PLCs can be a powerful lever for collaborative professional learning IF they are implemented with intention and fidelity.

We’ve supported our EIR grant partners to reconfigure how their PLCs operate — from a compliance and administrative orientation to providing opportunities for invigorating professional work. As one NTC program lead observed: “When they realized what a PLC could be, they were eager to make the shifts.”

We’ve all seen the headlines — our schools are understaffed, and enrollment in teacher prep programs is down. Public perceptions about our education system and the narrative about teachers and teaching can only be described as depressing. In short, the teaching profession is in trouble.

While what to do about it is being debated in state houses, think tanks, and prep programs across the country, at New Teacher Center, we believe the future of teaching depends on a reinvigorated vision for teacher mentoring. In the short term, mentoring is a critical bridge for teachers entering the profession right now through diverse and non-traditional pathways. It also needs to be integral to the design of longer-term efforts to reshape what teacher preparation, induction, and professional learning and collaboration look like.

Twenty-five years ago, NTC came into being because Ellen Moir and her colleagues said, and the field agreed: We can’t accept the teacher turnover problem — the loss of all that talent, the harm it does to teachers and the kids they serve. Instead of feeling isolated and ill-prepared, we need to ensure that every new teacher has the opportunity to collaborate with a quality mentor. To improve retention and teacher effectiveness, induction should be normalized, formalized, and grounded in the best research on how new teachers learn to teach.

In defining what this could and should look like, we spelled out three things:

• the nature of the relationship between mentor and mentee (highly personalized, trusting, power-neutral, teacher-led)
• the focus of mentoring interactions (a job-embedded teaching and coaching cycle to guide instructional conversations)
• the concrete details of the induction infrastructure (trained mentors, a prescription for the frequency and duration of support, meaningful school leader engagement)

These fundamentals are still foundational as we consider a new vision for mentoring based on the talents and needs of our potential new teachers. While the next generation of educators is still driven by the same sense of purpose, they come from widely varied preparation experiences. They also have different expectations for their careers. They want a job where they have opportunities for advancement. They are not interested in entering a profession that people talk about in terms of survival idioms — make or break, sink or swim — and where it feels difficult to make a difference. They have other options.

Our job, then, is to help think about what we can do differently to make our schools places where teachers (and their students) want to be and where they can flourish. It is within our sphere of influence.

NTC is looking at the future of mentoring as the key to a revitalized teaching profession built for the long haul. We are talking to all our partners, conducting empathy interviews with new teachers and teacher advocates, looking at the research, and watching with deep interest the exciting movement in talent development strategies — in apprenticeships, for example, and school staffing and team teaching models. In all of this work, we know that mentors will serve in lynchpin positions in support of new teachers coming through myriad pathways to serve a wide range of school communities.

As we face whatever the future is going to bring to the field of education, if we are going to invest in one sure thing, we believe it should be a quality mentoring experience for every new teacher. In the coming months, NTC will be convening educators, organizations, and researchers to talk about the role mentors can and should play in the transitional spaces within and between teacher preparation and in-service induction. If we want to expand the pipeline, we also have to ensure that the pathways to the classroom offer the quality of support that aspiring teachers and their future students deserve. We need everyone’s best thinking as we talk about how mentoring can make the difference for the generations to come. It’s critical for the profession and for the future of our schools. Join us.

NTC designed tailored pre-service professional learning and mentor training to support aspiring teachers in M-DCPS’s Grow Your Own (GYO) pathways, aligning with the district’s vision for teacher recruitment, retention, and development.

Our partnership with M-DCPS recently focused on enhancing district teacher recruitment efforts through custom professional learning for candidates in its Clerical to Teach (C2T) and Paraprofessional to Teach (P2T) programs. These initiatives provide pathways to full teacher certification for eligible staff, offering comprehensive support and the necessary resources to prepare candidates for the Florida Teacher Certification Exam.

Participants in the programs already play a crucial role in students’ lives, serving as vital liaisons in the classroom and between the school, families and caregivers, and the community. The C2T and P2T programs aim to strengthen the workforce by leveraging candidates’ deep community knowledge and school-based experience.

NTC developed targeted pre-service professional learning and mentoring to support aspiring GYO teachers’ transitions to new roles in the classroom.

