Chapter 12: Problem of Practice Dissertations as Improvement Efforts: Implementing Research-Based New Teacher Induction

There is an old African proverb that states, “A fish in water doesn’t know it’s in water.” This proverb, and its inverse, which refers to “a fish out of water,” aptly describes the mentoring and novice teacher experience. Experienced teachers often do not think about the everyday challenges of teaching. They swim along, flowing with the current of changing administrators, challenging students, and disappearing supplies. Novice teachers, on the other hand, may feel like fish out of water. They are looking in from the outside. As one novice teacher at Trish’s high school reported, novice teachers “are afraid to ask questions” because they feel it may make them look incompetent. Instead, they struggle without asking for help. While they sometimes learn to “swim,” many leave teaching before doing so (Weiss, 1999). At best, novice teachers often struggle more than necessary. We found the struggles of novice teachers we observed in our schools troubling, and as a result chose to focus on this problem of practice in our dissertations. The goal of our studies was to ease the difficulties we saw new teachers experiencing in our schools. In this chapter we detail our problem of practice dissertation work and its ongoing impact in the school district where we are employed as an example of EdD student research that can positively change the learning opportunities for both novices and mentors in schools. We connect the ways in which we learned how to address the new teacher induction problem of practice and others we encounter in our work to the training we received in our CPED-influenced EdD program.