In a move directly addressing one of Utah's educational challenges, a team at Utah State University has netted a National Science Foundation grant to dig into the reasons behind the high turnover rates of high school mathematics teachers. In an effort that strikes at the heart of teacher retention issues, the researchers are geared to investigate support systems for teachers at work and at home, as reported by USU Today.
Willa van Dijk and Kaitlin Bundock, associated with the Department of Special Education and Rehabilitation Counseling, alongside Carrie Bala of the Mathematics and Statistics Department, are setting out to rigorously analyze how to keep teachers teaching. The issue at hand is a serious one; Utah's secondary math and special education math sectors have begun to almost expect teachers to quickly vacate their posts. The NSF-funded project intends to explore how to effectively support these educators so they're more likely to stay put.
"The collaborative work that Drs. van Dijk, Bundock, and Bala will accomplish with this important project will help us better understand the factors that lead to both teacher and student success," Tom Higbee, head of the Department of Special Education and Rehabilitation Counseling, told USU Today. This project will reportedly look closely at best teaching practices across Utah's 41 school districts to find potential models for statewide replication.
Key to this initiative are two pilot studies, one surveying district-level leadership to grasp the essence of effective mathematics education, and another to closely examine how social support impacts retention from the teachers’ perspectives. Research indicates that students benefit from having experienced teachers, a fact fundamentally underscoring this study's importance. "If you have a teacher who has been in a school for two years and then leaves, the school will hire another teacher, but it’s like going back two years in time," Bundock, who formerly taught high school special education math, explained, as obtained by USU Today.