This webinar, presented in partnership with Results for America and Grant Wood Area Education Agency (GWAEA), highlights how to build effective, sustained, and well-supported induction programs. As part of GWAEA’s induction programming, new teachers in participating school districts receive two years of job-embedded professional development. At the core of these supports are induction coaches, who guide beginning teachers in improving their practice. These coaches, who are identified through a rigorous selection process, receive intensive training and coaching to ensure they can effectively support new teachers. Presenters make a case for what drives induction programming success, the critical importance of diverse stakeholder collaboration for buy-in and efficacy, and how to design program evaluation that yields evidence that supports continuous improvement while demonstrating the program’s credibility.

Key takeaways included:

Induction supports multiple benefits, some less visible.

• Supporting new teachers in evidence-based practices that build optimal learning environments is crucial for enhancing student outcomes and experiences.
• Nurturing teachers’ sense of success through job-embedded coaching and collaboration accelerates development, fosters persistence, and creates meaning…all key indicators that lead to improved teacher retention.
• Targeted professional development for beginning teachers is a strong recruitment strategy. It supports higher-quality talent pipelines while creating a supportive instructional culture.

Stakeholder engagement is imperative for long-term success.

• Treating school principals as true partners by involving them in joint program design efforts and aligning induction programs with school goals enhances support for new teachers and promotes program sustainability.
• Understanding district priorities and challenges while providing regular data updates, relevant learning, and voiceovers of program impact ensures district-level buy-in and sustainability.
• Establishing a multi-stakeholder steering committee with diverse representation fosters collective decision-making and ensures program alignment.

Collaboration is a cornerstone of setting instructional culture for new teachers.

• Intentional communication structures, such as triad conversations between principals, instructional coaches, induction coaches, and new teachers, do more than get everyone on the same page and demonstrate the level of investment in new teachers. These interactions facilitate alignment, continuous improvement, and support rooted in concrete growth and development goals.
• Bringing together the valued perspectives of new teachers and students (alongside other stakeholders) creates a collaborative mindset around how an engaged community is self-assessing and self-shaping program improvements.

Evidence is a foundational lever to collect support.

• A multi-pronged approach to program evaluation blends together multiple data points. Reach and implementation data (quantitative data, such as the number of teachers, coaching time, observations, etc.) helps assess program fidelity and implementation. Impact Data — the “so what” data — combines qualitative and quantitative measures to showcase the program’s influence on mentor/coach and new teacher practices, enabling ongoing reflection and adjustment of program actions. Student outcomes data draws direct lines between program impact and improved student outcomes, telling the complete story of student learning experiences in real-time alongside teacher development.
• Be practical in establishing an evaluation plan, first by clarifying program outcomes and intentions to determine what implementation, impact, and tangible non-survey data will provide readily actionable insights.

Speakers:

• Kimberly Owen, Regional Administrator, Grant Woods Area Education Agency
• Anna Selk, Associate Superintendent, Benton Community School District
• Ellen Hur, Vice President of Solutions, Results for America
• Ross Tilchen, Director of Economic Mobility, Results for America
• Ann Wenzel, Vice President of Program & Partnerships, New Teacher Center
• Jennifer Iacovino, Director of Program and Partnerships, New Teacher Center

^{1 Results for America Case Study
2 Webinar Research Round-up}

New Teacher Center’s long-time partner Miami-Dade County Public Schools (M-DCPS) has always been an innovator. We are more than excited to support M-DCPS’s multi-faceted Grow Your Own (GYO) teacher pathways programming as part of our ongoing collaboration to engage and support aspiring and beginning teachers, and the students they serve.

In summer 2022, with their office phones often ringing in the background, this year’s cohort of aspiring educators participating in Miami-Dade County Public School’s (M-DCPS) Clerical to Teach (C2T) and Paraprofessional to Teach (P2T) programs took their next big steps toward becoming teachers. During a custom pre-service learning experience designed and facilitated by NTC program consultants Taryn Glynn and Jeanna Hawkins, these seasoned school professionals, some of whom have worked in the district for decades, came together to take their rich experience serving students, families, and the local and school community to the next level.

Over the course of an intensive week, participants examined the three domains of optimal learning. (This framework, which is grounded in the science of learning and development, provides a schema, concepts, and language to talk about classroom conditions that reflect what we know about how students learn best.) Participants identified the critical importance of knowing students and building authentic, healthy relationships as the foundation for learning. And the cohort enthusiastically embraced new learning about standards, subject-area content, and instructional practice, eager for more.

