Beyond
SOLO
Teaching
Teacher induction needs to do more than just ease new
teachers’ entry into their role; it needs to welcome
them into a collaborative professional learning community.
Sharon Feiman-Nemser
The challenges of beginning teaching have been documented for decades. From Bel Kaufman’s Up the Down Staircase (Harper- Collins, 1966) to Esmé Raji Codell’s Educating Esmé (Algonquin, 1999),
autobiographical accounts of idealistic beginners battling bureaucratic requirements, struggling to build
relationships with students and families, and gaining
self-understanding and pedagogical know-how have
been a staple of the education literature.
Formal studies, too, have examined beginning
teachers’ concerns, aspirations, and learning needs.
Almost 50 years ago, Lortie (1966) likened the new
teacher to Robinson Crusoe, marooned on a desert
island and facing the challenges of survival alone.
In a more recent study, Johnson (2004) found that
new teachers often feel lost at sea, with little or no
guidance from colleagues or curriculum. Despite
changes in the backgrounds of teachers and the contexts of teaching, two themes persist: The early years
of teaching are undeniably a time of intense learning,
and they are often a time of intense loneliness.
Ideas about how to ameliorate the situation have
also been around for some time. In the early 1960s,
James Conant, former president of Harvard Uni-
versity, made several recommendations regarding the
treatment of new teachers. Conant (1963) urged
school boards to give new teachers the following
supports:
(a) limited teaching responsibility; (b);aid in gath-
ering instructional materials; (c);advice of experienced
teachers whose own load is reduced so that they can
work with the new teacher in his classroom; (d);shifting
to more experienced teachers those pupils who create
problems beyond the ability of the novice to handle
effectively; (e);specialized instruction concerning the
characteristics of the community, the neighborhood, and
the students he is likely to encounter. (p.;212)
Around the same time, Robert Schaeffer (1967),
dean of Columbia University’s Teachers College,
made this prescient observation:
It is trivial to argue about the degree of knowledge
necessary to begin teaching, while we ignore the
crucial question of how teachers can continue to learn
throughout their careers. The real problem about the
substantive knowledge possessed by new teachers
is not its initial quantity but the fact that the school
environment makes so few provisions for its steady
expansion. (p.; 14)
Conant recognized that beginning teachers
need support to ease their transition into full-time
teaching, but his recommendations did not challenge
