As a former mentor, I understand the impact that quality mentoring can have not only on new teachers but the whole school community.
The research on teacher retention and working conditions (see, for example, Ingersoll & Tran, 2023; Nguyen, Pham, Springer, & Crouch, 2019) is pretty clear about the importance of having a mentor or coach. As a former mentor myself, I’ve seen firsthand the impact quality mentoring can have. You see new teachers growing more confident, learning to succeed, becoming professionals, and moving into leadership roles. As a second-year principal of a rural elementary school in Madelia, Minnesota, it’s an understanding and a responsibility I bring to my new position. Mentoring influences the entire school community, building an ethos of collaborative professional learning and a peer culture that embraces improvement.
My district is small (600+ students), with two schools and a student population that is roughly half white and half Hispanic or Latino. We haven’t had a structured induction program in the past, but thanks to a recent state pilot program designed to create the enabling conditions for strong teacher induction, I now have the opportunity to put a formal mentoring program in place for my district.
We’ve long known that a thoughtful and comprehensive induction experience is a key factor in teacher retention and a stepping stone to continued professional growth. This critical transition period into the classroom can’t be left to chance. New teachers need support not only to manage the nuts and bolts of the day-to-day but also to accelerate the development of the skills and confidence they need as professionals.
In my experience, it’s quite often a mentor who helps a new teacher focus on the foundational mindsets they need to become the educator their students need them to be — knowing who their learners are and building a practice of reflecting and analyzing what happens in the classrooms that helps them grow. This kind of quality support doesn’t end with individual teachers either. It can have a ripple effect throughout the whole school, serving as the cornerstone of the kind of deeply relational instructional culture our teachers deserve and that helps them do their jobs and do them well.
Bringing a mentoring mindset to a leadership role
I have a lot of experience as a mentor and coach. I was fortunate to receive intensive training on a comprehensive, relationship-based, instructionally focused induction model. I subsequently served as a mentor for new teachers in my former district for several years. I was also an instructional coach for veteran teachers and a university supervisor for pre-service teachers. I also designed professional development for new staff. Through these experiences, I gained considerable knowledge about keeping new teachers in the classroom and coaching educators at different career stages to continue their development. Needless to say, it’s bolstered my effectiveness as an administrator and instructional leader.
As a mentor and coach, I worked collaboratively alongside teachers to encourage them to do the thinking rather than being the giver of knowledge. There are times, of course, when you must provide information, but as a professional learning practice, mentoring taught me the skill set of how to sit with a teacher, ask the right questions, and guide conversations so that teachers analyze their own practice and come up with their own answers and solutions.
Even in my principal evaluator role, I use my “mentor muscles,” and I think my teachers would say it feels more like a coaching cycle than an evaluation. One of my special education teachers recently told me: "Your leadership style is one of respect and trust. You correct our mistakes but not so it feels punitive or like our mistakes define us. You help us think through problems and help solve them rather than just dismiss them."
That's a practice I'm very proud of because I truly believe it’s the key to affecting change in teachers. When you come down harsh on a teacher — you're doing this wrong and this wrong and this wrong — they get defeated. With my instructional coaching background, I always start with, “Hey, here are some great things I saw you doing. Here are some areas of growth. How can we work on this?” Then I create the space for them to develop those ideas, providing support and resources as needed. Yes, I do have to evaluate them on a rubric, but we use it as a form of co-assessment to talk through where they are and how to get where they want to be. Nine times out of 10, they take the feedback and apply it. They know I'm not there to judge them. I'm there to help them get better.
Mentoring to center underserved students and build reflective practice
One of the hallmarks of the mentoring model I was trained on is its emphasis on knowing students, guiding and encouraging teachers to learn who their students are to design better instruction. Another emphasis is on developing that reflective muscle I referenced above, not just moving on, but circling back and asking, what worked well in a lesson, what didn’t, and building that practice as part of a teacher’s instructional toolset.
These practices are particularly important in my elementary school, which serves 300 students, a third of whom are multilingual learners. We’ve had a hard time attracting teachers of color who are Spanish-speakers, and we are working on a few initiatives to address that. But for the most part, my teachers come from different backgrounds, don’t look like my students, and don’t speak their home languages. So that knowing students piece is huge. Building a learner profile is like an iceberg. There is the little bit we see, but a lot we have to work harder, dive deeper, to understand. For our multilingual learner teachers, understanding this holistic view of students not only improves lesson planning but deepens trust and relationships — it's ground zero for establishing the conditions every student needs to engage in rigorous instruction.