“They were such a joyful and engaged group, and the community aspect of the training was particularly empowering,” said Taryn and Jeanna. “Their understanding of the learning environment from their current jobs allowed them to quickly make deep contextual connections with the content provided in the session. In addition, because they have worked within the dynamics of the school system and come from the same professional backgrounds, the training was a safe space for learning that supported confidence building — participants came together in community as ‘non-instructional staff’ to support each other in building their identities as educators.”

Throughout the coming year, candidates will receive ongoing support from NTC-guided “buddy teachers” as they continue preparing for certification (and continue to serve in their current jobs). Once they are hired as “teachers of record,” C2T and P2T teachers will access three more years of aligned support through the district’s comprehensive induction program for all beginning teachers.

The C2T and P2T programs are part of a suite of grow your own educator pathways M-DCPS initiated several years ago to increase teacher retention and address staffing shortages. These two programs were designed to engage current district employees who have rich community knowledge and experience working with families and students as potential educators. The goal is to capitalize on the assets and expertise they bring to their new roles in the classroom.

Identifying GYO participants as ”pre-service” teachers was intentional, said Stephanie Garcia-Fields, NTC senior program consultant. Aspiring educators taking alternative routes to teaching often miss the typical supervised clinical experience that traditionally trained teacher candidates are required to complete. She also emphasized that designing a custom pre-service offering aligned with their experience and needs was critical. “The first step we took was to sit down with the program leaders to see what participants would need specifically based on the work they are already doing and the strengths they will bring to their roles,” Stephanie said. “This is something we want them to realize, that the knowledge they bring as an experienced member of the school community is going to translate into a strength in the classroom. We want to highlight and build on the skills and contacts and touchpoints and knowledge they already have that perhaps a regularly trained classroom teacher might not. [It] helps to build confidence and identity as an educator, which is important for retention, efficacy, and, of course, the student experience.”

These teacher candidates already play an essential role in students’ lives. They serve as vital liaisons between the school, caregivers, and the community. Non-instructional staff have deep knowledge of students from day-to-day interactions in the front office, including historical information, home dynamics, and knowledge about attendance and academic strengths and needs. Participants who have served as paraprofessionals can also bring practical experience with classroom management, instructional strategies, IEP implementation, early/child development, parental/caregiver engagement, and learning differences to the job.

In addition to C2T and P2T, NTC is also supporting another ongoing district GYO initiative called the Temporary Instructor Preparation and Support program (TIPS). TIPS is designed to recruit college students to explore teaching as a career while serving as temporary instructors in long-term substitute positions. Three more GYO pathways in development are being created specifically to recruit more men of color currently serving in security and custodial roles. Another emerging effort targets M-DCPS high school students through the Florida Future Educators of America pathway called Project REDI (Recruiting, Empowering, and Developing Inclusive Male Teachers of Color).

Stephanie highlighted M-DCPS’s willingness to experiment within an aligned and coherent vision for teacher development as particularly powerful. This has been true, she said, ever since NTC first partnered with M-DCPS to build its comprehensive Mentoring and Induction for New Teachers program over a decade ago. “That alignment is really important to Miami,” she said. “It’s their goal that everybody gets equal access to high quality pre-service experiences, no matter what pathway brings them to the classroom.”

“Our Grow Your Own pathways are deliberately crafted with support structures.”

— Kristin Trompeter, M-DCPS Executive Director, New Teacher Support, Office of Professional Learning and Career Development

Kristen Trompeter, M-DCPS’s executive director of new teacher support, shared a reflection on the intention and design of GYO for the district. “Recently, Miami-Dade County Public Schools (M-DCPS) shifted so that our division of professional development now includes a focus on career enhancement, establishing the Office of Professional Learning and Career Development. From students in our schools to individuals newly relocated to South Florida who have only dreamed about working in education, we want potential hires to know that they can have a full career with M-DCPS, their employer of choice. Our Grow Your Own pathways are deliberately crafted with support structures. These plans encourage strategic partnerships, like the one M-DCPS has with the New Teacher Center, to ensure that participants in these pathways are provided with current and expert knowledge and skill sets that will lead to not only their success, but also to that of our students.”

A key priority for M-DCPS, said Stephanie, “is not just filling seats, but getting the people our kids need into the classroom … recruiting staff who come from the community, who really care about teaching and learning, and then supporting them to grow into their roles as educators.”

M-DCPS At-a-Glance

Over the last 10+ years, New Teacher Center and Miami-Dade County Public Schools have partnered on several major federal grants to implement and refine the district’s vision for a coherent teacher professional growth and development program. A current focus of the partnership is integrating support for potential teacher candidates coming through alternative pathways.

