Making the Most of Student Teaching: The Importance of Mentors and Scope for Change

Abstract

A growing literature documents the importance of student teaching placements for teacher development. Emerging evidence from this literature highlights the importance of the mentor teacher who supervises this placement, as teachers tend to be more effective when they student teach with a mentor who is a more effective teacher. But the efficacy of policies that aim to have effective teachers serve as mentors depends a great deal on the availability of effective teachers to serve in this role. We therefore use data from Washington State to illustrate that there is ample scope for change in student teacher placements; in other words, there are far more effective teachers within fifty miles of a teacher education program (TEP) who could host a student teacher in each year than the number of teachers who serve in this role. We also discuss the considerable challenges to improvement efforts related to the need for better coordination between TEPs, K–12 school systems, and states. Finally, we argue that, if policy makers value teacher candidate development equivalently to teacher in-service development, they should be willing to pay substantially more than the current average compensation for mentor teachers to recruit effective teachers to serve in this role.

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

“…it is also important to place these results in the context of the broader literature on student teaching placements and future teaching effectiveness, discussed in the "Background" section. On one hand, the effect sizes in this study-for example, a predicted increase of .07 standard deviations of math performance associated with teaching in the same grade or an adjacent grade as student teaching relative to teaching in another gradeare larger than any prior effect size we are aware of in this literature (summarized in Goldhaber, Krieg, Naito, & Theobald, 2020). This suggests that TEPs and districts should prioritize alignment between student teaching placements and first job placements.…”

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

“…This is also important given that we also document substantial misalignment between student teaching placements and first teaching jobs; for example, less than half of first-year middle school teachers student taught in a middle school. Only about 3% of teachers host student teachers each year (Goldhaber, Krieg, et al, 2020), implying both that there is tremendous scope for change in student teaching assignments and that trying to ensure better alignment between student teaching placements and first teaching jobs could be a low-cost strategy for improving teacher retention. Given that much of the misalignment between student teaching and early-career placements are related to disproportionate student teacher placements in elementary and high schools and disproportionate teacher hiring in middle schools, a good place to start might be placing more student teachers in middle school settings, as this would likely improve the alignment between student teaching and early-career placements in the aggregate.…”

Toward a Bidirectional and Co-Constructed Mentorship: Rethinking the Mentor and Student–Teacher Relationship

“…Although many teacher candidates identify student teaching as the most important part of their teacher training (Levine, 2006), the traditional apprenticeship model that guides many teacher education programs aspires "to provide student teachers with pedagogical skills and techniques derived from a pre-existing body of knowledge" (Zeichner & Liston, 1987, p. 23)-adaptation, according to a TAS. Further, student teaching is impacted by predominant university structures that often fail to connect university-based coursework and field-based teaching and to devalue mentoring teacher candidates, including undercompensation for mentor teachers (Goldhaber et al, 2020;Zeichner, 2002).…”