Emerging research in teacher education is showing that cooperating teachers (CTs) have a substantial impact on preservice student teachers’ (PSTs’) future teaching trajectories. In large-scale observational studies of recent graduates in Tennessee and Washington state (Goldhaber, Krieg, & Theobald, 2020; Ronfeldt, Brockman, & Campbell, 2018), researchers found that PSTs who were placed with more instructionally effective CTs were more instructionally effective themselves.The correlational nature of these studies, though, raised questions about whether these relationships were truly causal or just spurious correlations due to outside factors.
Addressing concerns over causality, recent randomized control trials have found positive effects of being placed with a more instructionally effective mentor on self-reported survey outcomes collected at the end of the student teaching experience. Ronfeldt, Goldhaber, Cowan, et al. (2018) found that student teachers assigned to more instructionally effective mentors reported receiving significantly more frequent and better coaching, as well as more opportunities to practice various instructional strategies. However, they found nonsignificant, though trending positive, differences between the treatment and control groups on feelings of preparedness to teach.
By contrast, the Mentors Matter Recruitment (MMR) initiative - the focus of this proposal - found positive effects on PSTs feelings of preparedness to teach (Ronfeldt, Bardelli, Mullman, et al., 2019). Partnering with one large program, Ronfeldt and colleagues used prior teacher evaluation information to identify the most instructionally effective teachers and sent recommendation lists to randomly selected partner districts to target their CT recruitment. Districts that received these lists recruited substantially more effective CTs and their candidate felt significantly better prepared. This paper discusses the replication efforts for the MMR initiative.
The first replication study fully replicates the results for the MMR initiative. Districts that were randomized to receive the recruitment lists were able to recruit significantly and meaningfully more instructionally effective and experienced CTs. As before, PSTs assigned to these CTs reported feeling better prepared at the end of their clinical experiences. Finally, PSTs still reported no significant differences in the kind of, frequency of, and satisfaction with the coaching they experienced.
The second replication study finds that the recruitment lists can be implemented on a large scale beyond the initial teacher preparation program that participated in the first RCTs. Participating teacher education programs were able to use the recruitment lists without major modifications to recruit the needed mentor cohort. Analysis of the effects on mentor quality and student teacher outcomes is underway.
Two major findings emerge from these replications studies. First, we were able to replicate the positive findings on mentor quality and student teacher feelings of preparation when implementing the MMR initiative a second time. This provides confirmatory evidence that the MMR initiative’s positive results were not a one-off result but rather a robust finding that can inform teacher education policy and practice. Second, the re-implementation with multiple teacher education programs provide initial evidence that this intervention can work at scale to inform the selection and recruitment of effective teachers to serve as clinical mentors.