M-DCPS is the 4th largest school district in the U.S.: 392 schools, 345,000 students, and over 40,000 employees, covering over 2,000 square miles and serving communities ranging from rural and suburban, to urban cities and municipalities. Students in M-DCPS speak 56 different languages and represent 160 countries.

Your district has invested in a two-year effort to rewrite curriculum in alignment with new state standards. You’ve organized a string of professional learning sessions to get it into classrooms. You and your staff are consistently using your “look-for” tools in schools to see if teachers are implementing the strategies from the initiatives central to your improvement planning. You regularly do step-backs to monitor progress. You have a well-established mentoring program for your beginning teachers, and you are ramping up your coaching program around your belief that every teacher deserves a coach. And yet, you still aren’t seeing anywhere close to the results you were hoping for. What isn’t working? Are teachers not implementing the curriculum? Do they need more professional development? How can coaches help? Or, are teachers and coaches doing what you asked them to do, but it’s just not the right approach for their kids, and teachers don’t have the time and the space to figure out how to adjust?

At NTC, we work closely with our partners to examine and overcome impact challenges like these.

“One of the things we’re learning,” said NTC’s Senior Director of Impact Lisa Schmitt, “is that sometimes assumptions about what the issue is can get in the way. There are so many moving parts, so many inputs, that it’s hard to zero in on where the disconnects are. That makes it hard to design solutions that will have real impact.” In response, we’ve been working with partners to define the unique landscape for change at their sites as a starting place for designing programs — What is the current state of instruction? How would students characterize the learning environment? Where are the strengths? What are the school- and system-level enabling conditions that have to be in place to support success?

Landscape Analysis

To help partners answer some of these questions, NTC’s program staff uses a suite of customizable data collection tools and processes to guide “current state” analyses. The goal is to target optimal starting points for designing and implementing improvements. These tools can be used for audits, instructional reviews, or strategic planning conversations to help identify trends, gaps, and opportunities to design appropriate interventions. The toolset may include:

• teacher and student focus group protocols
• student surveys
• curriculum review rubrics
• student work sample analysis rubrics using NTC’s mentoring/coaching tools
• walk-throughs and observations using customized instructional practice guides and other rubrics aligned with specific teacher practice and/or student experience goals
• consultative support focused on family/community representation and inclusion in audit and review processes

“We also encourage partners to extend invitations for ‘learning walks’ to site leaders, administrators, and others to help get a much wider group than might be typical on the ‘same page’ about the instructional landscape,” Lisa said. Our NTC team then supports partners in strategic planning conversations first to analyze the data and then to articulate very targeted findings and trends as the launching point for designing or modifying an improvement strategy or coaching priority. “In addition to observations, we really encourage partners to gather student and teacher perspectives from focus groups and surveys and analyze student work samples to better inform their planning,” she said.

“We encourage partners to extend invitations for ‘learning walks’ to site leaders, administrators, and others to help get a much wider group than might be typical on the ‘same page’ about the instructional landscape.”

— Lisa Schmitt, Senior Director of Impact

Common 5+1

Another “impact by design” approach we’ve been piloting is based on program evaluation research that integrates Guskey’s five levels of evaluation of professional learning. This framework differentiates data collection and indicators of success according to stakeholder input, program type, and depth of engagement. We call it: Common 5+1.

Participants value the experience → Participants learn → Organizations support, or change to support, implementation → Participants transfer learning to practice → Students learn and thrive + Improvements are sustainable/Ecosystems become healthier

The Common 5+1 approach is aligned with our theory of change — professional support of educators leads to student learning through a logical sequence of events and supporting conditions. Lisa continued: “We especially like this quote from Guskey about the broader system supports — ‘Organizational dimensions … can sometimes hinder or prevent success, even when the individual aspects of professional development are done right.’ That’s one shift we are trying to encourage by expanding the data we collect and by getting partners to articulate what the supporting conditions need to be. This drives a greater level of collective responsibility and accountability for the success of a new approach. It also helps us codify enabling conditions.”

Both of these approaches to NTC impact measurement focus on more immediate, student-centered, and site-specific measures in the unique contexts of our partner sites. “So often we will take a research-based initiative, and our goal is to have an impact on student performance on state tests because that’s how the field tends to measure success. But we don’t take into account all the existing variables in the context for implementing the strategy, including starting places and potentially limiting conditions on the ground that you need to design and adapt for. Half the time, we don’t even know what those hidden challenges are,” Lisa said.

