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

Abstract

New studies show that the instructional effectiveness of preservice candidates and their cooperating teachers are positively related. However, we neither know if these relationships are causal nor, assuming they are, if it is possible to significantly increase the instructional effectiveness of the cooperating teacher pool. In this study, we randomly assign districts to receive recommendation lists (generated using administrative data) for the recruitment of more promising cooperating teachers. Districts receiving lists recruited significantly more effective/experienced cooperating teachers, while candidates placed in these districts felt significantly better prepared to teach. As a result, this study offers an innovative, low-cost strategy for recruiting effective/experienced cooperating teachers and presents the first causal estimates that more effective/experienced cooperating teachers improve candidates’ preparedness to teach.

Disconnected Development? The Importance of Specific Human Capital in the Transition From Student Teaching to the Classroom

“…These findings suggest that human capital specific to grades and school types (e.g., curriculum and subject matter) may be more important for teacher candidate development than human capital specific to individual schools and districts (e.g., school/district culture and colleagues). But these conclusions are not universal, as for elementary math teachers, it appears that human capital specific to individual schools and districts is more important, which echoes findings on teacher evaluation ratings from Ronfeldt et al (2020). These findings have potentially important implications for the broader field of teacher preparation, though future research will need to disentangle the specific mechanisms that explain these relationships.…”

“…There is also evidence that the degree of selfreported (Boyd et al, 2009) and school-level (Goldhaber et al, 2017) alignment between student teaching and first jobs is predictive of future teacher effectiveness, as well as prior evidence from one TEP (Henry et al, 2013) that teaching in the same grade as student teaching is predictive of higher value added. Perhaps surprisingly, prior studies that consider matches between student teaching and first teaching positions in terms of school type (e.g., Ronfeldt, 2015) and the specific school (e.g., Goldhaber et al, 2017;Henry et al, 2013) have not found that these measures are predictive of teacher value added, though one recent study finds that same school hiring is predictive of higher teacher evaluation scores (Ronfeldt et al, 2020). To our knowledge, this is the first article to consider all of the measures of alignment discussed above, as well as measures of demographic alignment at the classroom level that have not been considered in prior analyses.…”

“…Bastian et al (2020); ; Matsko et al (2020); Ronfeldt, Brockman, and Campbell (2018); and Ronfeldt et al (2021) also connect the effectiveness of candidates' mentor teachers (i.e., the inservice teachers who supervise their student teaching placements) to the candidate's future feelings of preparedness (Matsko et al, 2020) and effectiveness; candidates who were mentored by teachers with higher evaluation scores (Bastian et al, 2020;Ronfeldt, Brockman, & Campbell, 2018;Ronfeldt et al, 2021) or higher value added (Bastian et al, 2020;Ronfeldt, Brockman, & Campbell, 2018) tend to be more effective according to these same measures once they enter the workforce. While all of these studies are subject to potential omitted-variable bias-for example, these findings could be explained by the nonrandom sorting of candidates to student teaching and first teaching positionstwo recent experimental studies (Ronfeldt et al, 2020;Ronfeldt, Goldhaber, et al, 2018) provide preliminary evidence that candidates randomly assigned to "better" student teacher placements according to these measures report better selfperceived preparedness than candidates randomly assigned to "worse" placements.…”

Front End to Back End: Teacher Preparation, Workforce Entry, and Attrition

“…Specifically, both the effectiveness (as measured by value added) and instructional performance (as measured by inservice performance evaluations) of cooperating teachers have been found to be associated with the future effectiveness and instructional performance of their teacher candidates who themselves become teachers (Bastian et al, 2020; Goldhaber et al, 2020b; Matsko et al, 2020; Ronfeldt, Brockman, & Campbell, 2018; Ronfeldt, Matsko, et al, 2020). Three recent experimental studies build on this observational work by providing evidence that candidates randomly assigned to “better” student teacher placements (as proxied by cooperating teacher experience and value added and school value added) report better preparedness (Ronfeldt, Goldhaber, et al, 2018; Ronfeldt, Bardelli,et al, 2020) and receive better preservice clinical observation ratings (Goldhaber, Ronfeldt, Matsko et al, 2020) than candidates randomly assigned to “worse” placements.…”

Mentor’s Perception of the Future Science Teacher’s Teaching Practice

“…Mentees would then be able to apply different teaching methods and approaches, to establish cooperation with other mentors, and thus, to plan a lesson based on interdisciplinary approach to teaching. Furthermore, increasing the number of lessons affects the mentee's self-confidence and feeling of better preparedness for the teaching job (Ronfeldt et al, 2020).…”