This knowledge of students also supports teachers to more effectively reflect on their practice in alignment with their students’ needs. They can dig into what happened during a lesson and look for instructional impact or alternative strategies to try. As one of my new teachers put it: “I know what to ask myself questions about.”
No one develops these practices overnight. A mentor is a powerful partner in supporting teachers to cultivate the habits of mind to return to these processes to design and improve instruction until it becomes second nature to their teaching practice.
Mentoring to support a strong instructional culture
Because my district is small, we don’t have 100 new teachers coming in every year. At my school, we'll have a handful of new teachers in any given year. This year, two of my multilingual teachers are tier one teachers in Minnesota, so they have a bachelor's degree but not in education. Then I have a tier one and a just-out-of-college special education teacher, and a new music teacher. But whether it's one, four, or 25 new teachers, each person needs and deserves individualized support at this stage in their development. It's not a buddy system. You can’t just say “the person across the way is going to be your ‘mentor.’ Ask them questions.” But if you don’t have an intentional and formalized program and process in place, that’s all too often exactly what happens.
It was important and deeply personal for me to get a framework for mentoring built out for our district, and the Minnesota Induction and Mentoring Program pilot came at the right time with our new superintendent leading a strategic planning process. We’ve established a new teacher workshop before the school year starts, where we lay out what their mentoring will look like. Clarifying the procedures, processes, and expectations is orienting and reassuring for new teachers. They come in thinking “my district’s got my back.”
We’ve also had access through the grant to provide professional learning from the New Teacher Center (NTC) for our new up-and-coming mentors, which is the same mentoring model that I am familiar with, so we have a shared language and approach. We’ve established mentoring schedules, and monthly principal visits are also part of the structure. Our team is formalizing a goal-setting process with new teachers and providing tools for teaching and coaching cycles. My mentors are also getting in-field coaching from NTC experts who observe them coaching their mentees. They can’t say enough positive things about how valuable that’s been. In providing this professional learning for our mentors, we are investing in their development and the longer-term sustainability of the program.
The mentors we’ve trained are learning and practicing, with their mentees and with their peers and colleagues. I’ve been observing the mentor in my building becoming a great support for her colleagues. She's now a professional learning community (PLC) leader, modeling how to ask the right questions of her colleagues and guiding them to find solutions together. That’s the ripple effect that is going to really catalyze change in my building and in the district. We’re all mentoring each other, learning how to be reflective practitioners, how to use data and professional knowledge to continuously develop our instructional practices to meet the needs of our kids.
What I love about Minnesota’s pilot framework for induction is its focus on creating conditions for new teachers to thrive in our system and for building a sustainable vision central to school culture. Teacher induction should be more than a couple days of orientation. It should be an embedded, multi-year plan that is integrated into all our teacher development initiatives and professional learning. This is what we are trying to do with our strategic plan. Induction is the first several steps of a lifelong process for professional teachers, and it all starts with good mentoring that has a ripple effect over the course of their careers and across the school.
References
Ingersoll, R. M., & Tran, H. (2023). Teacher shortages and turnover in rural schools in the US: An organizational analysis. Educational Administration Quarterly (59)2, 255–305.
Peske, H. (2022). Eight ways states can act now to retain an effective, diverse teacher workforce. Washington, DC: National Council on Teacher Quality.
Podolsky, A., Kini, T., Bishop, J., & Darling-Hammond, L. (2016). Solving the teacher shortage: How to attract and retain excellent educators. Palo Alto, CA: Learning Policy Institute. https://doi.org/10.54300/262.960.
Ingersoll, R., & Kralik, J. M. (2004). The impact of mentoring on teacher retention: What the research says. Denver, CO: Education Commission of the States.
Nguyen, T. D., Pham, L., Springer, M., & Crouch, M. (2019). The factors of teacher attrition and retention: An updated and expanded meta-analysis of the literature. (EdWorkingPaper: 19-149). Retrieved from Annenberg Institute at Brown University: https://edworkingpapers.com/ai19-149