So, instead of prioritizing statistical models and test data over all else, we are elevating student-reported experience data, classroom observations, and other qualitative measures. We are working with our partners to gather site-specific baseline data and then support them to co-design solutions that reflect their goals and appropriate methods of measuring impact. In all of this work, including expanded groups of stakeholders is key to designing solutions that honor and value partner, community, and student realities, needs, and priorities. Our ultimate goal is to build capacity at our partner sites to identify gaps for data collection and system supports, engage in goal-setting and action-planning around very targeted and meaningful outcomes for teachers and students, and effectively use authentic data to design solutions that are organically easier to monitor internally.

“We are learning from our partnerships all over the country about how to do this better,” Lisa said. In Florida and Houston, our partners are using student feedback from surveys to design professional development. In Massachusetts, parents and community partners are providing input to help shape social studies curriculum. Our Tennessee Math partners used our data collection tools and Common 5+1 structure to design site-specific strategies around a shared goal to prioritize conceptual understanding in math instruction. In Osceola, our partners are using a landscape analysis to align professional development and coaching strategies to support curriculum implementation.

These are just a few of the reports we’re hearing from our program staff.

— “This has just been a really good opportunity for us to think, with our partner’s end goal in mind, about what needs to happen at each level of the Common 5+1 plan to make sure that we get there. This work is super adaptive. We are meeting folks where they are … and helping them think through some of those system shifts and structures that need to be in place to be successful.”

— “We’re doing a set of focus groups with teachers, coaches, mentors, and administrators. We are also doing some with students and parents. We’ve been thinking – why are we trying to solve problems for students and parents without asking students and parents what they need?”

The aim of NTC’s new impact agenda is to be better able to co-design impact plans with our partners that measure outcomes that are meaningful and aligned with district needs. Our ultimate goal is to build capacity at our partner sites to engage in sustainable, evidence-based, systems-level continuous improvement that makes a real difference in the learning experiences of those students it is our mission to serve.

Tracking teacher retention at the local level is complicated and labor-intensive. It’s more complex than counting how many teachers are employed at a school one year and then counting how many come back the next. There are a lot of variables and methodological considerations, and it can get messy quickly.²

Not only that, retention is a lagging indicator — you’re already into the next school year before you can compute retention data because you won’t know who is returning until they do (or don’t). And if they don’t come back, and that’s all you’re monitoring, it’s too late to do anything about it.

For these and a host of other reasons, we need to think differently about monitoring our impact on teacher retention. Rather than being in the position of reacting to staffing gaps, we must look for measures that help us be proactive, keeping our fingers on the pulse of teacher attitudes and experiences so we can do something before they start heading for the door.

Fortunately, the research is pretty clear on the factors that can influence a teacher’s decision to stay in the classroom (or at a particular school). While some of these are personal and external and beyond the control of school/district decision-makers, many are within the sphere of influence of local leaders.

Rather than being in the position of reacting to staffing gaps, we must look for measures that help us be proactive, keeping our fingers on the pulse of teacher attitudes and experiences so we can do something before they start heading for the door.

Leading indicators for retention

As a mentoring and coaching organization, we believe one leading indicator for retention is self-efficacy — a teacher’s confidence that they are effective in the classroom. Evidence suggests that poor self-efficacy is linked to higher teacher burnout and stress. We also know that teachers who do not feel prepared or supported to do well at their jobs are at much higher risk for leaving the profession, while those who have more confidence in their abilities have higher job satisfaction and more commitment to teaching.³

A related indicator is “working conditions,” which researchers Ingersoll and Tran⁴ describe as putting “the organization back into the analysis” of staffing issues referring to the “structure, management and leadership in school districts and schools.” Specific working conditions called out in the literature include:

• supportive administration/capable leadership
• relational trust and respect among staff
• meaningful professional learning
• opportunities for collaboration as well as teacher autonomy
• opportunities for advancement
• having access to a mentor or coach⁵

A growing number of recent studies indicate that these factors matter especially to teachers of color,⁶ providing clarity about steps we can take in our ongoing effort to increase grow the educator workforce and improve retention overall.

Capturing teacher feelings about their daily work

To leverage the research base on what keeps teachers in the classroom, we can and should be monitoring these leading indicators for retention. Specifically, we need to gather and analyze data on teacher beliefs, feelings, and attitudes about the school environment, as well as self-perceptions of effectiveness.

