a strong commitment
to address the fundamental causes of our teacher-quality challenges
and a willingness to think "outside of the box." This document examines
a wide range of policies and practices that are all too frequent barriers
to quality teaching. While your community may not face each of these
barriers, we urge you to use this guide to identify those that it does
face and to begin finding ways to address them. The guide also includes
examples of programs and activities designed to eliminate specific barriers
to quality teaching.
Future
Teacher, Winter 2000, Recruiting New Teachers, Inc. (RNT)
This issue of the RNT's Future Teacher newsletter address teacher retention
with articles on teacher induction, mentoring, and the special needs
of new special education teachers.
How to Know if You Have a Special
Education Teacher Retention Problem... and What Do You Do if You Do?,
(html version) Fred Weintraub,
Lynne Cook, Ph.D. & Lynn Boyer, Ph.D.
Presentation to the Council for Exceptional Children California State
Federation Annual Meeting, San Diego, November 8, 2001.
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