New teachers say they're ill-prepared...

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Author Message   Yvettep AALBC .com Platinum Poster Username: Yvettep Post Number: 2906 Registered: 01-2005 Rating: N/A Votes: 0 (Vote!) Posted on Thursday, May 22, 2008 - 03:02 pm:        Many new elementary- and secondary-school teachers feel that their training left them unprepared for the challenges of working in racially and ethnically diverse classrooms or teaching children with special needs, according to a new report by Public Agenda, a public-policy research group. Public Agenda, together with the National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality, a research center backed by the U.S. Department of Education, surveyed 641 first-year teachers about their views on teacher training, professional development, and retention. The study found that while new teachers generally felt positively about their overall preparation, they identified gaps between teacher training and coping with diverse classrooms and special-needs students. While 76 percent of those surveyed said that their training programs had covered strategies for teaching racially and ethnically diverse groups of students, only 39 percent said that the training they received had helped them in such classrooms. Anxiety and Class? Curiously, in a trend that researchers labeled "suburban angst," the report showed that teachers who worked in affluent communities felt less prepared and were more anxious about teaching diverse groups of students than their colleagues at schools in less affluent areas. While most teachers surveyed said they had received training in working in diverse classrooms, new teachers in "high needs" schools were far more likely to say their training had helped them. In fact almost half of teachers in high-needs areas felt their diversity training had helped them a lot, as compared with less than one-third of the teachers in upscale school districts who said their preparation had been useful. The results suggest that teachers in affluent schools are not prepared for the diversity they will encounter, the report says. "Contrary to the popular view that suburban schools are not racially integrated," it says, "suburban teachers in focus groups mention that they increasingly find themselves with a wide range of populations from cultures from Asia, Latin America, the Asian subcontinent, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East"... http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/05/2907n.htm?rss