How do we do that? It’s pretty typical for schools to collect climate data through annual staff surveys. Climate surveys are appealing for many reasons. There are a lot of high-quality, open-source instruments out there with aligned student (and sometimes parent) surveys that allow schools to triangulate stakeholder feedback on the overall school environment. But what these instruments don’t address as well are conditions that tend to be more nuanced and personal and much more specific to the individual’s attitudes and feelings about their daily work:

• How supported do staff feel in their role? How much trust is there among faculty?
• How do individuals feel about their ability to implement change or their own self-efficacy? Do they feel like they can provide the best instruction for each one of their students?
• Are teachers experiencing stress and burnout?⁷
• Does the school environment support teachers in asking for and receiving help?

The question, then, is how best to capture this information and monitor these critical leading indicators. At NTC, we’ve added key questions to all our program quality surveys (PQS) and work with our partners to track and analyze the data. But what can other districts and schools do?

NTC used to administer a large-scale educator working conditions survey in multiple states and large districts called Teaching, Empowering, Leading, & Learning (TELL),⁸ which offered a robust and statistically sound approach for measuring teaching and learning conditions. From this work, we learned that if there was one single item that was strongly related to all the other things we know to be important for retention, that item is: “Overall, my school is a good place to work and learn.”

Any school or district site can gain valuable information by asking teachers just this one question. It can be added to any existing survey or administered as a stand-alone, single-item (anonymous) survey that staff can respond to with a click in an email. We’ve found it to be highly effective in capturing the mood and spirit of staff on a campus. If you start to see teachers disagreeing with that statement, then you know they are pulling away and likely to be considering a departure.

Is my school a good place to work and learn?

Learning from our partners

For over 25 years, NTC has been nurturing highly skilled mentors and coaches to guide new and developing teachers in the complex relational and intellectual work of teaching, helping to keep them in the classroom and supporting their growth as professionals. Our approach is grounded in high-trust relationships between adults designed to build teacher competence and confidence as they mature as teachers and instructional leaders. We also work with school and system leaders to create the enabling conditions for positive teacher development at the school community level.

NTC works with states and districts across the country committed to improving the teacher experience so that students thrive. Each partnership pushes our learning on how to increase teacher effectiveness and improve working conditions in schools as a sustainable approach to support job satisfaction and retention. Working across so many local contexts and geographies helps us elevate best practices and stay in tune with a changing educator workforce. Over the course of the next year, we will be sharing stories from a few of these rich and diverse communities, representing state departments of education in Minnesota and Hawai’i, a border district in Texas, and a small rural county in Eastern Maryland.

As many have observed, teacher working conditions are student learning conditions, and that’s where the rubber hits the road. Making investments in what we know matters to teachers has the potential to improve so much more than retention statistics. Is my school a good place to work and learn? The answer has to be yes.

^{1. See for example: Teacher Turnover: Why it Matters and What We Can Do About it; Teacher Turnover in High-Poverty Schools: What We Know and Can Do; How Context Matters in High-Need Schools: The Effects of Teachers’ Working Conditions on Their Professional Satisfaction and Their Students’ Achievement}

^{2. Tracking retention requires being able to compare rosters of all teachers employed in one year to subsequent years’ rosters, with multiple additional computations involved. Sometimes teachers are assigned to multiple schools and might be retained at one school but not at another school. For example, a PE teacher serves two different elementary schools one year then returns to one school but is assigned to a different second school the following year. Because the impact is different for the school vs. the district, you have to compute teacher retention both at the school level and at the district level, so really every teacher has two different retention metrics. And what if a teacher returns as an assistant principal? Is that teacher retained? It still results in a classroom role that needs to be filled. What about when teachers aren’t rehired or are shuffled around mid-year because of fluctuations in student enrollment or there’s a reduction in force? School closures? When a teacher transfers to another location, how is that coded? Because it’s so labor intensive, not all school districts, especially smaller ones, have the time or internal capacity in their HR or research departments to adequately track retention. It requires pretty sophisticated analysis to do it in a way that’s valid. If an external partner like NTC is doing the analysis, doing it right requires a data-sharing agreement with the district to get all the raw data, as well as interviews and investigation of a variety of contextual factors.}

^{3. Perceived Teacher Self‐Efficacy as a Predictor of Job Stress and Burnout: Mediation Analyses; Teacher Efficacy: Capturing an Elusive Construct; Why Do Teachers Leave?}

^{4. Teacher Shortages and Turnover in Rural Schools in the US: An Organizational Analysis}

