Urban districts have a harder time filling teaching vacancies, especially in such sought-after fields as biology, mathematics, bilingual education, and special education. Minority students make up 75 percent of urban enrollments, but only 20 percent of undergraduates in teacher education are minorities. Newly hired teachers in urban schools are more likely than their counterparts in suburban and rural districts to have either no teaching license or an emergency or temporary one. Most elementary school teachers have only 8.3 minutes of preparation time for every hour they teach, while high school teachers have just 13 minutes of prep time per class hour. Teaching loads for high school teachers generally exceed 100 students per day and reach nearly 200 students per day.
Teachers often come in needing more science background.
But they are often held back at first by the mental mindset that teachers must already be experts. Before they could advance their content understanding, she found, these teachers need first to build the crucial collaborative skills that strengthen their ability to learn from each other. As well as increasing their knowledge through lectures, conferences, field trips, and community mentorships, they work through new approaches by team-teaching in Lanier's ethnically diverse classrooms. As they struggle together to help students with different learning styles reexamine their preconceptions about science, the teachers' own ideas and understanding also grow. At year's end, Harcombe says, these teachers return to their home schools filled with new ideas about what it means to teach and learn.