Early Career Mentoring

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Early career mentoring programs have been implemented and reviewed for many years. Mentoring has been viewed by researchers as an effect method for teaching novices a variety of essential skills (Schweille, 2008). Expert teachers guiding novice’s development of knowledge and teaching practices, as well as nurturing the self-development of learning to grow and learn independently based on their own practices and experiences are common conceptions of what occurs in mentoring programs (Schweille, 2008). A further goal of the mentoring process has been to help novice teachers develop a vision of the type of teacher they want to become (Hanuscin & Lee, 2008).
While the goals of mentoring are no doubt worthy objectives to strive for, like all objectives
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Richard Ingersoll (2012) shares data which illustrates that more beginning teachers now receive mentoring support than ever before. In his publication, Beginning Teacher induction WHAT THE DATA TELL US, Ingersoll (2012) shares that the percentage of teachers receiving mentoring support rose 41% between the years of 1990 and 2008. State legislatures are also recognizing the benefits of mentoring, as the number of states requiring mentoring support for new teachers continues to increase, with 27 states requiring mentoring support for new teachers in 2012 and 29 states requiring mentoring for new teachers in 2015 (Goldrick, 2016). Additionally, within the last five years Hawaii, Oklahoma, and Vermont have all passed new teacher induction or mentoring requirements (Goldrick, 2016). While these data are supportive of mentoring processes and programs, there is still much room for improvement and further study.
Alas, even though data shows teachers given a mentor in their first year remain teaching in larger numbers and more teachers are being provided mentoring now than in the past, the problem remains that some teachers who have been assigned a mentor during the first year decide to leave. This begs the question, which mentoring program characteristics or procedures are most effective at retaining teachers? Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate what mentoring
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For example, one study analyzing university guided mentoring programs shows that teachers are more likely to remain in the district than teachers who do not participate in a mentoring program (Silva, Mckie, and Gleason, 2015). This particular study analyzed university guided mentoring programs funded by the U.S. Department of Education called the Teaching Residency Programs, or TRPs. Teacher Residency Programs are designed specifically for novice teachers who did not obtain a bachelors in education. These teachers complete a year of residency in their schools within their mentor’s classroom, throughout the year novice teachers gradually increase the amount of time and control they have over the classroom while simultaneously completing graduate work through a university program to earn a Master’s degree. The university course content and mentoring program are intentionally designed to complement one another. (Silva, McKie, Knechtel, Gleason and Makowsky, 2014). While this study shows promising effects for university mentoring programs, two separate studies by the U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, and What Works Clearinghouse (2013 & 2015) illustrate no significant effects on teacher retention when novice teachers complete an on-site mentoring program. The first study analyzed and compared the retention rates of novice