^{5. See for example: The Factors of Teacher Attrition and Retention: An Updated and Expanded Meta-Analysis of the Literature; The Effects of Working Conditions on Teacher Retention; The Impact of Induction and Mentoring Programs for Beginning Teachers: A Critical Review of the Research; Eight Ways States Can Act Now to Retain an Effective, Diverse Teacher Workforce}

^{6. See for example: Teachers Like Us: Strategies for Increasing Educator Diversity In Public Schools; If You Listen, We Will Stay; Voices from the Classroom; Building a More Ethnoracially Diverse Teacher Workforce; Retaining Teachers of Color in Our Public Schools}

^{7. Post pandemic, we are also specifically looking at things like burnout and stress at our partner sites. How are the people in the building doing in terms of mental exhaustion, being physically tired, and where can we step in and do something to further shore up how people are feeling about their jobs? See What Promotes Teachers’ Turnover Intention? Evidence From a Meta-Analysis.}

^{8. See Leadership Matters: Teachers’ Roles in School Decision Making and School Performance; see also TELL Kentucky research links here.}

Over the last five years, our collaboration with leaders across Minnesota has strategically targeted different touch points within the state’s education system to make critical investments in teacher talent. The aim is to support retention and develop the potential of the teacher workforce to better serve the student population of Minnesota. While these efforts carry a clear Minnesota stamp, they represent bright spots the field should closely monitor.

Bright spot — Coaching that centers students in standards-based learning

In 2018, we began working with Lisa Gregoire, director of the Southwest West Central Service Cooperative’s (SWWC) New Teacher Center, to adapt our mentoring model for local professional learning across the region. This partnership has been an incubator for innovation, and we’ve been able to share model practices and strategies with a cross-section of Minnesota education stakeholders and leaders in other states through our national peer learning networks.

As the program evolves, SWWC continues to offer robust induction support that gets better and better, producing several generations of highly skilled mentors serving new teachers in the region. A critical proofpoint is how well NTC coaching aligns with the needs of beginning teachers serving students with learning differences. Special educators and teachers and coaches from alternative schools in the region report that NTC’s optimal learning environment framework and coaching tools support teachers to design appropriate and impactful instruction to meet learners needs.

A critical proofpoint is how well NTC coaching aligns with the needs of beginning teachers serving students with learning differences…. Special educators and teachers and coaches from alternative schools in the region report that our relationship-driven approach puts the student first, leveraging social-emotional learning (SEL) to design appropriate and impactful instruction.

Bright spot — Coaching across the transition from pre-service to in-service

Recently, SWWC kicked off a collaboration with Southwest Minnesota State University to pilot a grow-your-own teacher prep initiative offering coaching modeled on NTC’s approach. But this is not the only place in Minnesota where higher ed is asking the question: Why are we waiting until they get into the classroom to mentor and coach our teachers?

To ensure student teachers at Minnesota State University (MSU) at Mankato receive excellent mentoring during their field experiences, Gina Anderson, director of the College of Education’s Center for Educator Support, has embraced our coaching approach. Her team uses NTC’s professional learning and formative assessment tools and protocols to support the growth of student teachers, university supervisors, and many cooperating teachers in MSU’s Elementary and Literacy Education, K-12 Secondary, and Special Education teacher prep programs. Graduates have shared they’ve made job decisions based on what kind of support they can expect at prospective schools. Systems that offer NTC-based coaching — even when teachers have to drive farther or when the pay isn’t as good — are seen as providing a critical career-boosting benefit.

Graduates have shared they’ve made job decisions based on what kind of support they can expect at prospective schools. Systems that offer NTC-based coaching — even when teachers have to drive farther or when the pay isn’t as good — are seen as providing a critical career-boosting benefit.

Bright spot — Coaching for rural communities

To learn more about how to support students and teachers in rural areas, in 2021, NTC received a five-year Education Innovation and Research (EIR) federal grant. We partnered with 20 Minnesota schools, engaging district and school leaders and coaches to support teachers to design rigorous instruction through coaching. A key focus is on elevating student, family, community, and teacher voices in the design of a whole-school professional learning strategy that prioritizes teacher well-being. Our learning from the EIR grant will help us contribute to the local and national knowledge base of what works for rural education.

Because so much education research focuses on urban environments, the field has a lot to learn about the challenges faced by educators in rural contexts. Our learning from the EIR grant will help us contribute to the local and national knowledge base of what works for rural education.

