Remember your first day in front of a class? The excitement and nervousness mixed with just a little fear can be quite daunting for new teachers! While many love the idea of teaching, build a great rapport with their students, and are organised with their lesson planning, others can become overwhelmed by the range of demands of teaching and suffer burnout. In fact, studies suggest up to 50,000 teachers will have permanently left the profession between 2022 and 2025.
Many new teachers feel under-prepared to face the demands of teaching. University prepares its students to deliver content, assess students, and plan lessons – all very valuable skills for a teacher to have, but other areas are difficult to learn from lectures and textbooks. Behaviour management, reporting, and analysing data to inform teaching are skills new teachers usually learn on the job. Beginning teachers can feel overwhelmed, lost, and powerless to cope with expectations without support to learn these skills and more. The stress from these feelings can lead to burnout.
Mentoring beginning teachers has become the best practice in Australia, but with their own workloads to contend with, experienced teachers can only go so far in supporting their new colleagues. They can advise on behaviour management, model reporting, and recommend differentiation strategies; however, there is usually insufficient time available to show beginning teachers how to gather and analyse data about their students effectively.
Statistics seems to be a polarising topic. Some people are fascinated by them and happy to spend time interpreting data. For other people, though, it’s not high on their list of favourite pastimes. The thought of gathering data on every student in each of their classes (or subjects) is enough to make them dread the lost time, fear performing the calculations involved, or even suffer an anxiety episode. It may be alarming for beginning teachers, but their mentors may not be faring any better. A stressed mentor is less effective.
So, what can schools do to help in this area? Should teachers be required to learn complex Excel techniques, including calculations, statistical formulas, and graphs? What data should they analyse? What is a correlation? What is it saying about your students? How can teachers use this information to support students?
New teachers have so much to learn and concentrate on. TrackOne Studio’s Learning Analytics Suite takes the stress and difficulty from analysing student data. All necessary information about classes and students is neatly summarised and set out, ready to evaluate. Trends in student progress over time are identified, so areas of improvement and decline can be easily identified both in internal and external assessments. The planning tools foster a review-and-plan approach for each student individually, the class as a whole, and even at the cohort level.
With much of the analytics done for them, beginning teachers can concentrate on planning interventions and differentiation strategies suitable for each student or group of students. They can take advantage of insights about students in their class recorded by other teachers – a way to share information from more experienced colleagues. In short, it reduces the stress a beginning teacher may experience when taking a data-informed approach to teaching. This, in turn, can help reduce the chance of burnout and career abandonment.
Everyone wins when our new teachers have a great start to a rewarding career – teaching the next generation.