NIET’s High-quality Mentorship and Support Key to Keeping Teachers in the Classroom

A high-quality mentor program increases the support and coaching that teachers receive early in their careers, ultimately keeping them in the profession. An opinion piece in The Oklahoman cites NIET's work to build strong mentoring programs and teacher leaders:

“Research over­whelm­ingly sup­ports that sus­tained, high-qual­ity ment­or­ing pos­it­ively impacts reten­tion rates, lead­ing to more exper­i­enced edu­cat­ors in the classroom. Ment­ors are vital in boost­ing the self-effic­acy of novice teach­ers by provid­ing sup­port, guid­ance and mod­el­ing effect­ive prac­tices. Fur­ther­more, this con­tinu­ous sup­port helps begin­ning teach­ers gain expos­ure and prac­tice in essen­tial skills, such as effect­ive classroom man­age­ment strategies and evid­ence-based teach­ing prac­tices, which are crit­ical to stu­dent suc­cess. Accord­ing to the National Insti­tute for Excel­lence in Teach­ing, ment­or­ing also sup­ports the devel­op­ment of reflect­ive prac­tices neces­sary for lifelong pro­fes­sional learn­ing.”

NIET offers three concrete, research-based strategies to improve mentoring for new teachers in our report, Why New Teacher Mentoring Falls Short, and How to Fix It:

1. Focus mentoring on instructional improvement.
2. Support mentors to be more effective by providing training, tools, and protocols for the role.
3. Align the mentoring program with district and school systems and goals.

If you’re a district or school leader looking for how to strengthen support for new teachers through mentors, download this free resource containing reflective questions that can help facilitate discussion.

Read the full piece here.