Growing Good Teachers
No Child Left Behind has brought renewed attention to putting qualified teachers in every classroom. Research shows that effective teaching is the single most important thing schools can do to help children achieve. Each year, thousands of people with the best of intentions enter the teaching profession. But many don’t stick with it — half leave within five years — and some who do never become especially good teachers. The result: high turnover, wasted training dollars, too many burnt-out teachers, and too many students falling behind.
How can we make sure that new teachers become good teachers?
Over the last decade, schools have increasingly experimented with programs to help fledgling teachers master their new profession. In the 1999-2000 school year, some 80 percent of new teachers reported participating in some form of induction program, a far cry from the old “sink-or-swim” approach once common in America’s classrooms. Researchers have been tracking these programs, and the results are now in: The best programs reduce turnover, increase the effectiveness of new teachers in boosting student achievement, and are cost-effective investments.
What Works
Mentoring. Having a supportive relationship with an experienced teacher helps. Teachers who had a mentor were 18 percent less likely to leave after the first year than those who didn’t. Having a mentor in the same field or grade level (e.g., matching math teachers with other math teachers, or middle school teachers with others at the same level) helps even more; such pairings reduced leaving rates by some 30 percent. The best mentoring programs go even further: making sure the mentors themselves are effective teachers, providing training in mentoring, and offering such perks as release time and extra compensation for helping new teachers learn the ropes.
Collaboration. New teachers also benefit from working with other teachers to plan lessons and activities, and from participating in seminars for new teachers. In an Illinois study over half of new teachers found seminars on such topics as teaching methods, lesson planning, and student discipline “very helpful.” Schools that offered these opportunities in addition to mentoring and support from the school administration saw attrition rates drop by one-third.
Other supports. A broad range of additional supports also help: providing a teachers aide, a support network for new teachers, and holding down the number of separate courses for which the teacher needs to prepare. While few schools have the resources to offer such expansive packages, those that do find their attrition rates dropping substantially. A majority of new Illinois teachers reported that access to computers and other technology to assess classroom applications was very helpful.
More is better. The better the package of services, the more effective they are. In a nationwide study, in schools that offered the full range of services identified above, only 18 percent of new teachers left; where teachers had no induction at all, some 40 percent left the classroom by the end of the first year. Offering an extra year of services also helps: a California study found that districts that offered strong mentoring during the second year found that some 80 percent of teachers made achievement gains.
What Policymakers Can Do
The research demonstrating the effectiveness of systematic efforts to give new teachers a solid induction into their new profession is strong. States increasingly recognize its potential: in the early 1990s few states mandated such services; today, some 30 states offer an induction program, and 16 of them, both require and fund such services. But it’s important that the programs are well thought out and of high quality; otherwise, cash-strapped schools could be tempted to name pro-forma mentors for new teachers and be done with it.
States can take several steps to create programs that genuinely help new teachers become effective teachers:
- Goals and guidelines: States should set clear goals regarding teacher induction programs and guidelines that identify best practices, and communicate those to school districts. Many states have established standards for their induction programs; California’s is an excellent example.
- Funding: While 28 states currently mandate at least one year of mentorship for new teachers, only 16 states provide funding. In practice, failure to fund such programs means that affluent districts will provide better quality programs, while poorer districts will scrape by with minimal efforts. To ensure best results in training and retaining good teachers, especially for less affluent districts, states should fund mentoring and induction programs.
- Evaluation: Induction is still a relatively new field with a variety of approaches; states can support evaluations to identify the best programs and promote their widespread adoption.
- District flexibility: School districts need flexibility to develop programs that work for them, addressing specific problems facing new teachers (language barriers, for example) and also specific characteristics of the district (e.g., rural districts might have special needs).
