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Standardized tests, workload turning off young teachers, educator warns

Everyone has one — that crazy, kooky, out-of-step teacher who got you thinking or feeling more involved in the classroom.

However, some advocates say increasing competition for jobs and resources, combined with an increasingly standardized curriculum, are forcing the brightest and most creative teachers away.

The result: nearly one third of new teachers are leaving the job within five years of starting out, says Joel Westheimer, a research chair and professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Ottawa.

Westheimer, who trains new teachers, says each year graduates outnumber available jobs.

At the same time, he said the last 10 to 15 years have seen a radical shift in the culture of teaching and education, skewing towards standardized training and testing.

As a result, "teachers feel compelled or forced to teach to the test and other aspects of the curriculum are pushed to the margins," he said.

The increase in standardization, combined with a heavy curriculum load that leaves limited time for creativity or autonomy, can leave teachers feeling like assembly line workers, he said.

The subjects being short-shifted, in his opinion: art, music, social studies and science.

"The problems are; we know the [teachers] that are leaving the system are the best and brightest, the most ambitious, the most innovative teachers — those are the ones that are frustrated the earliest."

And standardization is also hurting students — particularly those who learn in more hands-on or interactive ways, he said.

That's something retired chemistry teacher Brian Cheng has seen first hand.

Classroom learning needs 'sense of danger'

Cheng retired from Strathcona Composite High School in Edmonton in 2009 after a career spent blowing up things in the classroom while hosting hands-on science clubs on the side.

His goal, he says, was clear.

"[Anything] that would get the kids interested, something that is loud, that is flashy, that is exciting — a certain sense of danger which nowadays we are not allowed to do," he said.

The loud bangs and flashes of light that often emanated from his classroom not only helped with his lessons, but also had a pervasive effect throughout the school at large, Cheng said.

"They'd get really excited … and then they would leave the classroom and talk about them and tell their school friends about it, and that also motivated them."

However, Cheng himself began running into budgetary and safety restraints by the end of his career. He said he felt school administration became more caught up with liability, causing them to tighten the purse strings on chemicals for classroom experiments and demonstrations.

Today, he says, some teachers choose to forgo demonstrations and experiments completely.

"And I find that to be a travesty. They should use these experiments to motivate the kids, to get the kids involved hands on."

Others, though, are still findings ways to be creative within the curricular and budgetary confines, Cheng said.

"If the teacher is interested in staying true to his or her profession, they would always be able to find things that they can do in classroom," he said. "Be it small little things, be it something that is tiny, doesn't take that much time. If they are creative, they can always do that."

As for the teacher attrition problem, Westheimer recommended educators look to a corporate example.

"Imagine Google was suddenly hemorrhaging software engineers — that they had a high attrition rate. We would never imagine Google executives saying, 'Well, there's plenty of people who want to be Google software engineers, so let's let those people go and we'll just take along anyone who wants to come be a Google software engineer,'" he said.

"No, what they would do, of course, is do exit interviews. They would look at the workplace conditions and they would do everything they could to change their workplace conditions, change their recruitment and retention strategies to make sure that they have the best and brightest people to be there … and school systems really need to do exactly the same thing."