High School Educators Convene in Belize City to Address Teacher Retention Issues

Representatives from fifteen high schools across the county gathered in Belize City for a workshop on attracting and retaining teachers. The first session of the two-day workshop was held last Friday and the final session, today. The educators discussed a myriad of issues affecting teachers, including the delivery of material, the availability of resources, and the adoption of best practices to ensure that school environments are purpose-driven. Dr. Tillett told Love News that a key focus of the workshop was to improve the orientation given to new teachers, which is proven to assist with keeping teachers in the education field.

Dr. Salome Tillett,: “As a part of my studies I look at how secondary schools in Belize conduct new teacher orientation and it was very interesting to me to find out that there is a good attempt by schools and school leaders to do some form of new teacher orientation but that there was no standard across the board and in many cases there is nothing written. So it depends on the school leader at the time, what extent they decided to do it, what is involved, what they offer as a part of the training and so I felt that as a support to school leaders it would be important to give them the opportunity to reflect on the practices that hey have as a school and how they welcome new teachers and especially because we want the new teachers to stay and the studies say that 50% of the teachers who have a successful new teacher orientation session will stay at the school. They will stay in the field because this is what we want. We want people who join the profession to stay in the field to remain teachers and again the studies are saying that the new teacher orientation will make or break that teacher. It will make them decide I will stay or I will not stay. So we want our teachers to remain in the classroom.”

Dr. Tillett also said that a key component to teacher retention is to foster a greater love and appreciation for the profession.

Dr. Salome Tillett: “And you know in Belize we have teachers actually leaving the profession to work in call centers so it says something about what we need to do to bring them in and keep them in our profession. Well one of the things that we want the school leaders to have is to set the tone when the teacher comes in at the beginning of their employment. What are the expectations of the school ? We want all new teachers to embrace the concept of high expectations with every student in every classroom. We want the teachers to make all that’s possible and let it be a schoolwide practice that you don’t have this teacher working hard, this teacher testing with rigor the other teacher testing at a low level, the other teacher not caring about the students. We want it to be that in every school every teacher cares about every student and every teacher has high expectations for all their students. So they will promote to the students that you can do this, you can do it, this is not beyond your ability, you can do it  we will help you if you make the effort you will succeed and we will not give up on you. So if the teacher comes to the classroom with that sense then the whole system improves.”

Dr. Tillett said that, based on the feedback from the participants, there will be follow-up sessions planned at the district level.  The sessions were held at the SCA conference room.