Real Talk for New Teachers (the story of) and how to make teaching sustainable

moving from Why Great Teachers Quit to how to STAY teaching sustainably for years to come

Whew, boy.

I thought being a teacher during the pandemic was hard (news flash— it was). One simple tweet about it brought thousands of comments from educators and led to this post about that glorious time in education.

But we are in what has strikingly similar vibes to the pandemic right now in public education. Every day is a dizzying and overwhelming array of updates, news, changes, and potential horrors for our students and schools.

Wayyyy back in 2009 or so I had a colleague I was mentoring in the school where I taught. She was smart, funny, engaging, and creative. I was so excited for my young children to have her as their music teacher one day. Then after two short years she left. Despite my best efforts, the pressure from parents and a lack of boundaries for work/rest took its toll on her.

I sank into a dark winter with a newborn in my lap and stared at a computer screen. I wanted to understand why teachers were leaving the profession, why, at the time, 30 percent of teachers quit in the first 5 years. So I began a project of interviewing, writing, and research and culminated with the book Why Great Teachers Quit, published by Corwin Press in 2010 (and now Skyhorse in 2015). (More on non-fiction book proposals soon).

Flash forward 13 years of public school teaching and mentoring teachers and I am in front of a group of pre-service teachers, this time as an assistant professor, leading a workshop about how to create a sustainable career in education. I shared the wisdom of veteran educators, the ones who stayed and continue to despite myriad challenges. During the workshop, the students created personalized plans based on their own challenges, personalities and interests, and an idea was born.

How to shorten the learning curve for new teachers?

How can we help them begin this career with a plan to sustainable their physical and mental health, and build a strong, supportive community?

I joined with the incredible Penny Bishop— Dean of the Wheelock School of Education and Boston University, to write a new book called Real Talk for New Teachers: Tools for a Sustainable Career. We had partnered together with John Downes to write Personalized Learning in the Middle Grades and wanted to tackle this critical issue together.

This book is born of our love for teachers, the field of education, and students, and a deep commitment and desire to make teaching into a more humane and sustainable career. We’ve both written a lot about the challenges of teacher attrition, and current issues facing teachers. We wanted to shorten the learning curve that we experienced (too many years!), gather our experience, wisdom from other experienced educators, and glean important messages and ideas from current research, podcasts, and publications. Lastly, we wanted to create a reflective and supportive place where readers can write, draw, imagine, and decide on personalized actions to help sustain themselves in this vital career.

And so, at this wildly unpredictable time in America’s public schools, there are still many ways that a teacher can have a significant impact every day in the classroom, and plenty of resources to support you.

We hope that this book proves helpful to mentors and mentees in schools, to recent graduates at schools of education, and to those in their first few years trying to make their way.

It’s coming June 2nd from Routledge Press, and we hope if it helps even one teacher, it will have been worth it.

Available for pre-order on May 12th!

(and please visit katyfarber.com for more about my books, work, and projects)