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 cooperating teacher (CT) – a P-12 teacher who mentors them as they take on classroom teaching responsibilities. There is increasing evidence that clinical training generally, and CTs specifically, have important influences on preservice student teacher (PST) development. New research shows 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 CTs (Authors, 2018a; Authors 2018b; Goldhaber et al., 2018). 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, (2) school, district and program leaders may not know who their most instructionally effective teachers are, and (3) these different stakeholders may have competing criteria for selecting mentors.
In this initiative, we used prior information on instructional performance and years of experience (from administrative data) to identify the most instructionally effective and experienced potential CTs in the specific districts, subjects and grade levels needed by a large program that partnered with us. Our state partners, with our technical support, then randomly assigned neighboring districts to receive these targeted recruitment lists (or not) and requested district leaders who received the lists to begin their recruitment with teachers named on the lists; district leaders were also advised to use their best judgement where they felt it inappropriate or unwise for any listed teachers to serve. We investigate whether receiving these lists (1) increases the instructional quality of the CTs 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 CTs in treatment districts have, on average, substantially higher evaluation scores than CTs 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 CTs 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 CTs is a low-cost intervention that can significantly impact the overall instructional quality of CTs, as well as their PSTs’ readiness to teach.