In order to receive initial teacher certification, teacher candidates complete clinical training, often referred to as “student teaching” or “residency,” in the classroom of a clinical mentor (CM) – a P-12 teacher who mentors them as they take on classroom teaching responsibilities. There is increasing evidence that clinical training generally, and CMs specifically, have important influences on preservice student teacher (PST) development. Three new studies show that teacher candidates who were mentored by instructionally effective teachers are more instructionally effective themselves once employed, suggesting that teacher education programs and district/school leaders should recruit more instructionally effective teachers to serve as CMs. However, program leaders report that it is often difficult to recruit instructionally effective teachers to serve as mentors for a variety of reasons, including: (1) school and district leaders may be resistant to hand responsibility of instruction to novice teachers in the classrooms of their strongest teachers and (2) school, district and program leaders may not know who their most instructionally effective teachers are or, (3) different stakeholders sometimes have competing criteria for selecting mentors.
In the Mentors Matter: Recruitment Initiative, we used prior information on instructional performance and years of experience (from administrative data) to identify the most instructionally effective and experienced potential CMs in the specific districts, subjects and grade levels needed by a large program that partnered with us. We then randomly assigned neighboring districts to receive these targeted recruitment lists (or not) to test whether receiving these lists (1) increases the instructional quality of the CMs that are actually recruited and (2) improves feelings of preparedness, based upon data collected from online surveys completed by PSTs at the end of their clinical training.
We find that CMs in treatment districts have, on average, substantially higher evaluation scores than CMs in control districts. These differences are significant on observation ratings (0.332 s.d. units), TVAAS scores (0.654 s.d. units), and years of experience (0.558 s.d. units).
Furthermore, at the end of clinical training, PSTs in treatment districts reported feeling significantly better prepared on both questioning practices (0.660 standard deviation units) and other instructional skills (0.576 standard deviation units). On the other hand, PSTs in treatment and control districts reported statistically similar rates of mentoring and coaching activities.
These results suggest that the recruitment of CMs is a feasible and effective lever to improve teacher education. As our intervention uses evaluation and personnel data that is readily available at the district and state level, using prior information to aid the recruitment of CMs is a low-cost intervention that can significantly impact the overall instructional quality of CMs, as well as their PSTs’ readiness to teach.