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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Teacher preparation is the worst! You would never let a doctor right out of med school start being a doctor on their own. You would never let a lawyer right out of law school be a lawyer on their own. 
Teaching involves so much skill above and beyond knowing the subject areas. And we expect new teachers to figure it out along the way.

And I was a part of a mentoring program when I was a new teacher. Although it was nice, it didn’t help me much. [/quote]

The way we develop teachers seems unlike every other profession.  For other professions, you leave school or training, and they give you the more routine and boring tasks.  You might work hard, even harder than the more experienced people, but you aren't doing the same level of cognitive work as the most experienced people.  My spouse is an LEO.  As a first year officer, he worked really hard, but he was writing traffic tickets, and responding to DV calls, not solving gang murders.  He worked his way up to that.  I have another family member who is a software engineer who cut his teeth on the mundane pieces of code in project where senior colleagues where writing the innovative bits. Now he gets to do the fun exciting stuff.  I have another family member who is an electrician. He's got the newbies pulling wires, and redoing outlets while he's creating plans, and solving the tricky bits.

But in teaching, in many places, the newest teachers don't just have the same amount of cognitive work (that takes them three times as long to figure out) they get the most challenging situations.  So, if there are two positions in a department where someone has 1 or 2 preps, and one where that person has 3? Guaranteed that the newbie will get three.  If there's a kid who is particularly hard?  He/she will probably be in the newbie's class.  If there are classes that are more likely to have challenges, like algebra 1 in a high school (where the kids who struggle the most with math, and sometimes with behavior start), the new teacher will get it while the experienced teacher gets Honors Algebra 2.

I think that if we want to fix the teacher's shortage, we need to figure out strategies to prevent burn out and drop out.  One piece of that is figuring out how to bring teachers into the profession more gradually, with more time to watch and learn from people with experience and a gradual release of responsibility.  I work in special ed, and was a counselor in disability specific camps, and then spent a year as a paraeducator, and then worked in a classroom with a very experienced paraeducator, before being on my own. That actually was a pretty perfect route, but few teachers get that. [/quote]

Thank you for this great perspective. [/quote]

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