The Impact of Great Mentors
Every year, thousands of aspiring teachers complete their student teaching on their path to becoming a teacher. CALDER research reinforces the idea that who supervises this training matters a lot.
Studying teachers in Washington state, CALDER researchers found that new teachers who had highly effective mentors performed about as well in their first year as teachers with three years of experience who had an average mentor. This difference—equivalent to two years of on-the-job learning—drives home how important mentor selection is to developing the workforce.
Could schools and teacher preparation programs significantly improve new teacher performance by strategically placing student teachers with their most effective veterans? With 97% of teachers currently not serving as mentors, there's substantial room to expand the pool of high-quality mentorship and find out.
Go Deeper:
Goldhaber, D., Krieg, J., & Theobald, R. (2020). Effective like me? Does having a more productive mentor improve the productivity of mentees? Labour Economics, 63, 101792. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.labeco.2019.101792