Bright spot — State-level innovations driving optimal learning

State teacher induction policy varies widely, from the bare minimum of “you have to offer induction” to detailed, top-down mandates. From the beginning of our partnership with the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE), leaders in Teacher Induction and Mentoring have been purposeful in filling the gaps seen in many state programs.

MDE is deep into a carefully planned pilot of the framework, closely monitoring local strategies, progress, and impact at schools. The goal is to be able to show how school and district leaders are rethinking induction and to share evidence, artifacts, and resources to help replicate positive changes in new teacher support across the state.

From all our years in the teacher induction business, we know the life-changing impact a skilled mentor can have on a new teacher’s career. But quality teacher induction has to also involve commitments up and down the system to create the “enabling conditions” for teacher success.

We look forward to continuing our support for Minnesota’s education leaders as they connect the dots across multiple system touchpoints, making the efforts of champions for teachers statewide bear fruit. As they position coaching as a teacher preparation, recruitment, retention, and professional development strategy, we’ll share insights on:

• building seamless support for the transition from prep programs to the classroom
• identifying promising practices to meet induction challenges in rural schools
• and more clearly codifying the essential role school and system leaders play in these efforts.

As a professional learning organization and fierce advocate for teachers and learners, we care a great deal about student achievement. However, outside of our federal grant-supported initiatives, we have intentionally focused on areas other than student assessment results as a primary outcome in our impact reporting. Here’s why.

For one thing, it’s a burden on our district partners to extract and share that information with us; data-sharing agreements are complicated and take a lot of time. Additionally, it’s often several months after the school year ends before the data can be shared, offering little in a timely way to help with our partners’ programmatic decisions.

Also, more importantly, a state assessment can’t tell us everything we need to know. In fact, as a measure to guide how we improve, standardized test results leave a lot out. Test performance is just not a nuanced enough proxy for the complexity of student learning, and there is more timely, useful formative information to help students and teachers reach their full potential.

Test performance is just not a nuanced enough proxy for the complexity of student learning, and there is more timely, useful formative information to help students and teachers reach their full potential.

Rather than waiting until the test results come in, we’re convinced it’s more important to monitor what teachers are doing in the classroom, what they are asking students to do, and what students are actually doing, and we do that through observation. It’s how we help our partners assess if they are creating the conditions that are effective predictors of substantive learning. In other words, we zero in on the things the literature says are important for intellectual engagement, knowledge building, and growth and development. Research shows when those practices and conditions are in place, student achievement is likely to follow.

For years, NTC has designed professional learning and supports that recognize the complex, relational, cognitive, and developmental processes involved in teaching and learning. We have partnered with some of the leading researchers in the field to develop our Optimal Learning Environment (OLE) framework and related classroom observation instrument. 

At NTC, observation is part and parcel of what we do. It’s one of three key components of what we call the teaching and coaching cycle and guides the professional conversations mentors and coaches should have with their teachers. Our expertise is centered in understanding and supporting what happens in the classroom. Conversations rooted in our IPG-based observation tool, referred to as Post-Observation Co-Analysis, provide meaningful opportunities to coach teachers toward conditions for optimal learning. 

Our expertise is centered in understanding and supporting what happens in the classroom. We emphasize indicators that provide evidence that students are being set up for success and show they are interacting and engaging with teachers and other students around content. Specifically, we observe whether teachers are:

• providing multiple approaches to engage in content and demonstrate learning
• checking for understanding
• offering feedback to support every learner
• shifting academic struggle to students (as appropriate)
• providing examples and explanations
• conveying confidence that every student can meet high expectations and grow

And students are:

• connecting to lesson content
• seeking and offering help
• clarifying and extending their thinking
• engaging in learning
• self-reflecting and self-regulating to support their individual learning needs

Recent advances in our understanding from neuroscience — about brain chemistry and the importance of relationships and connection in the classroom — and all the interdisciplinary research contributing to the science of learning and development and educator professional learning confirm the importance of these leading indicators.

Some might say that using classroom observations to measure the impact of our interventions and actions is not as valid or as sophisticated as student assessment results. But if we know what to look for, the classroom environment is where we should see change first. It’s also where, if we don’t see movement, real-time adjustments can be made to influence what’s happening in the classroom.

When we are trying to assess the impact of our work, we need to ask the right question. Are we helping to create learning settings in which students can engage at their highest cognitive and creative potential? Our measurement tools and how we define success along the way need to help us understand if we are doing that and, if not, how we can do better.