Exploring the Impact of Student Teaching Apprenticeships on Student Achievement and Mentor Teachers

Abstract

We exploit within-teacher variation in the years that math and reading teachers in grades 4-8 host an apprentice ("student teacher") in Washington State to estimate the causal effect of these apprenticeships on student achievement, both during the apprenticeship and afterwards. While the average causal effect of hosting a student teacher on student performance in the year of the apprenticeship is indistinguishable from zero in both math and reading, hosting a student teacher is found to have modest positive impacts on student math and reading achievement in a teacher's classroom in following years. These findings suggest that schools and districts can participate in the student teaching process without fear of short-term decreases in student test scores while potentially gaining modest long-term test score increases.

Improving Preservice Teachers’ Feelings of Preparedness to Teach Through Recruitment of Instructionally Effective and Experienced Cooperating Teachers: A Randomized Experiment

“…In other words, recruiters were already doing quite well, but could they do better? Substantial doubts were also raised by stakeholders regarding evidence that instructionally effective teachers might be unwilling or unable to serve (Mullman & Ronfeldt, 2019), at least in part because of local concerns that serving as CTs might harm evaluation scores (Goldhaber et al, 2018a; Ronfeldt, Bardelli, et al, 2020; SAS Institute, 2014).…”

“…PSTs were surveyed about all outcomes, whereas CTs were asked to report on the frequency of their coaching. The survey items were adapted from instruments used previously (Matsko et al, 2020; Ronfeldt, Goldhaber, et al, 2018) to assess the preparation of student teachers. We adapted these prior instruments to this initiative, developing new items to collect data on the goals of the experiment and to better align with the teacher evaluation system in Tennessee.…”

“…Across preparation programs in Chicago, Gordon et al (2018) found that, compared with their peers who did not serve as mentors, CTs had better REACH observation ratings and were more likely to have a master’s degree, be tenured, and be National Board Certified; however, they had statistically similar VAM scores. In Washington state, Goldhaber et al (2018a) discovered that, all else being equal, teachers with more experience were more likely to host a PST, but teachers with greater VAMs were not.…”

What is the Best Way to Analyze Pre–Post Data?

“…A large education research literature demonstrates that observable student characteristics are often correlated not just with student performance but also with student learning gains (Goldhaber, Krieg, & Theobald, 2020;Shores & Steinberg, 2017;Krzywacki, Kim, & Lavonen, 2016). Thus, this approach-like the prior three methods we reviewed-does not account for the possibility that differences in student learning gains, or lack thereof, are due to differences in the characteristics of students in the treatment and control classrooms rather than to the effect of the intervention.…”

Not Remotely Familiar: How COVID-19 is Reshaping Teachers’ Work and the Implications for Teacher Education

“…The belief that teaching work is best taught in an apprenticeship model is firmly rooted in the history of teacher education. It is commonly accepted as a core feature of teacher preparation (Anderson & Stillman, 2013) with compelling links to teacher retention (Ingersoll & May, 2014) and teacher quality (Goldhaber et al, 2020). The whole mentor teacher model is premised on experienced classroom teachers and teacher supervisors guiding the growth and development of the novice student teacher.…”