Part of IDCTE is to train teachers - specifically new teachers, and to certify them to some standard level.
Orienting new teachers and assessing their capabilities should be the educational institutions responsibility, with IDCTE as a partner, which goes beyond the initial week of orientation.... Deans, department heads, program directors and whomever else should be part of the orientation and assessment team. Mentors should be assigned. A year long program of 1 semester observation, then 1 semester "student teaching" should be followed, with feedback to the new instruction.
1st year observation should not be the new instructor sitting in the classroom, but interactive, much like a teaching assistant, with the instructor and program chair or other administrator with a new teacher orientation checklist covering specific items to help a new instructor be preprared for teaching: Items like Setting up a Roll in the LMS, taking Roll in the LMS, handing out papers, tests, taking the test, grading homework and test, adding / removing materials in the LMS, as directed by the teacher, reviewing the quiz bank, and exam question bank, reviewing lesson materials, leading classes (a second semeter activity, but perhaps done in the observation semester) proctoring exams, helping with labs, grading and inputting grades into both the LMS and the educational intistution's grade tracking system.
It the instittuion has an "early warning system" or an alert system for students with difficulties, this should also be trained during the observation year.
I would like the Observation year "just observing": to the "student view of the LMS" and active "Teaching assistant" participant as the "teacher view of the LMS... giving a new teacher a more complete picture of what goes on behind the scenes in running a classroom - what might be called the mechanics of teaching.
To have the new teacher "experience" everything the teacher would be doing in the obervation year. If the first time the new instructor is exposed to roll taking, grading, grade inputs, etc is his/her first year of actual teaching... it will be a challenging and unfulfilling semester.
Are you setting up your new instrutors for failure, training them to be mediocre, or preparing them for success?
As teacher observations are also part of a teachers performance review: having the new instructor observe not only his/her primary mentor, but other instructors along the way, USING the evaluation forms or observation forms used by the institution, is a good way for the new instructor to become familiar with what criteria is being used for those observations, for what they will be evaluated on, and for them to look at seasoned teachers using those forms. This latter concept is for the new teacher to become more integrated with the staff as a whole, and not isolated to their own program.
