After the Bell

The first few years as a teacher can be rough—an estimated one-in-three newcomers leaves the profession within five years.

Teacher induction programs are designed to ease that transition, to promote teacher retention and improve classroom efficacy. But the amount and types of support new teachers get varies widely, from informal buddy systems to comprehensive—and expensive—structured induction programs.

The question is: Are those comprehensive programs better, and are they worth the cost?


The good news is, few schools espouse the sink-or-swim approach anymore, says Dr. Richard Ingersoll, professor of education and sociology at University of Pennsylvania who has analyzed national survey data on first-year teachers for correlations between induction programs and teacher retention.

"Only five percent of teachers get nothing," he says, "but what the rest get really varies." Various induction efforts include mentors with common planning time, orientations, reduced course or lesson-planning loads, observation, and feedback.


So which of those methods work? "What we found is: The more you get, the more you get, so to speak," Ingersoll says. "But the two factors that seemed to have the strongest positive effect were having a mentor from the same field and having structured, common planning time with a mentor."

Those elements are included in some mandatory induction plans instituted on the state level, as in California’s Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment (BTSA) or Texas’ Beginning Teacher Induction and Mentoring. Other programs are implemented by school districts, and still others are managed by nonprofits like ETS. 


The New Haven Unified School District outside San Francisco offers a two-year BTSA program that teachers must complete to become fully credentialed. Each new teacher works with a BTSA specialist and two supporting teachers: one in the same field with common planning times and a consulting teacher in charge of observation and assessment. The extensive program costs around $4,100 per teacher, says Jodie Schwartzfarb, secondary BTSA specialist for the district. But, she says, "I’ve had teachers say, ‘We wouldn’t have made it without the program.'"

Still, Institute of Education Sciences (IES) recently published a major study on teacher induction, finding no difference in teacher retention rates or overall student achievement between comprehensive induction programs and the supports schools already had in place.

But induction advocates point out that may simply be because induction programs have in many schools become, de facto, fairly comprehensive already.

"The teachers in the control group often had a lot more support than they were expecting—three-quarters of them had an assigned mentor," says Dr. Michael Strong, a researcher at University of California-Santa Cruz and former research director at the New Teacher Center (NTC), one of the programs IES studied.

NTC’s own research on comprehensive teacher induction has found a great deal of support for the NTC model, which employs fulltime mentors, each with a maximum caseload of 15 teachers. In one study, Strong calculated that the program cost $6,600 per new teacher—but brought a return on investment of $1.66 on the dollar after five years, with 88 percent of teachers still in the classroom after six years.

"There's a lot of support for this kind of approach on the front lines," he says, "yet there isn't a lot of scientific evidence to prove it."

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Posted by soon2bdocta, 11-09-2009 As a part of my doctoral study on new teacher professional development, some of the program you mentioned in this piece are quite interesting and appears to be very helpful to new teachers. However, I feel if the pressure to meet an established quota of students to do well on state mandated exams and the like are diminished (somewhat), then teachers should be able to design their own programs based on the needs of learners, and their own personal and spiritual needs. Teaching is a passion that to some degree cannot be taught. School leadership, i.e., principals and district leaders must understand that learning is a shared responsibility and is reciprocal. Next, conversations and discussions should include such topics as what teaching and learning should look like? This could be dome using professional learning communities that include new teachers into the conversation. Conversations about grading hat matters; assessing our (teacher) expectations, reorganizing our approach, and reconnecting school and life. Again. Simple. But not easy. Leadership has to be willing to allow these things to take place in the school and the community. As a first year teacher over ten years ago, I was simply given the textbooks and the curriculum and told to "go and teach". Yet, I was able to speak up, ask questions, become involved and immersed myself in education as a passion. Many new teachers are not certain about what questions to ask and who to ask. Finally (because I could go on with this for days!), The need for mentors and continued collaboration among teachers is tantamount to learner and teacher success.

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