Teachers need to be recognized with higher titles and pay as they show increased talent, and their jobs should have potential to change over time. She has been studying new teachers in reforming schools for her dissertation. As a teacher, you work with young people to help them become thoughtful, responsible, confident members of society. You analyze sophisticated ideas and skills and break them apart into their smallest parts in order to make them understandable to others. You create relationships that are complex, important, and exciting which can rarely be duplicated in other settings.
Teaching is much harder than many initially anticipate.
While people are often drawn to the profession for the reasons I described above, they are discouraged when they realize how difficult it is to turn theory into practice. For example, it is hard to teach diverse learners successfully in one classroom without either leaving the most needy behind or neglecting to challenge the most advanced. Very little is currently done in schools to help new teachers deal with the difficulty of the job. New teachers feel isolated in their classrooms. They don't have colleagues with whom to collaborate, they often don't have good mentoring, and they don't have ongoing professional development to help them improve their practices.