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Timothy Surrette is an associate professor of education at the University of Maine at Augusta and vice chair of the Bangor School Committee. This column reflects his views and expertise alone and not those of the University of Maine System, the Bangor School Department or any organization of which he is a member.
An urgent challenge for public schools in Maine and nationwide is to successfully support and professionally develop new teachers and thereby prepare them to engage in long and successful careers in education.
A longitudinal and comprehensive study conducted by the U.S. Department of Education in 2015 found that nearly one in six teachers leave the profession of teaching during the first five years of their career. This high level of teacher attrition has negative implications for schools such as high financial costs associated with recruiting, hiring, and training new teachers and decreases in student achievement.
Teaching is inherently a complex profession and pre-employment teacher preparation programs are unable to provide teachers the full knowledge base necessary to navigate the many challenges associated with early career teaching. Long-standing research has identified eight common challenges new teachers experience: classroom discipline, motivating students, addressing individual student differences, assessing students’ work, maintaining relationships with students’ parents and caregivers, organization of classroom instruction, lack of teaching materials and resources, and addressing the personal problems of individual students.
Also, new teachers have high-priority needs such as receiving emotional support and adjusting to the school environment and their role as a teacher in it. New teachers also typically receive heavier workloads than their more experienced colleagues. These heavier workloads often include larger classes, more students with special needs or behavioral difficulties, extracurricular duties, and classrooms with fewer textbooks and equipment.
To assist new teachers in navigating these various challenges, schools have traditionally relied on a variety of formal and informal systems of support that are collectively referred to as teacher induction. However, induction programs vary greatly in quality and content from school to school.
Traditionally, the centerpiece of a school’s induction program is matching a new teacher with an on-site veteran teacher with pedagogical and classroom management expertise. However, research indicates that veteran and highly skilled teachers do not necessarily make high-quality mentors. In addition to possessing outstanding pedagogical skills, highly effective mentors must also have strong interpersonal skills, credibility with peers and administrators, a demonstrated curiosity and eagerness to learn, and respect for multiple perspectives.
Long-standing research points to the many challenges associated with being a new teacher and of being a mentor to a new teacher. These challenges contribute to unacceptably high levels of new teachers leaving the field of education early in their career, which has financial costs to schools and academic, social, and emotional costs to students. Also, a recent study conducted by the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching found that high-quality mentors and mentoring programs have been shown to increase teacher retention and effectiveness, and new teacher surveys rank mentoring as the most helpful type of support.
This is why I’ll be supporting LD 470, An Act to Require School Administrative Units to Adopt Mentoring Programs for Teachers and to Improve Existing Programs. This bill, if passed, would provide mentors of new teachers in Maine with adequate compensation, ongoing professional development, and training needed to fully and successfully support new teachers setting them up for long and successful careers educating Maine’s youth.
