For the past 10 years, educational pundits have been warning of a massive teacher shortage that’s the result of a perfect storm of budget cuts, attrition, and retirement from baby boomers.
This article, Class Dismissed: The Teacher Shortage, corroborates much of what we heard at the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship conference on Education last month.
Some tidbits from the teacher shortage article:
High-achieving countries like Singapore provide their teachers with 100 yearly paid professional development hours and 20 hours a week to collaborate with colleagues. Such benefits are almost unheard of in U.S. schools.
The next decade will see a tsunami of boomer-teachers approaching the average retirement age of 59, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. The study predicts that 95,000 teachers will start collecting pensions every year until 2020, creating the largest mass retirement of teachers since the 1950s.
At the same time, teacher attrition, or turnover, has been increasing. One in five new teachers leaves the profession within three years. In urban areas, 50 percent have moved on after five years. Many researchers argue that a radical solution is needed in order to save public education.
Teacher Brian Beaudet also believes that support and student behavior are important in a new teacher’s experience. “Schools need to support new teachers more substantially,” he explained. “I was given no access to a mentor, and often learned about the job through mistakes. When you have class sizes that regularly exceed 40 students, [that] means that disciplinary issues become much more of a distraction.”
Using virtual tools as a scaffold to bridge the gap between meaningful learning with a teacher in a situated setting and online learning where people sit in a vacuum looking at a computer screen is essential. The debate is over, and hybrid learning has won.
At BettrAt, we’re trying to envision what this future looks like, and work with teacher training programs (starting here in Chicago with Teach for America). If you run a teacher training program, let us know how you can get involved with our pilot programs.
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Virtual tools are also useful for supplemental education. In India for example, many students do not receive the kind of education they pay for in colleges. We are experimenting with several models – blended learning, learning-by-doing and setting up innovation cells in engineering colleges to encourage students to go beyond rote learning.
I would be very interested in looking at your pilot program.